Almost ten years have passed since Karl Ove Knausgaard's father drank
himself to death. Vulnerable and assailed by doubts, he is now embarking
on a new novel. With an uncanny eye for detail, Knausgaard breaks down
his own life story to its elementary particles, reliving memories,
reopening wounds, and examining with candor the turbulence and the
epiphanies that emerge from his own experience of fatherhood, the
fallout in the wake of his father's death, and his visceral connection
to music, art, and literature. Karl Ove's dilemmas strike nerves that
give us raw glimpses of our particular moment in history as we witness
what happens to the sensitive and churning mind of a young man trying-
as if his very life depended on it- to find his place in the disjointed
world around him. This Proustian masterpiece opens a window into one of
the most original minds writing today.
Intense and vital... The need for totality . . . brings superb,
lingering, celestial passages . . .
The concluding sentences of the book [are] placid, plain, achieved.
They have what Walter Benjamin called 'the epic side of truth, wisdom.'
--James Wood, The New Yorker
"While not unconcerned with finding objective truth in the moments he
recounts, Mr. Knausgaard aims first to simply record them, to try to
shape the banal into something worth remembering. Beautifully rendered
and, at times, painfully observant, his book does a superlative job of
finding that "inner core of human existence." --The Wall Street
Journal
Steadily absorbing, lit up by pages of startling insight and harrowing
honesty, My Struggle introduces into world literature a singular
character and immerses us in his fascinating Underground Man
consciousness. -- Philip Lopate
Karl Ove--with his shyness, his passion, his honesty--can take on any
subject and make it his own. -- Edmund White
I read both books [One and Two] hungrily and find myself already
missing Knausgaard just a few days after turning A Man in Love's last
page, searching the Web for inexpensive crash courses in Norwegian,
mostly just wishing Volume Three were available in English now.
--Jonathan Callahan, The Millions
Knausgaard's preternatural facility for description, the dreamy
thickness of his prose, speaks not only to the sheer pleasure his
fiction affords, but to the philosophical stakes of that pleasure. --
Mark Sussman, Los Angeles Review of Books
