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My Struggle: Book 1

(Min kamp #1)

Karl Ove Knausgård,

Don Bartlett (Translation),

Edoardo Ballerini (Narrator)

4.08 · Rating details · 34,217 ratings · 3,566 reviews

Romanen åpner med en svimlende beskrivelse av døden. Derfra fortelles det om forfatteren Karl Ove Knausgårds kamp for å mestre livet og seg selv og sine egne ambisjoner på skrivingens vegne, i møte med de menneskene han har rundt seg. Min kamp. Første bok utforsker det å vokse opp og være overgitt en verden som ser ut til å være komplett, avsluttet, lukket. Romanen beskriv ...more

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May 29, 2014 Manny rated it liked it · review of another edition

Recommends it for: People who want to know what all the fuss is about

Shelves: not-the-whole-truth, parody-homage, swedish-norwegian-and-danish

I sat, leaning slightly forward, and continued to stare at the screen, but I could think of nothing to say. I shifted my weight, trying to find a more comfortable position, and scratched my head, using my left hand; my right shoulder had still not completely recovered from the skiing accident I had suffered earlier that year, when for a few days I had felt near death. Now, it was hard to remember how I had experienced that time. A small shower of dandruff landed on the keyboard, and I wondered i ...more

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Jan 15, 2017 Jeffrey Keeten rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: memoirs

”But Dad was no longer breathing. That was what had happened to him, the connection with the air had been broken, now it pushed against him like any other object, a log, a gasoline can, a sofa. He no longer poached air, because that is what you do when you breathe, you trespass, again and again you trespass on the world.”

photo karl-ove-knausgaard_zpsgqga7une.jpg

I first met Karl Ove Knausgaard while watching an interview he gave to BBC. He has all this barely tamed hair surrounding a face that conveys peaceful reflection. He has dra ...more

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Feb 05, 2018 Adina rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: norway, w-mwl-alternative

I lay on the beige textile corner sofa thinking that I should start writing my review for A Death InThe Family, My Struggle Part 1. I sit up, unplug the laptop from the white charger and sit back down. I open the lid, punch in the password and click on the Notes application icon. A new blank page is revealed to me. I then start to look at the empty screen and realize I am hungry. I sit up again and take an orange form the fruit basket who also containes pears, apples, bananas and kiwis. I reach I lay on the beige textile corner sofa thinking that I should start writing my review for A Death InThe Family, My Struggle Part 1. I sit up, unplug the laptop from the white charger and sit back down. I open the lid, punch in the password and click on the Notes application icon. A new blank page is revealed to me. I then start to look at the empty screen and realize I am hungry. I sit up again and take an orange form the fruit basket who also containes pears, apples, bananas and kiwis. I reach for the fruit knife from the counter and start to cut the orange peel in equal sized parts. The smell of fresh orange juice fills my nostrils with expectation. I start to unwrap each juicy orange bit and put them in a bowl to take with me. I lay in the sofa again with the laptop on my lap. I start to type a few words while eating the orange. Bored already? I am. However, Knausgaard writes in the same excruciating detail about all sorts of mundane stuff and I was never bored (almost) while reading this almost 500 pages memoir.

Here is an example of his detail at its worse: “I joined Yngve, who was standing in front of the house hold detergents section. We took Jif for the bathroom, Jif for the kitchen, Ajax all-purpose cleaner, Ajax window cleaner, Mr. Muscle for extra-difficult stains”- and he goes on and on with the things he bought. Yes, he wrote almost half a page about his shopping choices in a local supermarket.

The first few times I heard of this book and the omnipresent comparison with Proust, I thought that it is the kind of book literature “snobs” would read because of its originality and to prove their endurance with an unreadable novel. In short, I ran away from it with all my might. Gradually, after reading more and more positive reviews from friends my attitude became a bit more accepting and I became even interested. While on holiday in beautiful Norway, I bought a couple of Norwegian novels , this one included. I was surprised by the fact that I was drawn in the Karl Ove Knausgaard’s memoir from the first sentence.

“For the heart, life is simple: it beats for as long as it can. Then it stops. Sooner or later, one day, this pounding action will cease of its own accord, and the bloody will begin to run towards the body’s lowest point, where it will collect in a small pool, visible from the outside as a dark, soft patch on ever whiter skin, as the temperature sinks, the limbs stiffen and the intestines drain.” Creepy but fascinating in the same time.

It took me two months to finish the first of this massive six volume fictionalized autobiography. I felt that I could not be rushed. Even though the book is filled with unnecessary mundane details about the author’s life and it does not have an obvious plot I found it strangely readable and fascinating as a literary Big Brother can be.

The volume is structured in two parts, the first one deal with the author as boy growing up with bits and pieces from different periods while the 2nd part discusses the death of his alcoholic father and the burial preparations which trigger more memories from childhood. There is also a part about him as a struggling writer struggling to be affectionate to a pregnant wife and to also find the much needed solitude to write. The narration shifts between painfully detailed memories of everyday activities including banal dialogues between family and friends to deep philosophical insights.

“Writing is drawing the essence of what we know out of the shadows. That is what writing is about. Not what happens there, not what actions are played out there, but the there itself. There, that is writing’s location and aim? But how to get there?”

Knausgaard is an amazing writer, a wizard who manages to keep one interested and absorb all his written words. His sincerity is shocking and disarming. We get to see him as a self-absorbed man who is sometimes a jerk with the ones around him, who loathes his father and wants him dead but is destroyed by his death. A man of who likes to be alone and is afraid to talk to people but writes a 7 volume memoir about himself. It was fascinated to enter Knausgaard mind with all its contradictions and flaws.
...more

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Feb 08, 2017 Glenn Russell rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Karl Ove Knausgaard - Norwegian novelist born in 1968

This first volume of the author's novel captures episodes in his life, usually as a boy growing up but sometimes events in his twenties and thirties and also reflections as he writes in his forties, through a particular lens: the poignant emotions and heart-break of a teenager. While this would probably be a formula for literary disaster if attempted by most writers, in the skillful hands of Mr. Knausgaard it is a formidable achievement.

How do ...more

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Mar 27, 2014 Melanie rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

My first impression of Karl Ove Knausgaard came from a black and white photograph published with a review of his book "A Time For Everything" in The New York Review of Books.

He is seen smoking against the rugged Norwegian landscape, hair disheveled, wearing an old, battered tee-shirt, lost in thought. Completely and unabashedly himself, yet ill at ease. Entirely present, feet deeply rooted in the present moment, yet his mind is clearly in flight, flickering at the surface of his gaze.

The strikin ...more

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May 27, 2014 Douglas rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

“Life's a pitch, as the old woman said. She couldn't pronounce her b’s.”

I’m not sure I can say much of anything about this work that hasn’t already been said. I still have several volumes to finish. The next one is nearly 600 pages, so in a way, I’m just getting started on this enterprise.

