Karl Ove Knausgaard was born in Norway in 1968. His debut novel Out of This World won the Norwegian Critics Prize in 2004 and his A Time for Everything (Archipelago) was a finalist for the Nordic Council Prize. For My Struggle, Knausgaard received the Brage Award in 2009 (for Book One), the 2010 Book of the Year Prize in Morgenbladet, and the P2 Listeners' Prize. It is also a finalist for The Believer Fiction Prize. My Struggle has been translated into more than fifiteen languages. Knausgaard lives in Sweden with his wife and three children. The author lives in Sweden.
A New York Times Notable Book of the Year
FINALIST - THE IMPAC DUBLIN LITERARY AWARD
"Halfway through, this (six-volume) series is starting to look like
an early-21st-century masterpiece." -- Kirkus Reviews (starred
review)
“My Struggle is a truly original and enduring and great work of
literature." -- The New York Times Book Review
"2014 was the Year of Knausgaard . . . the six-book memoir
phenomenon My Struggle [is] . . . a page-turner that
keeps readers turning pages, and talking about why they find
Knausgaard so irresistible." -- Vanity Fair (11 Best Books of
2014)
"I fell into the first two books of My Struggle as if I
were falling into a malarial fever. I did little else for four days
except devour them, leaving email unanswered, dogs unwalked, dishes
piling up in the sink. The steady headlamps of his prose stun and
mesmerize you, as if you were a lumbering mammal caught in the
middle of a highway . . . [Knausgaard] is contemporary fiction’s
alchemist of the ordinary. . . . This writer is constructing a
towering edifice, in what feels like real time. Few artistic
projects of our era feel more worth attending to." -- Dwight
Garner, The New York Times
"Knausgaard’s somewhat autobiographical novels are mesmerizing; he
is contemporary fiction’s alchemist of the ordinary. He manages,
seemingly without effort, to make the minutia of one man’s life as
involving and gravity-laden as another writer’s account of the
assassination of Osama Bin Laden.” -- The New York
Times Holiday Gift Guide in recommending all three currently
available hardcover volumes of My Struggle
"And then there is the beauty of Book Three itself. In
the earlier volumes, Knausgaard’s insistence that we witness all
the steps the narrator takes to cook his dinner, from turning on
the oven to forking the finished product onto his plate, sometimes
seemed an irritating exercise in literary estrangement. But the
young Karl Ove’s attention to his dinner is in perfect keeping with
the child’s perspective, in which details of such daily events are
a real source of interest and the focus of attention. It’s as
though we were finally let in on the secret referent of
Knausgaard’s style." — Elaine Blair, The New York Review of
Books
"No writer has emerged on the world stage to more acclaim in at
least a decade ... readers of every stripe, it seems,
are talking about Knausgaard." -- Evan Hughes, The New
Yorker
"He has managed to transform self-abasement into a kind of
grandeur, humiliation into a purified form of pride, and—above
all—fiction into the most painful mode of truth-telling." -- The
Daily Beast
"What's notable is Karl Ove's ability, rare these days, to be fully
present in and mindful of his own existence. Every detail is put
down without apparent vanity or decoration, as if the writing and
the living are happening simultaneously. There shouldn't be
anything remarkable about any of it except for the fact that it
immerses you totally. You live his life with him. . . . The
overweening absurdity of Ove's title is a bad joke that keeps
coming back to you as you try to construct a life worthy of an
adult. How to be more present, more mindful? Of ourselves, of
others? For others?" -- Zadie Smith, The New York Review of
Books
"The book investigates the bottomless accumulation of mysteries
everyday life imposes. . . Knausgaard's approach is plain and
scrupulous, sometimes casual, yet he never writes down. His subject
is the beauty and terror of the fact that all life coexists with
itself. A living hero who landed on greatness by abandoning every
typical literary feint, an emperor whose nakedness surpasses royal
finery." -- Jonathan Lethem, The Guardian
"[My Struggle is] a confessional outpouring that became a
sensation. . . You imagine yourself as Karl Ove because it’s
impossible to get inside anyone else’s head." -- Slate
"This segment of a genre-defying and unusual novel will leave
readers hungry for the following installments, and serves as a fine
entry point into the series." -- Publishers
Weekly (starred review)
"Notable for his meticulous attention to the quotidian details of
everyday life, Knausgaard’s pared-down style and plainspoken
narrator manage to propel these long books, concerned less
with sustaining plot than with the accumulation of tiny intensities
and candid disclosures, which makes for strangely engaging,
compulsively page-turning prose." -- Booklist
Online (starred review)
"For Knausgaard, who seems increasingly Wordsworthian as he writes
himself into his long memoir, childhood is the truth of life, the
source and heat of everything; to have to travel away from it, as
we all must do, is something akin to moving away from the sun.
