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.