Perhaps the best I can do is to offer a few of my observations. All I keep thinking is that this is the best boring book I’ve ever read. I can’t believe how utterly boring it is and that I cared. Every detail ...more

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Oct 26, 2015 Darwin8u rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: aere-perennius, 2015, fiction, memoir-autobiography-diary

Book 1: A Death in the Family

"And death, which I have always regarded as the greatest dimension of life, dark, compelling, was no more than a pipe that springs a leak, a branch that cracks in the wind, a jacket that slips off a clothes hanger and falls to the floor."

description

First, let me say something about this novel (and I'm assuming the next five novels) that is both simple and genius. This is a weird book. It captures the reader because it falls into a funky zone between memoir and fiction. He is te ...more

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Jul 24, 2013 Adam Dalva rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Jawdroppingly good. Somehow both a memoir and a page-turner. As smart as it gets, beautiful, and unusually simple for something this deep. A couple of knockout sequences (New Year's Eve party and especially cleaning his Grandma's house). I read it in a day, lagging only when he approached art history.

I am continually amazed, years later, after re-reading, by how many people have ideas about what this is, without having even tried it. I still remember, 6 years ago, the sun in Long Island as I re ...more

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Dec 25, 2012 brian rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

that statistic about how often the average man thinks of sex? well, double it, change 'sex' to 'death' and you have a hint as to what's going on in my head. the thought that (spoiler) you, me, and everyone we know, ever will know, and/or ever will know of, will end up an inanimate object seems preposterously unfair and, conversely, is what drives me to live-it-the-hell-up in my pitifully brief time on this less-than-a-speck-of-dust in our expanding universe.

obsessed with death, a collector of d that statistic about how often the average man thinks of sex? well, double it, change 'sex' to 'death' and you have a hint as to what's going on in my head. the thought that (spoiler) you, me, and everyone we know, ever will know, and/or ever will know of, will end up an inanimate object seems preposterously unfair and, conversely, is what drives me to live-it-the-hell-up in my pitifully brief time on this less-than-a-speck-of-dust in our expanding universe.

obsessed with death, a collector of death (no bodies in my basement, i'm talkin' the artistic and historical representation of), karl ove knausgård jumps to the top of my personal canon (thanon?), edging in there right under ol' philip 'nothing more terrible, nothing more true' larkin.

as with life (KOK's secondary subject), there're pages and pages of dullsville until a flash of the morbidly sublime, ineffable, & mysterious rears its head and all that banality - as with boring memories seen through the lens of time passed - takes on the hazy glow of significance.

an imperfect book: my favorite of the year because of its imperfections. and five more volumes to come. yee-fuckin'-haw!

on seeing his father's corpse:

Now I saw his lifeless state. And that there was no longer any difference between what once had been my father and the table he was lying on, or the floor on which the table stood, or the wall socket beneath the window, or the cable running to the lamp beside him. For humans are merely one form among many, which the world produces over and over again, not only in everything that lives but also in everything that does not live, drawn in sand, stone, and water. And death, which I have always regarded as the greatest dimension of life, dark, compelling, was no more than a pipe that springs a leak, a branch that cracks in the wind, a jacket that slips off a clothes hanger and falls to the floor.

on memory:

You could still buy Slazenger tennis rackets, Tretorn balls, and Rossignol skis, Tyrolia bindings and Koflach boots. The houses where we lived were still standing, all of them. The sole difference, which is the difference between a child’s reality and an adult’s, was that they were no longer laden with meaning. A pair of Le Coq soccer boots was just a pair of soccer boots. If I felt anything when I held a pair in my hands now it was only a hangover from my childhood, nothing else, nothing in itself. The same with the sea, the same with the rocks, the same with the taste of salt that could fill your summer days to saturation, now it was just salt, end of story. The world was the same, yet it wasn’t, for its meaning had been displaced, and was still being displaced, approaching closer and closer to meaninglessness.

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Mar 20, 2012 Geoff rated it really liked it · review of another edition

It was a sense of bewilderment at the utter banality that is the immediate surface of this project of Knausgaard’s that at first had me thinking “I’m not going to be able to see this book through” and questioning not only whether it was worth my time but actually was it worth his, all this writing? It was a genuine bewilderment because I was taken aback, flustered, and not a little annoyed that he seemed so casual in his approach, so utterly unconcerned with any kind of decoration, any kind of S It was a sense of bewilderment at the utter banality that is the immediate surface of this project of Knausgaard’s that at first had me thinking “I’m not going to be able to see this book through” and questioning not only whether it was worth my time but actually was it worth his, all this writing? It was a genuine bewilderment because I was taken aback, flustered, and not a little annoyed that he seemed so casual in his approach, so utterly unconcerned with any kind of decoration, any kind of Style, that thing that lets one know one is reading a personality that has encountered a world in some kind of authentic way. Nabokov is an overture of interlocking etyms fluttering in accord of each other in a flower garden like the lepidoptera he obsesses over and Gaddis is turmoiled density a kind of cacophony that emerges as tonal bliss and Joyce is the music of the spheres, a radiant cosmos, and Woolf is a kind of chamber orchestra in a shadowy room, but what was this? Just a man talking? Knausgaard is not a stylist, he is not a musician, he might be something like when the rain streaks the pavement different tones of bone-color and you are startled to become aware that this static plain is actually capable of unconcealing multiple appearances, that even a square of pavement can reveal a variety of essences - or when old bricks are made fox red by the right angle of light, fleetingly the animal can be seen in the baked clay. Or the gray cloud bank that arrives and only announces itself, gray cloud bank, but you understand that a gray cloud bank is a touching phenomenon all on its own. He is not Proust. Someone writing at length about their childhood does not make that someone a Proust. Proust is the sound of the different branes of our personal temporal multiverses gently touching one another creating big bangs that detonate and spread subaqueously, subcutaneously, muted and unnoticed but sending us forward in our lives, like we are the disturbed air waves on which the viola sings searching out the ears that might hear. But Knausgaard? He is not these writers; don’t go looking for them here.

But if you do decide to read this book, don’t give up on it until you have proceeded deeply into Part Two, because Knausgaard, unconcerned with winning you right away, really comes to life in Part Two, when he is in closest proximity to Death. This is a death-haunted book from page one to the end, and what becomes compelling in Knausgaard’s exhaustive realism, his absolute dedication to identifying every minutiae of movement, object, sense-item in a scene, is that through his spare prose meditations (almost stone quarries of the everyday) one is forced to reckon with the thought that, because we are involuntarily immersed, from birth, in our miserable, troubled, absurd, sometimes blissful, mostly futile and selfish strivings - since this is a fate we all share, that is only consecrated by Death - then the banality of each life is sacred, and worth the telling. I believe Knausgaard is sincerely approaching his project with the idea that each life is an epic, his not excepted. I see no evidence, in this first book, to qualify the accusation of narcissism, of navel-gazing, unless we are all guilty of this when looking back over our unhappiness, our growth, our attempts at becoming human. This is not narcissism so much as it is a reckoning of self-loathing, (and there is a vital difference between the neuroses of the self that are narcissism and self-loathing) - of coming to terms with our ugly humanity on this rock on which we were washed up at birth, when we plopped out covered in blood, cold, and screaming.

