Overview
Winner of the 2009 Brage Prize, the 2010 Book of the Year Prize in Morgenbladet, the 2010 P2 Listeners' Prize, and the 2004 Norwegian Critics' Prize and nominated for the 2010 Nordic Council Literary Prize.
"No one in his generation equals Knausgaard."—Dagens Næringsliv
"A tremendous piece of literature."—Politiken (Denmark)
To the heart, life is simple: it beats for as long as it can. Then it stops. Sooner or later, one day or another, this thumping motion shuts down of its own accord. . . . The changes of these first hours happen so slowly and are performed with such an inevitability that there is almost a touch of ritual about them, as if life capitulates according to set rules, a kind of gentleman's agreement.
Almost ten years have passed since Karl O. Knausgaard's father drank himself to death. He is now embarking on his third novel while haunted by self-doubt. Knausgaard breaks his own life story down to its elementary particles, often recreating memories in real time, blending recollections of images and conversation with profound questions in a remarkable way. Knausgaard probes into his past, dissecting struggles—great and small—with great candor and vitality. Articulating universal dilemmas, this Proustian masterpiece opens a window into one of the most original minds writing today.
Karl O. Knausgaard was born in Norway in 1968. His debut novel Out of This World won the Norwegian Critics' Prize and his A Time for Everything was nominated for the Nordic Council Prize.
Synopsis
Winner of the 2009 Brage Prize, the 2010 Book of the Year Prize in Morgenbladet, the 2010 P2 Listeners' Prize, and the 2004 Norwegian Critics' Prize and nominated for the 2010 Nordic Council Literary Prize.
"No one in his generation equals Knausgaard."—Dagens Næringsliv
"A tremendous piece of literature."—Politiken (Denmark)
To the heart, life is simple: it beats for as long as it can. Then it stops. Sooner or later, one day or another, this thumping motion shuts down of its own accord. . . . The changes of these first hours happen so slowly and are performed with such an inevitability that there is almost a touch of ritual about them, as if life capitulates according to set rules, a kind of gentleman's agreement.
Almost ten years have passed since Karl O. Knausgaard's father drank himself to death. He is now embarking on his third novel while haunted by self-doubt. Knausgaard breaks his own life story down to its elementary particles, often recreating memories in real time, blending recollections of images and conversation with profound questions in a remarkable way. Knausgaard probes into his past, dissecting struggles—great and small—with great candor and vitality. Articulating universal dilemmas, this Proustian masterpiece opens a window into one of the most original minds writing today.
Karl O. Knausgaard was born in Norway in 1968. His debut novel Out of This World won the Norwegian Critics' Prize and his A Time for Everything was nominated for the Nordic Council Prize.
Editorials
Publishers Weekly
Knausgaard's perplexing autobiographical third novel (after A Time for Everything) is by turns a coming of age story—told in fits and starts—and a philosophical exploration of what it means to be a son, brother, and writer. The first in a series of six, this work is at its melancholy best when ruminating on how to survive in a world too minutely examined to trust or love: on the first page, the narrator's focus shifts in a moment from a sentimental note on the life of the heart to an outline of the physical processes of bodily decomposition. And though Knausgaard's sprawling story is rife with vital energies—flitting from the discoveries of childhood to the meditations of a more mature man—death's presence is palpable throughout: Karl's attention is constantly drawn toward the vanishing point of his late estranged, alcoholic father. A profusion of quotidian ephemera—from binge drinking to cigarette after cigarette—serves to highlight the incommensurability of death in light of the banality of life. Though light on plot (or perhaps heavy on it, depending on a reader's estimation of hyperrealist saturation as constituting a storyline), Knausgaard's gorgeous prose and enthralling reflections make this tome a rewarding struggle. (May)The Barnes & Noble Review
In the summer of 1984, long before he clambered into the front ranks of the international literary scene, Karl Ove Knausgaard got plastered for the first time. Of the two known photographs that memorialized the event, one shows the fifteen-year-old Norwegian, in a pair of shades, clutching a beer bottle in one hand and holding a skull between his legs with the other. Decades later, what should have remained as naught but a record of childish frivolity seems tinged with prescient irony. For in the summer of 1998, Knausgaard buried his father, who had become an alcoholic in the intervening years.
The agony that pulses behind the title of Knausgaard's memoir My Struggle is formed, in part, by his contentious and unsettled relationship with his patrimony. (I say "in part" because this is but the first volume to appear in English of a series of six.) His father, a schoolteacher and stamp collector, was a distant man, not given to taking others into his confidence. As a child, Knausgaard lived in a constant state of apprehension due to his father's mood swings, which set the tempo for family life. After his parents divorced in the mid-eighties, Knausgaard's ability to comprehend his father dwindled precipitously. Thus, by the end of My Struggle the reader is left, in presumably the same situation as the author, to wonder why a man who was a light social drinker during the first sixteen years of his son's life fell into a hellish spiral that culminated as he barricaded himself in his mother's house, where he delivered himself over to abject squalor.
Knausgaard is one of those narrative wizards capable of turning out a book that feels half its length. He shifts smoothly between time periods as he turns over different themes of his life — moving, say, from a childhood memory in the seventies to thoughts about what it's like to raise his own three children in 2008. If one were hunting for an operative structural metaphor to elucidate his blend of aesthetic craftsmanship, this section, in which he describes standing outside a mortuary with his brother, is worth a second glance:
Standing outside on the pavement, Yngve produced a packet of cigarettes and offered me one. I nodded and took it. Actually the thought of smoking was repugnant, as it always was the day after drinking because the smoke, not so much the taste or smell as what it stood for, created a connection between the present day and the previous one, a kind of sensory bridge across which all kinds of things streamed so that everything around me, the grayish-black tarmac, the light gray curbstones, the gray sky, the birds flying beneath it, the black windows in the rows of houses, the red car we were standing beside, Yngve's distracted figure, were permeated by terrifying internal images; at the same time there was something in the sense of destruction and desolation that the smoke in my lungs gave me that I needed, or wanted.My Struggle teems with such "sensory bridges" that interweave description and reflection in an unaffected yet poetic fashion. Out of the ashes of his childhood and the cooling cinders of his youth, Knausgaard has fashioned a memoir that burns with the heat of life.
Christopher Byrd is a writer who lives in New York. His reviews have appeared in publications such as The New York Times Book Review, The American Prospect, The Believer, The Guardian, The Washington Post, The San Francisco Chronicle, and The Wilson Quarterly.
Reviewer: Christopher Byrd