Volume Three of “My Struggle” returns the reader to childhood
(specifically, to Knausgaard’s nineteen-seventies Norwegian
childhood): it immerses us in those now-distant pungencies
(cornflakes, being afraid of dad’s bad moods, running around freely
all day with friends, the feel of a cool new bag or some new
swimming trunks, the horrors and bliss of days at school) as if to
say to the reader: “See this, feel this, remember every single
second of it, so as to reclaim it as it disappears from your
grasp.”" -- James Wood, The New Yorker
"I was thrilled by the way Knausgaard dared to explore the
absolutely mundane, while also being unembarrassed about
considering the utterly transcendent. While the books are
often extremely funny, they are also an exemplary argument for the
value of taking oneself, and one’s life, seriously, and I
could not be happier that there are still three more volumes to
go." -- Rebecca Mead, The New Yorker (Best Books of the Year)
"The narrative: Love, Anger, Guilt. Repeat. Predictably, as a
parent myself, I found His Struggle absorbing, delicate, clever,
cannily plotted." -- D.T. Max, The New Yorker (Best Books of
the Year)
"Both Knausgaard’s Proustian style and the fact that his work is
one long book stretched out into many volumes, just like In
Search of Lost Time, should signal that it’s a literary event the
likes of which we probably will not see again in our
lifetimes. . . . Unlike almost every other work of art
released in the 21st century, Knausgaard’s massive book is an
ongoing cultural event that we’re being afforded the opportunity to
savor." -- Jason Diamond, Flavorwire
"...reading My Struggle, you have the sense that Knausgaard has
made a wonderful discovery, an almost scientific innovation. My
Struggle is something new, something brave..." -- n + 1
"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, via Twitter
"Achieves an aching intimacy, one that transcends the personal and
makes Knausgaard’s pursuit of grand artistic ideals, his daily joys
and misgivings, strangely familiar." — Time Out New
York
"It would not be an exaggeration to say that Karl Ove Knausgaard’s
six-volume memoir “My Struggle” (Archipelago Books) — of which
three volumes have been translated into English — has catapulted
the Norwegian writer into the rarefied company of such authors as
James Joyce, Marcel Proust and Henry Miller. These writers burst
forth with a new consciousness and in so doing became the voice of
their generation. Years hence we will be talking about Knausgaard’s
incredibly detailed memoir cycle doing the same for the late 20th
century." — The Providence Journal
"A six-volume literary experiment in which a contemporary Norwegian
author describes his own life may sound dull. But Knausgaard's
literary experiment is both brutally honest and far from dull.