I am intrigued. I am at the very beginning of his project, and I’m not sold that this is literary greatness. But it is something worthy of your consideration. It might be something necessary... ...more

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Oct 09, 2012 Jim Elkins added it · review of another edition

Shelves: norwegian

Reasons for Knausgaard's Reception (Notes on the Reviews)

This essay has three postscripts. What follows is a negative account of vol. 1, which I read when it was first out in English; now "My Struggle" is famous, and subsequent volumes have attracted some reflective reviews. Thoughts on those at the end. At the moment, there are three postscripts: I intend to add two more, about Fred Jameson's review and Toril Moi's essay. What is in need of explanation at this point (that is, after every other ...more

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Sep 28, 2019 Michael Finocchiaro rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: novels, norweigan-21st-c, autobiography, series

I was initially sceptical about this Proustian roman fleuve, but I actually really enjoyed it! I find his writing is closer to that of Elena Ferrante than Marcel Proust.

I think there are two Proustian aspects to KOK: the autobiographical angle (the distance from Marcel of the book to Marcel the author is not very great even if often genders are transposed for societal reasons and situations shaked and baked to his narrative) is rather obvious. The other aspect is the roman fleuve and free assoc ...more

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Oct 18, 2017 Agnieszka rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: biography-memoirs-letters, nordic, reviewed, 2017, scandinavian-authors, ebook, own-a-copy

Now that all the hype over Karl Ove Knausgård cycle is over I thought it’s time to finally meet the guy. Almost everything about My struggle was already said, both bad and good stuff. The author was accused of every thing imaginable, of being ungrateful sonofbitch that fouls own nest, that he was hypocrite and megalomaniac, that he hurt own family in hope of making money, that he did it to win plaudits, that he can’t write and the book is rubbish and pure graphomania and much more like that. On
Now that all the hype over Karl Ove Knausgård cycle is over I thought it’s time to finally meet the guy. Almost everything about My struggle was already said, both bad and good stuff. The author was accused of every thing imaginable, of being ungrateful sonofbitch that fouls own nest, that he was hypocrite and megalomaniac, that he hurt own family in hope of making money, that he did it to win plaudits, that he can’t write and the book is rubbish and pure graphomania and much more like that. On the other side there were these who found the novel original, who could appreciate its simplicity, who could accept banality even, who didn’t consider that detailed report to be exhibitionistic gibberish and to that group I count myself. I thought it was painfuly honest and gritty, excruciatingly intimate family portrait.

I don’t mind that kind of writing though I don’t feel it’s necessary to write about almost every cup of tea or bottle of beer or meal or shower or lighting cigarette but it didn’t feel fatiguing either. Sometimes it’s the only way to deal with horrible things. Just celebrate simple deeds. I thought Knausgård primarily was writing for and to himself and only later to the reader. And it was device to tame the fear, clear head and calm down oneself. No, it didn’t enrich me but somehow felt right. There are parts in the novel that almost knock you down and it’s hard to read them. The level of sharing every nasty detail is really high and at times feels unbearably intimate, it’s like you were some voyeuristic jerk that witnesses how Karl’s father is drinking himself to death or sees how his grandmother lives. And it’s not a pleasant sight, believe me. Powerful but not pleasant. Then again there are pieces that KOK treats us truths and reflections on life that smacks of banality. And maybe there is a key to his success. To be painfully direct and make from banality and mundaneness a method.

I thought the writing was good, not especially quotable but solid and easy to follow. I found comparison to Proust rather laughable for the only thing in common is the length of the text. Knausgård operates on well-known territory and discusses basic things and emotions. He works his life out, dismantles it, speaks of growing up, love, music, uncertainty, friends, first steps towards writing career, death, parents and grandparents, hatred to father and how it felt destructive. Plain writings, pure emotions, with his heart on his sleeve. There is no place for flamboyance here. No need for extravagance. For sure going to see how it goes and how the author progesses, both in personal and professional life. ...more

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Aug 05, 2013 Nick Wellings rated it it was ok · review of another edition

For some reason, My Struggle (AKA, in the UK - 'A Death in the Family') made it into James Wood's Books of the Year 2012. Woods is, like Kakutani, a doyen of critics, and his word always carries a weight of sensitivity and intelligence gained from years of reading and teaching about literature. With Woods' nodding imprimatur bestowed upon it one would imagine the literary cachet of Knausgard's book is beyond reproach.

But having read my Struggle (and boy, what a struggle) I fear for Mr. Wood's cr For some reason, My Struggle (AKA, in the UK - 'A Death in the Family') made it into James Wood's Books of the Year 2012. Woods is, like Kakutani, a doyen of critics, and his word always carries a weight of sensitivity and intelligence gained from years of reading and teaching about literature. With Woods' nodding imprimatur bestowed upon it one would imagine the literary cachet of Knausgard's book is beyond reproach.

But having read my Struggle (and boy, what a struggle) I fear for Mr. Wood's critical acumen. (I nearly wrote "I think he's lost his god-damn mind"). Woods is such a perspicacious reader that I fear somehow I've read a different My Struggle or that he's read a different one, or that I'm in a parallel universe where my struggle with my Struggle is not the same as everyone elses - everyone else having from it, like, significant insights into the human condition, deep engagement with fictionalised wisdom, harrowing journeys into grief and sadness, the soul eclipsing throes of love, the constancy and Love for family etc., the sadness of growing older, etc etc.

The reason I say this, is that My Struggle Part 1 (AKA, in the UK 'A Death in the Family') was pretty damn bad. Boring bad. Pointless, bad. Why this is being compared to Proust is way beyond me. A handy way of selling more copies perhaps. All I know is that I don't think it is quite in the league of Proustian prose-majesty to reminisce how you went to the shop with your brother and bought a Lion bar and 1.5 litres of Sprite to wash it down with before spending the night watching TV getting hammered. Or wait, how you looked after your dementia-ridden grandmother for a while and on the trip to see her...you stopped off at the petrol station and bought a Bounty and had a ciggie leaning against the car. His brother calls him to say his dad has died and after they hang up he wanders to the shower and wonders whether he should "have a wank". This is hardly the realm of an enduring classic. 'War and Peace', this ain't. I truly don't think anyone will care about it in ten years time. I situate it in the "Scandanavian Cultural Renaissance" which has like some Nordic phagocyte, like the Vikings of old (but with less swords n' longboats) taken over the realms of detective novels, detective TV shows, detective movies, trendy retailing (H&M) haute-cuisine (Noma is the best restaurant in the world, say some.)Sure, they can do Volvos and cheap priced flat pack furniture but the world's eating their stuff up, and the Scans are happy. So, seeing a popularly written book about Weighty Subjects, the Scandi-media probably just saw an opportunity to make money from their native readers, and when people got reading it, it was decided to export the book by the bucketload by hyping it to the mesosphere. Notice many quotes about its Proustian might come from Scandanavian newspapers/magazines/reveiwers. Hmmmmmmmm....

