Karl Ove 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 a finalist for the Nordic Council Prize. My
Struggle: Book One was a New Yorker Book of the Year and Book Two
was listed among the Wall Street Journal's 2013 Books of the Year.
In 2014, Book Three was named a New York Times Notable Book of the
Year. My Struggle is a New York Times Best Seller and has been
translated into more than fifteen languages. Knausgaard lives in
Sweden with his wife and four children.
About the translator:
Don Bartlett has translated novels by many Danish and Norwegian
authors, among them Jo Nesbø, Roy Jacobsen, Lars Saabye
Christensen, and Per Petterson. He lives with his family in
Norfolk, England.
"The first monumental literary production of the 21st century."
— Dwight Garner, The New York Times
"A bracing, strange and singular reading
experience." — Kevin Canfield, The San Francisco
Chronicle
"Book Five, like the two volumes that preceded it, has a
straightforward, linear structure. It tells the saga of a young
writer’s path from failure to success . . . 'The world,' he writes,
'extended its hand and I took it.' Over the course of a masterpiece
that runs to more than 3,000 pages, he hasn’t once let
go." — Sebastian Smee, The Boston Globe
"The penultimate entry in Knausgaard’s autobiographical series
centers on the trials and tribulations of a competitive young
writer, as the protagonist, Karl Ove, adjusts to the various
responsibilities and expectations of adult life in the city. . .
The narrative, like the protagonist, strikes an impressive balance
between the interior and exterior, as well as the cerebral and
emotional; snappy and amusing episodes coexist alongside weighty,
meditative, and essayistic passages on art and literature. . .
Those who have come this far in the series will not be disappointed
by book five; it is a pleasure to witness the gradual emergence of
a dedicated artist over the course of a decade." — Publishers
Weekly (Starred Review)
"In which our author, never at a loss for words, spends his 20s
figuring out how to use the right ones. . . the most conventional
book in the series, but its form echoes the urge for
conventionality he's seeking. And in the context of the entire
series, it's a self-deprecating study of how stories are made and
found and how the best ones get ignored. His father's death was a
heartbreaking event in Volume 1, told from a decade's distance. He
elides it here, suggesting he lacked the literary and emotional
tools to process it at the time. An admirably seriocomic look at a
headlong leap into maturity." — Kirkus Reviews (starred
review)
"Fans of Knausgaard’s indulgent style will revel in every last beer
can and krone as the closing chapter of this infamous Norwegian
saga approaches." — Booklist
"[Knausgaard] unspools a middle-class male life, lived amid
relative plenty and familiar heartache ... What compels the
reader is Knausgaard’s total, undiscriminating, ecstatic
attentiveness ... Every moment, even of putative boredom, seems to
have the sharpness of an adrenaline rush, or the terrifying clarity
of recollected shame ... Mundanity, narrated with such
hallucinogenic precision, evokes not a unique perspective but the
isolation of selfhood as such." — The Atlantic
"In each succeeding volume of
this one-of-a-kind chronicle, Knausgaard has aimed for
nothing less than to discover just who he is, to get to the root of
his own particular self. Here, that struggle is intensified, as the
idea of being a writer is so woven into his self-conception that
failure makes him doubt who he is supposed to be and which
direction to take... This fifth volume feels more insular than
the others, but that’s where Knausgaard has always been at his
best. The inner life inspires him. It’s what gives the sentences
their urgency. He’s the rare writer who has made self-absorption
work for him." — Washington Post
"Knausgaard, for his part, finds a tenuous salvation in repurposing
old forms. Like Augustine... Knausgaard’s approach is to confess,
even if he has no God to receive his confession. His reward,
instead of heaven, is an intimation of the divine, which reveals
itself when the artist is at his most god-like, deep in the fiery
furnace of creation. On one level, this is art as religious
experience, in which the artist feels as if the godhead is working
through him; on another level, this is Freud’s sublimation at work,
the transfiguration of dark thoughts and dark impulses into
refinement and beauty. Freud considered this process a triumph of
civilization, and in this respect, the salvation that Knausgaard is
working toward is not only his own. It has always seemed
audacious for Knausgaard to name his novel after Hitler’s
autobiography-cum-manifesto, but Book Five is proof that we didn’t
realize the extent of his ambitions. It turns out that
his Min Kamp is meant to be Mein Kampf’s fraternal
twin, and proof that the evil of their shared birthright can be
overcome." — New Republic
"Knausgaard's books feel like an antidote to the sterile, branded
curation we sift through every day. It offers this rich texture as
a contrast to the perfection of those suntanned smiles. He is
saying, here is what life really feels like. It's messy. It often
ends in failure. It often detours and rambles." — Chicago
Tribune
"'My Struggle' has pushed me to think more about my own self, and,
in particular, my emotions. It’s reacquainted me with the vividness
of feelings. It’s a sentimental education. . . The style of
'My Struggle' has often been described as solipsistic. It’s said to
capture one person’s impressions of the quotidian, the banal, the
everyday. And yet it might be more accurate to describe
Knausgaard’s style as disinterested, non-conceptual, or free. His
writing is highly personal, but it’s also selfless. He writes about
himself, but without recourse to the static ideas from which selves
are made. . . The novel imagines a kind of ultimate freedom—a
spiritual freedom based in radical openness. It’s expansive and
impersonal, yet still human; it’s concrete, anti-ideological, and,
above all, emotional. Beyond, alongside, or perhaps within the
quest to know oneself, there’s a quest to know the universe."
