Name: My Struggle:
Rating: 4.022727272727272 (44 reviews)
ISBN: 9780374534172

Karl Ove Knausgaard

My Struggle: Book 4 finds an eighteen-year-old Karl Ove Knausgaard in a tiny fishing village in northern Norway, where he has been hired as a schoolteacher and is living on his own for the first time. When the ferocious winter takes hold, Karl Ove--in the company of the Håfjord locals, a warm and earthy group who have spent their lives working, drinking, and joking together in close quarters--confronts private demons, reels from humiliations, and is elated by small victories. We are immersed, along with Karl Ove, in this world--sometimes claustrophobic, sometimes serenely beautiful--where memories and physical obsessions burn throughout the endless Arctic winter. In Book 4, Karl Ove must weigh the realities of his new life as a writer against everything he had believed it would be.

My Struggle:

Karl Ove Knausgård

Don Bartlett

A Norwegian Marcel Proust. This nerve-striking, addictive piece of "hyper-realism" has created a phenomenon throughout Scandinavia.

My Struggle

Greg Talbot

Life is not for the meek or faint-hearted. Karl Ove nibbles over the heavy topics: death, art, making contributions and raising children. The absent piece is Karl Ove never lets his heart get carried away. Ove guides us through his childhood, the challenges of finding friends, finding a vocation, and providing for his family. He writes unguardedly about his experiences, but limits evocative or eloquent words The structure is never obvious, but we move through the memories of Karl's boyhood and adolescence with a natural order. Even with a prosaic voice he segways into long passages that build his world. He writes unmannerly, sometimes unlikable;y, but always with the strong grip of an experienced writer. When he does venture into more poetic territory his work glows with intensity and beauty. The book has many themes in them, but the main chord has to be his relationship to his father. As we walk through Ove’s life, the relationship to his father becomes defined. The descriptions are observable tip of the iceberg that we know as a reader extends much further. Ove never dives into how he feels, or his inner turmoil, but are privy to all his actions and get an idea of how he views his father’s late choices. Despite the size of the book (and the first book of 6), Ove ownes his material with vivid detail and a confident voice. At times the book drifts into some boring areas, or some trenches I’d rather not explore. Still I give Ove credit, he cares so much about giving us the total picture, and letting the reader define the experience. “My Struggle” deceptively hits the reader with a thousand different threads, but like any good work of reveals more than it chooses to show you.

Stan D

An autobiographical novel focuses on a young man trying to make sense of his place in the disjointed world that surrounds him.

I'd like to read it many more times. The way this book makes me feel and where it takes me...it's very unique. When I think about reading it it's a place, I'm there! does that make sense? Even though some parts of the book are uncomfortable, sad, painful- overall this book is comforting for me in a way. Maybe because the stream of consciousness type of writing is so honest, it's like I don't feel alone at all while reading this book. I related to the way Karl feels in so many situations throughout this book. Can't wait to read his others.

Becca M

Landen Angeline

The third volume--the book that made Knausgaard a phenomenon in the United States--in the addictive New York Times bestselling series A family of four--mother, father, and two boys--move to the south coast of Norway, to a new house on a newly developed site. It is the early 1970s and the family's trajectory is upwardly mobile: the future seems limitless. In painstaking, sometimes self-lacerating detail, Karl Ove Knausgaard paints a world familiar to anyone who can recall the intensity and novelty of childhood experience, one in which children and adults lead parallel lives that never meet. Perhaps the most Proustian in the series, My Struggle: Book 3 gives us Knausgaard's vivid, technicolor recollections of childhood, his emerging self-understanding, and the multilayered nature of time's passing, memory, and existence.

Stephen Schenkenberg

Loved this quote from Bookworm's Michael Silverblatt, who hosted the author for an interview after book three was published in English (http://www.kcrw.com/news-culture/show...

What’s daring about My Struggle is that you’re willing to put the difficulty of the literature of the century — Joyce on — aside, to recapture the human. To make it human again, or to restore it to humanness. And in doing so, you risk being wildly misunderstood…. 

These works of great literature, in some way, speak to readers. And they speak from a world of genius. And I feel that in order to restore the possibility of originality, and even grandeur, you had to enter the zone of shame and the zone of ordinary life, which is banality. And you had to ask, Can great literature be made of such things? Am I willing to try to write six volumes of daily life, when all of us are feeling that our daily lives are disappointing and dissatisfying? Can the novel of Knausgaard restore our feelings of the importance of daily life? 

I can’t think, personally, of anything more important. I’m very grateful when I read these books, because I feel like you’ve restored my interest in human beings. In going to the grocery. In feeding a child and making sure things are taken care of from one day to the next.

ipek soran.

read it twice. a masterpiece. every time i come across an excerpt from this book, i once again understand why knausgaard is a writer of depth, and one of the best authors of his generation. 

Moving to the south coast of Norway in the early 1970s, an upwardly mobile family is observed from the vibrant perspectives of a young boy whose life parallels but rarely intersects with that of his parents. By the award-winning author of Out of This World.

Book three : Boyhood

If I'm being honest, it took me a bit to get into the book. After reading about the Knausgaard phenomenon, I was beside myself. The no-holds-barred, unflinchingly honest stream-of-consciousness style of writing sounded like exactly what my soul needed. Write the book you want to read, they say, but here was someone who'd already done it. 

That particular style, though, took awhile to adjust to. The minutiae came off as a bit banal, even if it was exhilarating. 

As I read, though, I got to know Karl Ove, and that's where the excitement lies. Once you get to know him, once he opens himself up to you, seeps into you, his every move and every thought is a small thrill. By the time I was halfway through, I couldn't stop: I sighed when I had to put the book down to get back to work or go to sleep. 

By the time I reached the end of the book, I felt like I was carrying Karl Ove with me throughout my days. His world transposed itself onto mine; as I walked through my house, I half-expected to see him washing the walls down, or his grandmother sitting in her chair, sipping on Sprite and vodka. 

The book is a comfortable thrill, a hot cup of tea on a cold but bright winter's morning. I'll take my time with the rest of the books, but I will—I must—read the rest.

Morgen Ruff

Katrina Wilson

Marek R

Elena Kuran

While teaching in a tiny fisherman's village in the far north of the arctic circle, 18-year-old writer Karl Ove finds his life taking a dark turn when his drinking results in blackouts, his attempts at losing his virginity end in humiliation and shame, and he develops romantic feelings towards one of his students.

The provocative, audacious, brilliant six-volume autobiographical novel that has unquestionably been the main event of contemporary European literature. It has earned favorable comparisons to its obvious literary forebears "A la recherche du temps perdu" and "Mein Kampf" but has been celebrated as the rare magnum opus that is intensely, addictively readable.

My Struggle:

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