Frankly the book was 400 page waste of my time, crammed full of trite observations. I would say "D minus. Could do better," but really I don't think he can. If I want to read detailed memoirs in I'll read them from someone who actually has something interesting to memoir about. Knausgard doesn't. In my defence, Wood says "even when I was bored, I was interested." at least Woods admits he was bored, and lets face it "I was interested" isn't quite "I was moved, I was edified, I was transported, I as shocked, I was touched," all those things we demand from quality fiction, but at least HE was interested. But, hey, I could be wrong. Maybe it picks up in books 2-6, but I'm not getting my hopes up. Sorry, Karl, but you'll have to struggle on without me. ...more

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Oct 24, 2019 Michael rated it liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: 2019

Slow moving and full of detail, My Struggle: A Death in the Family reflects on the author’s fraught relationship to fatherhood. The work doubles as the first volume in Knausgaard’s epic six-part portrait of himself, and a self-contained memoir about his fraught relationship to his father, who died at an early age due to alcoholism. The series centers on the lifelong conflict Knausgaard has felt between his desire for greatness and the obligations of family, and is written in plain but hyper-spec ...more

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Jul 18, 2017 Maxwell rated it liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: owned, translated, non-fiction

When I started reading this I had a feeling similar to when I read Elena Ferrante for the first time—the feeling that I was reading a book that would be read, possibly even studied, for years to come. I can't put my finger on what exactly it is about this one though that made me feel that way. With Ferrante it was the historical context, observant writing, and vivid characters. With Knausgård it might just be the ambition behind this series: a six-part autobiography.

Nevertheless, though his writ ...more

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Dec 29, 2018 Sophie rated it really liked it · review of another edition

I had felt for many, many years that the form of the novel, as I used it, created a distance from life. When I started to write about myself, that distance disappeared. If you write about your life, as it is to yourself, every mundane detail is somehow of interest—it doesn’t have to be motivated by plot or character. That was my only reason for writing about myself. It wasn’t because I found myself interesting, it wasn’t because I had experienced something I thought was important and worth shari

I had felt for many, many years that the form of the novel, as I used it, created a distance from life. When I started to write about myself, that distance disappeared. If you write about your life, as it is to yourself, every mundane detail is somehow of interest—it doesn’t have to be motivated by plot or character. That was my only reason for writing about myself. It wasn’t because I found myself interesting, it wasn’t because I had experienced something I thought was important and worth sharing, it wasn’t because I couldn’t resist my narcissistic impulses. It was because it gave my writing a more direct access to the world around me. And then, at some point, I started to look at the main character—myself—as a kind of place where emotions, thoughts, and images passed through.

Πηγή: https://www.newyorker.com

Το βιβλίο του Knausgård δε μεταφέρει εν τέλει τίποτα λιγότερο ή περισσότερο από την αίσθηση της αναμονής· ο συγγραφέας παίρνει το χρόνο του ώσπου να φτάσει στο αποκορύφωμα μιας σκηνής κι έπειτα, όταν η κλιμάκωση έχει επιτευχθεί, να συνεχίσει την αφήγηση. Σε αφηγηματικό λοιπόν επίπεδο, στο πρώτο μυθιστόρημα της εξαλογίας του Karl Ove, οι κορυφώσεις παραλείπονται λες κι αποτελούν επουσιώδες στοιχείο της πλοκής.

Αν και περιστασιακές αυτές οι αποφορτίσεις της ατμόσφαιρας είναι κάθε άλλο παρά τυχαίες, η επιμονή του Knausgård ωθεί την ανύψωσή τους στο επίπεδο της μεθόδου, δημιουργώντας έναν κόσμο στον οποίο το να βλέπει είναι ταυτόσημο του να γράφει και το να γράφει απαιτεί έναν συνεχή συνδυασμό τάξης και χάους. Ο αφηγητής, σε κάποιο σημείο, εξομολογείται πως για αρκετά χρόνια είχε καταβάλλει προσπάθεια να γράψει για τον πατέρα του μάταια, καταλήγοντας στο συμπέρασμα πως το θέμα εκείνο ήταν πολύ κοντά στη ζωή του κι επομένως όχι ιδιαίτερα εύκολο να το εξαναγκάσει σε μια άλλη μορφή, να το καταστρέψει μέσα στη λογοτεχνία.

Μορφή και καταστροφή: οι δύο λέξεις τρέχουν σαν παράλληλες ράγες, διαπερνούν το μυθιστόρημα δημιουργώντας μια ενέργεια ορατή όχι μόνο στο πλαίσιο της γραφής, της συγγραφικής δηλαδή δραστηριότητας, αλλά και μέσα στη σχέση του νευρικού και προσχηματικού αφηγητή και του εμμονικού με τους κανόνες πατέρα του. Ένας ισχυρός μα βαθιά απογοητευμένος πατριάρχης, ο πατέρας του συγγραφέα, στοιχειώνει τη ζωή του γιου του τόσο πριν όσο και μετά το θάνατό του. Η αλκοολική του εξάρτηση τον οδηγεί στο αναπόφευκτο τέλος του αλλά και σε μια εξίσου αναπόφευκτη τραγωδία για τους γιους του, τα βάσανα των οποίων συνεχίζονται ως την αγωνιώδη και συνάμα περιστασιακή τους κάθαρση (σημαντικό το γεγονός ότι ο Karl Ove κι ο αδελφός του καλούνται να καθαρίσουν το δωμάτιο στο οποίο διέμενε ο πατέρας τους, επαναφέροντας έτσι μια τάξη μέσα σε αυτό που καθαρά μοιάζει με καταστροφή).

Το έργο Ένας θάνατος στην οικογένεια είναι το πρώτο από τα έξι βιβλία του νορβηγικού σάγκα, ο αναγνώστης καλείται επομένως να επιδείξει προσοχή, να εντοπίσει τα θεματικά κέντρα του κάθε έργου, της κάθε αυτοβιογραφικής μαρτυρίας. Ο ίδιος ο Knausgård εντούτοις, θυμίζει συνεχώς ότι όλες οι αναγνώσεις, όλα τα γραπτά, αφήνουν κάτι εκτός· μια δήλωση που εύκολα ξεχνιέται σε μια παράδοση όπου κάθε νέα ιστορία επιδιώκει να ξεπεράσει τους σύγχρονους αλλά και τους παλαιότερους. Ακόμη κι αν ο θάνατος περιγραφεί με την παραμικρή λεπτομέρεια, σχολαστικά, μέχρι το τελευταίο ρίγος, ακόμη και τότε δε θα περιγράφεται ο ίδιος ο θάνατος αλλά κάτι το νεκρό· το έργο του Knausgård ωστόσο, ένα βαθιά νοσηρό κείμενο, μεστό σε θάνατο και στην αίσθηση του κενού, είναι παρ' όλα αυτά γεμάτο ζωή.

The duty of literature is to fight fiction. It's to find a way into the world as it is.

Πηγή: https://www.newyorker.com

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Aug 06, 2012 Jim Coughenour rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: memoir, bleakfiction

For the heart, life is simple: it beats for as long as it can. Then it stops.

I'm not sure what to say about this book except that once I started reading I kept going for the next two days. A couple nights ago the current issue of The New Yorker popped up on my iPad; I idly scrolled to the review of this book by James Wood. I read only a few sentences then called Books Inc. They had a copy. I walked over and picked it up even though it was almost 10 pm – and started reading.