— Joshua Rothman, The New Yorker
"[T]he eerie thing is that, at times, it is as if we are not within
the pages of this book at all, but outside it and in his
confidence. We understand that [Knausgaard] is ambitious to write a
novel that will make his name and we suppress, as we read, the
acknowledgment that this achievement, this extraordinary work
of which he has been dreaming, is the book we hold in our hands." —
The Guardian
"[T]he charisma of these books, a combination of critical acclaim,
commercial success and the strange brilliance of their form, has
made being hypnotised by their extensive descriptions of ordinary
Norwegian life a sort of cultural obligation. . . My
Struggle, by volume five, is so dense with detail that much of it
is necessarily forgotten. And yet it is lost in a way similar to
how many of our days and hours are lost, only to return in sudden
moments of recollection. Knausgaard has thus gifted us with a
set of novels that matches the shape and texture of our pasts, in
which the relentless accumulation of fictionalised days dramatises,
better than any novel I have read, the experience of living in
time. It is a pen-and-paper virtual reality; after reading it
you feel that another past has been downloaded into your mind." —
The Financial Times
"[O]nce again, Knausgaard’s storytelling is a masterclass in
clarity and intensity. The litany of quotidian detail is
strangely mesmerising, even gripping ... [My Struggle: Book
Five] is a lengthy journey, a bumpy ride full of pitfalls and
setbacks, but one that shapes its protagonist and transports its
reader. Knausgaard may only present fictionalised events,
but on each page, and in every detail, Karl Ove pulses with
life." — The Australian
"The experience of reading Karl Ove Knausgaard is an extraordinary
one. His eye for detail and for all the little byways of thought
and feeling are unsurpassed. . . Knausgaard began his great
project with the idea of using himself up and emptying the
reservoir. Instead, he emerges more fully himself, replete
even." — Charleston Post and Courier
Of the Series:
"Perhaps the most significant literary enterprise of our time." -
The Guardian
"Intense and vital... Knausgaard is utterly honest, unafraid to
voice universal anxieties... Superb, lingering, celestial
passages... [with] what Walter Benjamin called the 'epic side of
truth, wisdom'." - James Wood, The New Yorker
"My Struggle is candid and compulsively readable, with moments of
searing insight and bold shifts through narrative time. Its scope
is both ambitious and modest; its range aggressive and tender."
-VICE
"Why would you read a six-volume, 3,600-page Norwegian novel about
a man writing a six-volume, 3,600-page Norwegian novel? The short
answer is that it is breathtakingly good, and so you cannot stop
yourself, and would not want to... Arrestingly beautiful." - Leland
de la Durantaye, The New York Times Book Review
"With each subsequent book of his that is translated into English,
Mr. Knausgaard continues to solidify his reputation as one of the
most vital writers working today." -The Observer
"My Struggle is unexpectedly entrancing - the combination of
detail and intimacy creates an illusion of being inside somebody
else's brain... My Struggle is worth the, uh, struggle."
-GQ
"Karl Ove Knausgaard. My Struggle. It's unbelievable. I just
read 200 pages of it and I need the next volume like crack." -Zadie
Smith
"Knausgaard pushed himself to do something that hadn't quite been
done before. He broke the sound barrier of the autobiographical
novel." - Jeffrey Eugenides
"By exposing every last detail of his life, Karl Ove Knausgaard
became your favorite author's new favorite author." -Evan
Hughes, The New Republic
"If the function of literature is to take you out of your own life
and involve you in someone else's then My Struggle is
literature... gripping." --The Sunday Times
"A masterpiece of staggering originality, the literary event of the
century... Life here and now, examined at a fever pitch, daily
recollections recounted in exhausting but exhilarating detail."
--The Wichita Eagle
"So what is it that has led fellow authors to rave about Knausgaard
and hail him as literary pioneer? The answer lies in the intensity
of focus he brings to the subject of his life. He seems to punch a
hole in the wall between the writer and reader, breaking through to
a form of micro-realism and emotional authenticity that makes other
novels seem contrived, 'made up', irrelevant... Whether he's
writing about his adult alienation at a toddler's birthday party or
the memory of trying to get hold of alcohol as a teenager on New
Year's Eve, Knausgaard is prepared to go into extraordinary
sensuous detail... the overall effect is utterly hypnotic." -Andrew
Anthony,The Observer
"[My Struggle] replicate[s] the vivid, overwhelming sense of
being alive on the page... satisfying and moving." — The
National (UAE)
"There were moments when I wondered who was the better comparison:
Wordsworth, for the ways that nature bent to Karl Ove's mood and
past selves composed and recomposed themselves in his recollection,
or Harry Potter, for the readable, epic soap opera about a young
student learning to wave his magic wand about. Few writers
create so confidential a bond with the reader, at times
uncomfortable, unwanted but also undeniable. Occasionally I
fancied him an old friend. An infuriating, unstable, self-obsessed
and well-read friend who outstays his welcome, admittedly. But a
friend nonetheless." — The Independent
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