My Struggle, Book One

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