James Wood calls My St ...more

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Dec 25, 2014 Matt rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: from-the-north-country, media-ebooks, yesterday-just-a-memory

The indicator on the bottom of my Kindle shows 8% at location 808 in the book. There is certainly some country in the world where the number eight promises great misfortune. Not here. I look from my Kindle and see the bowl of fruit on the table in front of me. An apple and a pear, each one quartered, eight pieces total. Next to the bowl the tobacco pouch – Schwarzer Krauser, funny name for a Tobacco – and a lighter. Fruits and Tobacco. The Yin and the Yang for my body. Although my nose is about The indicator on the bottom of my Kindle shows 8% at location 808 in the book. There is certainly some country in the world where the number eight promises great misfortune. Not here. I look from my Kindle and see the bowl of fruit on the table in front of me. An apple and a pear, each one quartered, eight pieces total. Next to the bowl the tobacco pouch – Schwarzer Krauser, funny name for a Tobacco – and a lighter. Fruits and Tobacco. The Yin and the Yang for my body. Although my nose is about 80 centimeters away from the apple, I can sense its smell. A little of the pear too, but not much. The flavor of the apple predominates – apple/pear = 80/20 (my estimation, no way to check). The tobacco in its plastic wrap, I do not smell. I look at the clock. No relevant figure eight there. Cannot have everything at 51.

                    ·•●•·

At 16%. The counter on my Kindle tells me there are four hours and forty-seven minutes left in the book. Well, we'll see about that. I pour another mug of tea. The mug has a bright color, almost white, and is slightly mottled. On its side there is a silhouette of a moose with the word NORGE below it. Moose, NORGE, and the tea inside the mug are of the same color – a dark brown. Black tea it's called, probably because brown isn't considered a nice color? Darjeeling, second flush 2014, FTGFOP 1. Things need names. No sugar, no milk either. Just a spoonful of honey for the jug. Sunday morning and tea become synonyms. Contemplating at 51.

                    ·•●•·

At 32% Karl Ove gets drunk. It's new year's night 1984/1985. Later that same year... I'm on a road-trip with my girlfriend to visit her relatives. The annual shooting match in this small village in the countryside is the biggest deal. Aim and shoot, playing a game everyone knows is fixed. The winner – the King – predetermined. Later, at night, more shots, with beer this time. Force myself to mingle, and I do it in style – half drunk means money wasted. I get plastered – vomit, make room for more – until the place looks alright. Too far gone at 21.

                    ·•●•·

At 42%. Karl Ove's collection of tapes contains SOUL MINING by THE THE. Is Matt J. still alive and kicking? I wonder. Haven't listened to the band in what feels like ages
You've been read like an open book, page by page
You'll never tell anyone your inner thoughts again
You were taken in by a heart of fools gold
Now you're drifting in circles in the depths
of your soul

                    ·•●•·

At 64%. Reading about Karl's father makes me think of my own, inevitably. I realize they share the same first name. Sitting at my desk (back then) two meters from where I sit now. The cawing sound from the intercom pulls me out of concentration. In the midst of the most important work so far and my father's illness becomes mine in a way. The house is dark. I'm going upstairs, counting ten, then seven steps. Down the hallway to his bedroom. He looks at me, looks through me. "Wolfgang," he says to me, holds his son for his nephew, who has not visited even once, and then "Tablets". I see some little white pills on the floor beside the bedside table. Daddy's little helper on morphine base to dull the pain, clip its sting. I pick up the pills, put one in his hand, help him with the glass of water. His Adam's apple moves up, then down, emerges much more clearly than it has a week ago. "Work is calling," I say to him, although I cannot be sure he understands what I mean. Back at the desk. How long will it be now? Wretched at 26.

                    ·•●•·

At 80%. Flying with Karl-Ove to his father and ███ ███████. Switching my Kindle to Airplane Mode to save power. A little ✈ appears. A plane-crash in the alps leaves one hundred and fifty bodies. One hundred and fifty deaths in one hundred and fifty families, and they'll all struggle to carry on —— Me, my friend and his girlfriend on a camping trip leads us to France, not too far from the crash site, in 1982 or 3. The camper is huge, painted in pink with green stripes. An eye-catcher if there ever was one. Three months later she's dead. Leukemia. So it goes. —— The woman I knew from high-school helps out on Haiti after the devastating quake. The images of the dead and dying still in her mind she returns home to find her husband hanging from the ceiling. Depression. So it goes.
Seems like every time you turn around
there's another hard-luck story
that you're gonna hear
and there's really nothin'
anyone can say.
Words by Bob Dylan, I know by heart, kept me company my whole life. Maybe I'll rearrange the shelves on Goodreads, give them all names of Dylan songs. Maybe I won't.

                    ·•●•·

90% done with Dying and I wonder: How long lasts dying anyway? The media keeps saying the passengers on the flight died in an instant. Must have felt like a lifetime for them. In the end it's only a thin line, crossed in a millisecond. The journey there takes a whole life. It's all downhill from birth. Memento mori. Enjoy the ride!

                    ·•●•·

At 100%. Closing the book on its final page, like emerging from someone else's thoughts. The truth. How accurate are the narrator's memories? How much got lost on the way from his mind to mine? Written down, edited, re-written, translated, read. And then ... understood? How accurate are mine? The whole truth. He did try to tell it on more than one occasion. When he's cleaning a room, or preparing a meal, seemingly nothing is left out. Some call it boring. I call it thoroughness (being a Teuton an all). But there are always some tiny details, some things that got stored in memory, but can't be recalled. Wasted space. Nothing but the truth. How reliable is this narrator anyway? No way to confirm those memories, those sneaky bastards. Things got scrambled, distorted, resorted. And then there is artistic license. I grant him that. But all of this doesn't really matter for the book to be liked by me. Thumbs up for Knausgård so far. One down, five to go.

                    ·•●•·

[to be continued here]

