Lawsuits, pulped books, family rifts: when novelists base their characters on real people, trouble tends to follow. John Preston investigates literary libel.
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The Telegraph - 14 July 2013
"It never occurred to me that it might cause problems,” says the Norwegian
novelist, Karl Ove Knausgaard, of his 3,500 page epic about his family, catchily
if provocatively titled Min Kamp. In retrospect, this might have been a bit
naive. Aged 40 and with an undistinguished literary career behind him,
Knausgaard decided to write unsparingly about himself and his family. No punches
would be pulled, he vowed, no confidences left unbroached.
Here at least he was as good as his word. Knausgaard wrote about his
grandmother being an incontinent alcoholic, his father being a sadistic brute
and his second wife being a depressive. While he was writing, his mother begged
him to stop. “It’s too much,” she said. “Think of your family.” But Knausgaard
ploughed on regardless. When he had finished, he showed what he’d written to his
relatives. Not surprisingly, they didn’t like it – in fact they hated it so much
that they tried to get publication halted.
Although they failed, they did persuade Knausgaard to change everyone’s name
apart from his father’s. This, however, did nothing to lessen the fallout when
the first volume of Min Kamp (Mein Kampf in Norwegian) came out in 2009.
Knausgaard’s father’s family have refused to have anything to do with him since,
and so has his brother. His former wife made a radio documentary about how
traumatic she found the whole business, while his second wife, Linda, called him
up after reading it to say that their life together could never be romantic
again. Subsequently, their relationship was said to be in “deep crisis”.
While some critics have described Min Kamp as narcissism gone mad, Knausgaard
must be doing something right – the book has sold 450,000 copies in Norway
alone. Even so, Knausgaard himself is ambivalent about whether it’s all been
worth it. “I get the rewards,” he admits, while “the people I wrote about get
the hurt.”
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