Trust me, it'll be worth waiting for volumes three through six to
appear in English translation." — Jo Nesbo, in The
Week (one of Jo Nesbo's six favorite books)
"MY STRUGGLE is a revolutionary novel that is highly approachable,
even thrilling to read. The book feels like a masterpiece––one of
those genuinely surprising works that alters the tradition it
inherited." — Bookforum
" Knausgaard's cycle...is poised to become a true global
sensation
...there is an utterly unique genius to the books." — The
Christian Science Monitor
"Boyhood, so little given to evaluation, assessment, or
argumentation, is instead a study of immersion. It is a pure-state
immersion: not immersion in something, not a
study of something, but immersion per se. With a nod to
Roland Barthes’s dream of a language returned to its simplest,
Adamic roots, we might call this immersion degree zero, a similarly
paradisiacal (or childlike) fantasy. It is the function of the
novel as a genre stripped to its barest essential. Little
in Boyhood is allowed to get in the way of that goal. Not
the prose, which in Don Bartlett’s translation is as swift and
unornamented and unmannered as possible, as if aiming for pure
continuation and sequence, as if driven by an almost childlike
desire to keep moving to the next thing. Not the narrative rhythm,
in which the sheer mass of a few random childhood days exerts a
gravitational pull that distends and stretches into a time almost
equivalent to the time of reading itself...Glistening surfaces,
constantly in the act of opening up—and always, as a result,
transfixing." - Nicholas Dames, Public Books
“My Struggle is a book so private it feels like a sanctuary. . .
[Knausgaard is] the great chronicler of the modern condition."
— Ian Brown, The Globe and Mail
“One of the most anticipated books of the year (or the decade).” —
Financial Times (UK)
"[Knausgaard is] one of the most remarkable authors who have
emerged in recent years … he is in the process of becoming a global
superstar." — The Economist (UK)
"Via his visceral, immersive art, Knausgaard makes the heart
visible as he conjures 'the intensity that only exists in
childhood'."— The Independent (UK)
"A compelling memoir of times we cannot know." — The London
Evening Standard
"an immediacy as astonishing as that of its two predecessors.
. . . In Don Bartlett’s lively vernacular translation, My
Struggle will, I am convinced, outlive the furore, welcoming
or hostile, of its first appearance." — Paul Binding, The Spectator
(UK)
“extreme artlessness creates a far more intense realism than we
might have thought possible, a confessional novel that outdoes most
confessions.” — Times Literary Supplement (UK)
"...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
"It would be wrong to suggest that Karl Ove is just an
Everyman-plus-shading, and that Knausgaard has simply lucked out.
Historical factors may account for why My Struggle has
become a “phenomenon” but they can neither explain nor dilute the
novels’ richness. Yes, Knausgaard appeals to the modern appetite
for warty portraiture and off-page bust-ups and has chronicled
middle-class Norwegian life during the country’s “exceptionalist”
phase. To a loud anglophone minority, he constitutes a thrillingly
boring alternative to boringly diverting invention. But he also
displays a tremendous and irreducible zeal for penetrating what
Karl Ove, reeling after a date with Linda, calls “the inner core of
human existence” – an effort that brings fame to some but not
others, and in which he has no obvious superiors among the writers
now available to an English-reading public." — The New
Statesman
"MY STRUGGLE is a revolutionary novel that is highly approachable,
even thrilling to read. The book feels like a masterpiece––one of
those genuinely surprising works that alters the tradition it
inherited. . . . What makes MY STRUGGLE so hypnotizing––a word
more than one reviewer has used to describe it––is in part the
pleasurable surprise of seeing habits of mind (your apathy at a
dinner party, or envy of a friend's tracksuit, or momentary
frustration with your partner) that normally go unrecorded put down
in exhaustive detail. But it's also the interplay between those
lengthy, hyperrealistic scenes of everyday experience and what are
in effect meditative essays." — Meghan O'Rourke, Bookforum
"Though a boyhood so honestly rendered cannot claim the title of
'innocence,' it can be termed wondrous." — AskMen
"When Knaugaard writes about culture and art, his observations are
transcendent; not only has he fully digested what he has seen and
read, his references fit seamlessly. . . This is
quintessential Knausgaard: a complexity of ideas generated out of
true observation. . . relentless, fascinating and unflagging
self-scrutiny." —The Rumpus
"While many are busy bemoaning the death of bookshops and
literature, Knausgaard is a surprising, relieving phenomenon
that is sweeping the world. . . [he is] undoubtedly the
literary star of the moment." — Outlook India
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