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License. ...more

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Nov 25, 2012 Lee Klein rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Within a week of each other my mother and a grad school friend recommended this to me, both calling it "up my alley," maybe because it's a literary autobiography unafraid of piling on detail and ripping off pages of dense, insightful exposition. I hadn't seen the James Wood review in The New Yorker (didn't skim it until after I wrote a draft of this review), but I've long been a lover of the look and feel of Archipelago's books and I'm an Anselm Keifer fan (there's a Keifer on the cover). Fictio Within a week of each other my mother and a grad school friend recommended this to me, both calling it "up my alley," maybe because it's a literary autobiography unafraid of piling on detail and ripping off pages of dense, insightful exposition. I hadn't seen the James Wood review in The New Yorker (didn't skim it until after I wrote a draft of this review), but I've long been a lover of the look and feel of Archipelago's books and I'm an Anselm Keifer fan (there's a Keifer on the cover). Fiction is fact selected, arranged, and charged with purpose, said Thomas Wolfe, but Knausgaard's acknowledged precedent is Proust. Narrator admits to gulping Proust down before writing this novel, memoir, "roman," something that maintains the circuituous structure but swaps out the velveteen serpentine suffusions for something cleaner, starker, heteronormative, and involuntarily cathartic more than ecstatic -- none of which mean it's better than Proust, just comparing the two because Proust is the archetype, the way some bands derive from The Beatles, The Stones, Led Zep, and others from Kraftwerk. A pretty clear division between scene and summary (exposition): pages of always welcomed dense/deep exposition (usually about death, although at first about parenthood) followed by pages of scenes (sometimes with quick little refreshing streams of sparsely attributed dialogue). The exposition I loved whereas the scenes, especially in the first part, I only admired -- or maybe I overrelated to the first section involving his adolescence? Teenage dudes driving around looking to drink, playing guitar (I loved how my electric guitar case smelled), crappy bands playing outside to no one (my college band once played outside to four of our friends), lusting, making out, varieties of -- to my mind -- overly common experience that may account for why I've never really written about my teen years, have always pushahed them, deemed them necessarily stoned more than beautiful, and therefore unworthy. But Knausgaard seemed to approve those years, those experiences, and shows how to go about it as long as -- as in Proust -- teen/childhood talk is filtered through a mature narrator's recollections. That depth, that distance, seems necessary in part to evade accusations of YA-ness from fuckheads like me. Something else I loved: things are detailed at times to the point of what Frank Conroy called "abject naturalism": comprehensive minute detailing of minor movements, especially washing dishes or setting a table or other rote physical actions. Here, such naturalism is less abject than the object, its point, a cataloguing of momentary forms, like monumental skyscapes at sunset, momentary, meaningless, lacking secret codes to crack, glanced at, deemed beautiful, that's it -- appreciated but so common they're taken for granted. "The veranda, the plastic bottles, the light in the neighbor's windows . . . The gutter and the rainwater still running down it into the grass. I could not grasp that he wouldn't see any more of this, however hard I tried." There's something steely about the narrator no matter how often he, like water from a rock, breaks into tears. Things are clear and rational and yet move unpredictably -- nonlinear layering of the story gives it more depth. It feels absolutely real and reading it enhanced perception of life around at least one reader. Also, when they inevitably round up the post-irony novels that have come since DFW's prediction in the famous TV essay about Leyner, Knausgaard will be mentioned. He's sincere without being stupid about it, without feeling like he's restraining a natural instinct to entertain or humor. Loved the bit, after he talks with his wife on the phone and they both say how much they miss and love each other, how he gets some things at a convenience store and wants to sleep with the chubby Iraqi or Iranian girl who won't look up at him. It's very well-done, understated, its significance not overexplicated with exposition, plus it suggests issues that might arise in later volumes. Throughout, its naturalism feels natural, like literature more than contemporary literary fiction that adheres to the rules of its genre and thereby so often for me feels unreal, like a story, like fiction. 4.5 stars for me -- I'll definitely read the next five or so volumes as they come out and maybe revisit this rating if moved to do so. I'm sure this will stick with me. A half-star off since it was a bit of a slog midway before the second half when the aftermath of the father's death started up -- but I also had trouble finding time to sit down for consistent stretches, plus it's too cold and windy to walk and read at lunch or to/fro work. One thing of note: when I did walk around at lunch and read this, it was fun to think that a few folks might have thought I was reading a fancy new translation of "Mein Kampf." That suggestion/juxtaposition is pretty audacious/rad since it adds heft to the minor details throughout -- reminds me a little of the early Kiefer photos (late '60s) of the artist giving the Heil Hitler while standing in a bathtub filled with toy boats, in front of the ocean, or alone in a field? The author's struggle is artistic, emotional, personal if not solitary (ie, familial), literally and figuratively cleaning the mess others have made in life, dealing with the memory of his father now that the narrator himself is a father of three. Not a depressing book since it's filled with life, even if it's mostly about death. Minimal talk of fjords, too, although the word definitely appears.

(If interested, here are my reviews of Books Two, Three, Four, and Five.) ...more

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Jan 06, 2014 Trish rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: fiction, scandinavian, adolescence, favorite, art, literature, nonfiction, totally-unexpected, memoir

I hadn’t really thought to read this despite it being “the” book of 2012, but I read the article he wrote for the March 1, 2015 NYT Sunday magazine, Part I(!) It was the funniest thing I’d ever read. Here is an author whose linked novel/memoirs has taken the literary world by storm and he is showing his utter unpreparedness for that world and the interactions it requires. I wanted to see if that tongue-in-cheek droll self-awareness was his constant subject.

As it turns out, his six-volume memoir I hadn’t really thought to read this despite it being “the” book of 2012, but I read the article he wrote for the March 1, 2015 NYT Sunday magazine, Part I(!) It was the funniest thing I’d ever read. Here is an author whose linked novel/memoirs has taken the literary world by storm and he is showing his utter unpreparedness for that world and the interactions it requires. I wanted to see if that tongue-in-cheek droll self-awareness was his constant subject.

As it turns out, his six-volume memoir cum fiction is much more than that. It has a vibrancy, truth-telling honesty, and relevance far beyond anything I expected. And the writing…well, the writing was involving and exacting…and addictive. For a man who doesn’t like to talk to strangers, he does an awful lot of talking to strangers.

My Struggle Volume I begins with a discussion about death and how the dead have been removed from our purview, we lucky ones in the Western world who do not experience street conflict. This is precisely the thing I have been mulling over lately, so he drew me in with his talk of death rather than put me off. Without even a pause or a section break from our dip into death’s icy waters in the first pages, Knausgaard relates a news event in his childhood he watched on television, in which some newscasters showed the waters of a fjord, explaining that some Nordic fishermen were lost on a ship that sunk without a trace. His parents had laughed at his eight-years-old imagination that he had seen a face in the waves on the newscaster’s film shot. He returns to that humiliation again and again as he grows older, for the sense of having seen something and the shame of having been laughed at never leave him.

There is a circular momentum to his narrative (a circling-the-drain quality, all facetiousness aside), for he returns to the death of his father in the second half of Volume One. But first we learn his age (39 years), and learn of his marriage, his children, his attempt to create something important, circling back to begin at the beginning, his birth and childhood. Knausgaard as a teen is not to be missed. The second half of the book is consumed with his father’s death, which occurred just before he turned thirty. When viewing his father's corpse he writes: "The idea that I could scrutinize this face unhindered for the first time was almost unbearable." Unhindered? What a remarkable thing to say. But, he goes on to say, "I was no longer looking at a person but something that resembled a person." His father, with all his personality, strengths and failures, was gone.

The very ordinariness of his days, and of his detail about those days makes the novel/memoir something extraordinary. Knausgaard says in a Paris Review interview that he was trying to get the detail "as close to life as possible," so we shouldn’t feel surprised to experience a palpable peristalsis of boredom followed by intense interest and inescapable need. The interminable house cleaning and grass mowing…we feel those details in our exhaustion, repugnance, and need to escape. The accretion of detail, the structure, the language…all of it add up to something impossible to put down and impossible to forget.

"But as anyone with the least knowledge of literature and writing—maybe art in general—will know, concealing what is shameful to you will never lead to anything of value."--Paris Review interview

Karl Ove, the narrator, shows us how he is his father’s son. He claimed to hate his father, but he loved him, too, and was more like him in his reserve than he dares mention. But we see it. We don’t get a clear or complete picture of his father--his father as son, his father as husband, as teacher, as neighbor--but the moments of his tenderness and of his decline flash from the book like beacons.

