My Struggle: Book 1 Author: Karl Ove Knausgaard | Language: English | ISBN:
0374534144 | Format: PDF
My Struggle: Book 1 Description
Review
“Powerfully alive . . . Knausgaard is intense and utterly honest, unafraid to voice universal anxieties . . . He wants us to inhabit the ordinariness of life, which is sometimes visionary, sometimes banal, and sometimes momentous, but all of it perforce ordinary because it happens in the course of a life, and happens, in different forms, to everyone . . . There is something ceaselessly compelling about Knausgaard’s book.” — James Wood, The New Yorker (selected as one of the Books of the Year)
“A fantastic novel . . . I cannot say anything other than that I am looking forward desperately to the rest of it.” —Dagsavisen (Norway)
“Knausgaard’s thinking is magnificently unbridled.” —Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (germany)
“Between Proust and the woods . . . Like granite, precise and forceful. More real than reality.” —La Repubblica (Italy)
“I can’t stop, I want to stop, I can’t stop, just one more page, then I will cook dinner, just one more page . . .” —Västerbottens-kuriren (Sweden)
About the Author
Karl Ove Knausgaard was born in Norway in 1968. My Struggle has won countless international literary awards and has been translated into at least fifteen languages. Knausgaard lives in Sweden with his wife and three children.
See all Editorial Reviews
- Series: My Struggle (Book 1)
- Paperback: 448 pages
- Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux; Reprint edition (May 28, 2013)
- Language: English
- ISBN-10: 0374534144
- ISBN-13: 978-0374534141
- Product Dimensions: 8.2 x 5.6 x 1.2 inches
- Shipping Weight: 14.1 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
Novels are often autobiographical, and memoirs usually have as much fiction as fact. So what is Norwegian writer Karl Ove Knausgaard's My Struggle? It's clearly his personal story, told in a hyper-realistic manner. When I saw him in conversation with James Wood in September 2012 at Porter Square Books in Cambridge, he said yes, of course this is a novel, not a memoir: he uses the techniques of a novelist. But it's something simpler than that: it's an extremely effective piece of storytelling, the elemental kind that is how we make sense of our lives.
Why should readers care about the story of Karl Ove's life? It's not that it's in any way remarkable, though it certainly has its personal dramas. No, it's the almost guileless realism that drew me in--all the small details that make up our everyday lives that rarely get acknowledged in books, but which completely resonates at some deep inner level. And while there are passages where the writing is plain--no other word for it--often Knausgaard is employing the careful wordcraft of a skilled writer more concerned with telling his story than showing off his chops. In doing so, he gets to the heart of being in all its everyday ordinariness.
Knausgaard spares no one in his family in this portrayal, least of all himself. We see family scenes from his childhood, a long section from his teenage years that's blissfully free of moralizing or wallowing in self pity: it's simply life itself.
But ultimately the book is about death, and what that means for the living. My Struggle opens with a meditation on life's end, and the heart of the book recounts Karl Ove's week after learning of his father's death, most of it spent at his grandmother's fetid home in Kristiansand, a town on the southern coast of Norway.
My Struggle: Book 1 Preview
Link
Please Wait...