"But still, there is much more to a relationship than what you can say. You just take one more step back into yourself. I’ve never understood psychoanalysis. Mentioning things doesn’t change anything, doesn’t help anything, it’s just words. There is something much more deep and profound to a relationship than that. Revealing stories and quarrels—that’s just words. Love, that’s something else."--Paris Review interview

Observing Knausgaard’s intense reluctance to self-reveal in ordinary day-to-day interactions and conversation, one has to ask why Knausgaard wrote a book like this. The answer comes in a thousand ways, but it revolves around the breaking of accepted patterns, of standing outside so as to observe and understand more deeply, of the spaces between things, like language…what it doesn’t describe, what it can’t catch. He seeks to make an experience, rather than just describe one. "Writing is more about destroying than creating." Well, he’s done something provocative here, and it is absolutely an experience reading this book.
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Sep 26, 2014 Stephen P(who no longer can participate due to illness) rated it really liked it

Recommended to Stephen by: Lee

Past the delicatessen I stopped at the shop window surrounded by the mob. Shouldering and pushing I made my way near the front. Standing near someone wearing too much perfume and someone not enough I located myself close by to see the desk, red writing blotter, the mirror attached across from him and the stack of books on the far side by the crook of his elbow. A store employee arrived with a clean glass ashtray. A cigarette dangled from the writers stained lips, yellowed teeth. Fingertips also ...more

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Jun 13, 2016 Malia rated it liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: non-fiction

Original review seems to have vanished...

"My Struggle" is Karl Ove Knausgard's first book in the ambitious six part series, and one I had been hearing so much about in recent months that I finally decided to give it a try. As the title might suggest, this is not a comedy, so if you are struggling through a gray, bleak winter, stay well away!

Knausgaard is kind of like sharp cheese. At first you think you hate it, but then it's actually not bad at all. The first half of the book, he came across as Original review seems to have vanished...

"My Struggle" is Karl Ove Knausgard's first book in the ambitious six part series, and one I had been hearing so much about in recent months that I finally decided to give it a try. As the title might suggest, this is not a comedy, so if you are struggling through a gray, bleak winter, stay well away!

Knausgaard is kind of like sharp cheese. At first you think you hate it, but then it's actually not bad at all. The first half of the book, he came across as arrogant and, keeping in mind that a man who isn't even fifty is writing six books about himself, very self-indulgent. Nonetheless, even mildly irritated as I was, I had to admit that there was something about his style that made this book compulsively readable. About two thirds of the way through, something happens, "the big event" in Knausgaard's life and his voice softens. His mind turns to others and his vulnerability even as a grown, relatively successful man is exposed. It is this last third that makes me want to keep going with Knausgaard's books, though their length and number is a little daunting. Sometimes his recording of all the minutiae of his daily life and the airing of all his frustrations is a little annoying, and the setting reads like a gray-washed Scandinavian crime drama, but I suppose this is his attempt to provide an honest and transparent account of his inner and outer world. Undeniably he is a good writer, and his observations, though sometimes tediously conveyed, are often astute gems of human insight, which elevate this book from an autobiography, to a text that possesses philosophical musings and reads like a well-polished novel.

Something that initially irritated me was the title, "My Struggle" is, of course, "Mein Kampf" in German. Being German, I couldn't understand why anyone would chose to give their book such a name, but reading My Struggle, it becomes clear that he in no way associates his very personal story with Hitler's disgusting book.
When you read Knausgaard's story, the title does seem very apt, because he really highlights and dissects all the areas in his life that are rife with struggles.

Though I think I'll read something slightly lighter next, I will definitely return for Book Two.

Find more reviews and bookish fun at http://www.princessandpen.com ...more

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May 19, 2016 Kevin Kelsey rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: read-2016, read-it-again

Posted at Heradas Review

Memoirs are fascinating to me, because we know how truly fallible memory is. It is demonstrably unreliable. It’s completely insane that eyewitnesses and line-ups are such a fundamental part of our criminal justice system. But the cool thing about memoirs is that it really doesn’t matter if it’s a legitimate telling of events or not. I think that David Shields said it best in his book Reality Hunger: A Manifesto: “Memoir is a genre in need of an informed readership. It’s a Posted at Heradas Review

Memoirs are fascinating to me, because we know how truly fallible memory is. It is demonstrably unreliable. It’s completely insane that eyewitnesses and line-ups are such a fundamental part of our criminal justice system. But the cool thing about memoirs is that it really doesn’t matter if it’s a legitimate telling of events or not. I think that David Shields said it best in his book Reality Hunger: A Manifesto: “Memoir is a genre in need of an informed readership. It’s a misunderstanding to read a memoir as though the writer owes the reader the same record of literal accuracy that is owed in newspaper reporting. Memoirs belong to the category of literature, not journalism. What the memoirist owes the reader is the ability to persuade him or her that the narrator is trying, as honestly as possible, to get to the bottom of the experience at hand.”

This is literature, it’s a story, it has characters, etc but for Knausgård it’s all about form: "For several years I had tried to write about my father, but had gotten nowhere, probably because the subject was too close to my life, and thus not so easy to force into another form, which of course is a prerequisite for literature. That is its sole law: everything has to submit to form. If any of literature's other elements are stronger than form, such as style, plot, theme, if any of these overtake form, the result suffers. That is why writers with a strong style often write bad books. That is also why writers with strong themes so often write bad books. Strong themes and styles have to be broken down before literature can come into being. It is this breaking down that is called 'writing.' Writing is more about destroying than creating."

The characters have the same names as real people, and the story is based around Knausgård’s recollection of events, however accurate/inaccurate they may be, but these events, and this story was broken down and rebuilt to serve the form of literature. And it is really, really good stuff. It took about 20-30 pages until the prose clicked for me, and then it became difficult to put down. I found myself coming back to it again and again, "Oh, I'll just read another page or two while I'm waiting for such-and-such."

I think it's something to do with the method that Knausgård uses to jump around in his story. He'll write toward an event, we know what the event is, we know that it's important. And then the Karl Ove 'character' in the story will think back to something, and we're instantly back with him, experiencing a different event. We eventually forget that we're in the past-past, and that's right when he goes back to just before that event that's coming up. The story progresses with some forward trajectory, but skips right over the event, to 20 years later, and he describes the room in which he's sitting writing his second novel. Its marvelous.

The story itself is simple, brutally honest, and relatable. It's also very foreign for me, having known very little about life in Norway until this small glimpse has expanded my knowledge slightly. It's the first thing I've read that I would count as both literature, and a comfortable, easy read. ...more

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May 14, 2012 Declan rated it did not like it · review of another edition

Difficult - no, impossible - when beginning a book like this to ignore the adulation the book has received and not accumulate some sense of expectation; to anticipate a worthwhile return for your reading time when the author has been described as the Proust of our age and critics breathlessly annunciate their drug-like dependence on the authors prose and implore us to join them in appreciating "a memoir that burns with the heat of life", one which is "close to a work of genius" . Given all that, Difficult - no, impossible - when beginning a book like this to ignore the adulation the book has received and not accumulate some sense of expectation; to anticipate a worthwhile return for your reading time when the author has been described as the Proust of our age and critics breathlessly annunciate their drug-like dependence on the authors prose and implore us to join them in appreciating "a memoir that burns with the heat of life", one which is "close to a work of genius" . Given all that, you could be forgiven for expecting that the book would, at the most basic and undemanding level, be a good read.

It doesn't take terribly long for doubts to filter into the mind, especially when one begins to notice an element of the narrative which will appear in various forms throughout the book: the lengthy and detailed description of some person or event which you begin to think must be of some significance, given the space being devoted to it, only to find that the subject is entirely incidental, like the jabbering of someone in your company whose nervousness is demonstrated by the need to fill every potentially silent moment with their own pointless observations. All of this would be more bearable if Knausgaard possessed any exceptional skill as a writer or a talent for original insights. Some element of style might transform the tedium into compelling prose. Instead we are stuck with writing that is (in, one presumes, a faithful translation) at best competent, or one might say, writing that matches the level of ennui that most of the subject-matter induces.

Only when the narrator's father dies does the book become briefly interesting (I almost said it comes to life). We are given descriptions of the circumstances in which the man and his mother lived which have a fascination that is at once repulsive and absorbing. But even here the effect is diminished by needless rambling, unimaginative descriptions and -something which is a feature of the entire book - a complete lack of humour. For when is humour more needed that at a time if death?

I have no idea why this book has been so adored and praised by critics and readers. But then I feel the same way about the film 'Boyhood' which was lauded and won prizes, but which I thought was lacking in any visual flair and whose clever construction masked a basic lack of soul or nerve. It bears a lot of similarities with the Knausgaard book, if not in specifics then certainly in the way that both are praised for their honest representation of truth. But the representation of truth does not necessarily exist in describing, or showing, someone walking along a street, with due attention to their clothes and the buildings and sky behind them. To understand the quiddity of that reality we need to have the experience reimagined for us so that we can be inside that scene and experience it as a transcendent moment, a moment of "enstrangement". That is why a book like Mircea Cărtărescu's Nostalgia is a book I adore and which seemed more real to me as I read it than any moment of Knausgaard's redundant demonstrations of "honesty". ...more

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Nov 30, 2017 Chris_P rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: non-fiction

Karl Ove Knausgård - A Death in the Family (My Struggle #1)

The only reason I could actually put it down and didn't finish it earlier was because my free time was limited over the last few days. A fact which raises a certain little question: who the fuck are you, Karl Ove Knausgård, and how on earth did you make me give a damn about the tiny little details that your past consists of?

Knausgård can write. He would captivate you even if he wrote about washing the dishes or picking the right fish at ...more

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Oct 04, 2012 Bill rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: 2013, lit-fiction, fiction, library-book

this book is purportedly fiction, as evidenced by the fact that it won several european prizes for fiction. however, it seems like pretty much straight autobiography to me.

i mean the main character has the author's name, he was born in norway and moved to sweden, as did the author. he has a wife and three children, as does the author. at one point in the book, he describes the picture on the cover of his first novel, which was designed by his brother, so i checked and sure enough it really is th ...more

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Oct 29, 2014 Jessica rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: leetle-boys, substance-related-disorders

I spent a lot of time, especially at the beginning of this, wondering about why I personally swear to hate memoir, but then go ahead and fall in love with these autobiographical novels. I worry there's something vaguely misogynistic about this, since I tend (rightly or wrongly) to think of memoirists as mostly female and navel-gazey novelists as mostly male... And isn't the difference mostly just one of packaging? Maybe, maybe not. I think I take the point of a memoir to be a memoirist's persona ...more

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Jun 28, 2013 Ken rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: contemporary, finished-in-2013

It is said that this book is a modern rendition of Proust's Remembrances, making me an untrustworthy narrator for this review as I've never read the French giant's magnum opus of life's minutiae. Yes, I have Lydia Davis's new translation of Proust, but no, I haven't mustered the courage -- yet. Reading Knaussgard's book won't help. Rather than inspire me to read Proust, it inspires me to read My Struggle: Book 2: A Man in Love, just released. Such is life.

If plot's the thing, this 440-pager is p It is said that this book is a modern rendition of Proust's Remembrances, making me an untrustworthy narrator for this review as I've never read the French giant's magnum opus of life's minutiae. Yes, I have Lydia Davis's new translation of Proust, but no, I haven't mustered the courage -- yet. Reading Knaussgard's book won't help. Rather than inspire me to read Proust, it inspires me to read My Struggle: Book 2: A Man in Love, just released. Such is life.

If plot's the thing, this 440-pager is probably not your best choice. Knausgard is one of those characterization writers who gives every detail of every action. He's more into "exploding the moment," as they say in writing class, than "shrinking a century."

The book shares traits with Petterson's Out Stealing Horses: a strong father-son theme, a strong coming-of-age theme, a distinct 70s flavor, and, what I like, a heavy dose of sensitivity and just noticing things. Like death. Our young protagonist is rather obsessed with it, and the book opens with a worthy "essay" on the subject (you will find others along the way as you read).

Death, Knausgard notes, is just a concept -- one we are happy to discuss and expose ourselves to in reading or movie-viewing -- but make it REAL (that is, find a dead body on your front lawn or consider your own mortality when something goes wrong with your ticker) and it's a whole other matter. We are all fascinated with death -- our own -- and when we run into the real thing with, say, members of our family, we as a society like to keep it hidden, out of sight. In a word: Eew.

Very modern of us, isn't it? I don't think it was always so. Dead bodies used to become part of the living room furniture for wakes and such once upon a time. And people died in their own homes, as a rule, or out of doors, wherever the Reaper took his harvest. Not much different from road kill, I guess. And certainly no nonsense such as dying in hospitals and special homes for the dying (read: hospices). That would come with capitalism. Death as economic driver. Back then it was just a case of "death happens -- to squirrels and people. Let's move on."

In any event, Knausgard has clearly given it a lot of thought, and you may enjoy his thoughts, too, because I happen to know that you have given mortality some meditation yourself. No one casts a spell like the Grim One.

But really, there's a lot of joyfully dumb adolescence to this first of a projected 6-book series, too. Young Karl Ove is finding his way -- with friends, with girls, with alcohol, with rock n roll, with books, with his own soul. He's the kind of sensitive loner most of us bookish, introspective introverts can identify with. Thus, the attention the book has drawn. Thus, the fact that I discovered it via the New York Times ravings.

Is it THAT good? A classic to be? Please. But it's a great way to spend a slice of summer, I'll tell you, and after breaking for a few must-reviews of ARC's, I'll be back to Book Two to take in Karl Ove's further adventures in Scandinavia (land that I love -- I can write that, right? It's the FIFTH of July and all patriotic obligations have expired).

Recommended to fans of meandering, philosophical coming-of-age tomes -- and Norway. I know you're out there.... ...more

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Dec 27, 2014 Barry Pierce rated it liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: 21st-century, read-in-2014

The hype around these books is immense. I’ve been meaning to start them for months but now I’ve started and ugh I’d already ordered the second one while I was half-way through this one. I really liked this. Knausgaard is an insufferable, narcissistic arsehole and I love every fibre of his being. This book covers some of his teenage years and the death of his father. His prose is just fantastic and poetic and ugh you just want to bathe in it. I know already that I’m gonna love this series, I cann ...more

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21st Century Lite...: Min Kamp 1 - General Discussion (May 2016)	35	96	Sep 16, 2016 08:02AM
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On Paths Unknown: Selfie Lit	11	35	Oct 20, 2015 10:04AM

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About Karl Ove Knausgård

Karl Ove Knausgård

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Nominated to the 2004 Nordic Council’s Literature Prize & awarded the 2004 Norwegian Critics’ Prize.

Karl Ove Knausgård (b. 1968) made his literary debut in 1998 with the widely acclaimed novel Out of the World, which was a great critical and commercial success and won him, as the first debut novel ever, The Norwegian Critics' Prize. He then went on to write six autobiographical novels, titled My S ...more

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