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.
Don Bartlett has translated dozens of books of various genres,
including eight novels and short story collections by Jo Nesbø and
It's Fine by Me by Per Petterson. He lives in Norfolk, England.
A New York Times Bestseller
“My Struggle: Book Four is an elegiac kind of comic novel, and it
is pure Karl Ove Knausgaard. This is to say, it comprises intimate
descriptions of daily life, descriptions that build to something
improbably greater than the sum of their parts." — Dwight Garner in
The New York Times
"The sheer accumulation of minutiae becomes hypnotic. Many times
I’ve thought to myself: It’s getting late, I’ll stop reading now.
But an hour on, I’m still turning the pages. My
Struggle is addictive, whether the narrator is frying onions,
engaging in drinking bouts that end in a fetal position on the
bathroom floor, or meditating on evil." — The Wall Street
Journal
"Knausgaard is not a 'difficult' writer like Proust, Joyce or David
Foster Wallace. He's pointedly unliterary. Anyone can understand
what he's writing. And, paradoxically enough, his honest, obsessive
self-absorption makes his life feel universal. As I was reading,
every single subject that came up in my daily living —
parents, politics, education, Italian food, trees, even David Byrne
— reminded me of something in Knausgaard. His work makes you
realize that each and every one of our lives contains rich enough
material for a long, daunting book called My Struggle."
— John Powers, Fresh Air
"Knausgaard’s brooding Scandinavian obsessiveness has a way of
getting under a reader’s skin, not because his life is so exciting
and eventful — it isn’t — but because it’s so familiar. He writes a
clear prose that transforms ordinary events, detailing the span of
his life with such directness that everything seems to be happening
in real time." — Washington Post
"I just finished the newest volume of My Struggle, the fourth
of six, and it was marvelous, transporting. The whole sequence is
maddening at times, yes, but also, beyond any question, something
special and important... He does recapture the world, somehow;
that's the thing, and it gives these strange, boring, hypnotic,
luminous books almost a religious feeling, something like
immanence. It's astonishing. If you haven't already, read them
now." — Charles Finch, Chicago Tribune
"Book Four is the swiftest, most neatly arced of the books
thus far... Not since Jack Kerouac’s “Big Sur” has a novelist
depicted the terrors and highs of oblivion so well." — John
Freeman, The Boston Globe
"My Struggle is engrossing almost in spite of itself: built on
smoothly layered, quotidian details, Knausgaard’s storytelling has
an undeniable forward thrust that encourages the reader to
compulsively explore the writer’s inner consciousness. .
. Book 4 is among the funniest of the volumes thus far
published in English, in part because it captures the jumbled,
absurd mind of the late adolescent man—pretentious, preening,
sex-obsessed, fixated on maturity but not quite in possession of
it." — Mark Athitakis, Kirkus Reviews
"Two thirds of the way into Knausgaard’s mundane, transcendent
six-book series on his (slightly fictionalized) life comes a
portrait of the artist as a late adolescent — defiantly skipping
college to teach and write, without much success; dealing, often
face-to-face, with the legacy of his father’s violence and
alcoholism while threatening to repeat his mistakes. With more
drama and narrative arc than the first three books, it’s a good
entry point for the uninitiated. For devotees, it’s another
beautiful jigsaw piece in Knausgaard’s great work and ordinary
life." — Boris Kachka at Vulture.com
"...Knausgaard's command of the traditional novelistic procedure is
the reason these books are the opposite of dull, though on the face
of it they should be. Knausgaard is always spinning a tale, always
drawing the reader along with some romantic entanglement, sexual
disaster, or emotional crisis. He feeds in atmosphere in just the
right amounts; his pacing is flawless. How wonderful to read
an experimental novel that fires every nerve ending while summoning
in the reader the sheer sense of how amazing it is to be alive, on
this planet and no other." — New York Times Book Review
"Begun when he was 39, feeling intimations of mortality and a
crushing desire to “write something exceptional one day,” My
Struggle is a colossus, a Proustian megabook of memory and
family life; a poetic recall of the textures and terrors of
childhood and boyhood; an unsparing glimpse into the mind of a man
on the other side of that magical period in life, raising his own
children; an exorcism of a terrifying and controlling
father." — Literary Hub
"Its repetitions have a darkly comic energy that is unique
to Book Four... The narrator’s
companionable intelligence is one of the great pleasures
of My Struggle. Yet almost none of that intelligence is
gathered into concentrated thought... The result is a book that
doesn’t think in the way that we expect novels to. You
wait for some sort of deeper consideration of what’s happening, and
it may come but more likely it will not—the book, like the life,
keeps moving." — Elaine Blair, New York Review of Books
"With My Struggle, Knausgaard makes a bid — a huge, quixotic one —
to restore the possibility of awe, which stems less from the length
of the book or its focus on his life than in its colossal ambitions
for what a novel can achieve." — Los Angeles Review of Books
"The events Knausgaard relates gain a raw intensity from the fact
that the tale is told solely from the perspective of Karl Ove, and
this, combined with Knausgaard's flair for storytelling, makes
“Book Four” into the excellent composition that it is. . . He
uses the page to explore his transition from a record-hoarding
horny teenager to the great writer that he is today, and his
provocative writing will likely strike a resonant chord with many
who have in their own way struggled with growing up." — The Harvard
Crimson
"Given the size of the undertaking, the widespread critical acclaim
and cultural buzz the series has generated, it has strong
claim to be the great literary event of the 21st century. . .
[Knausgaard] 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. . . [In Book Four] he
documents his prolonged and calamitous attempts to dispose of his
virginity during his late teenage years, a struggle sorely
undermined by a chronic condition of premature ejaculation.
It’s very funny but also excruciatingly exposing." — The
Guardian
"Of the four books in this series published in English thus far,
this one is the most rhetorically conventional: Knausgaard employs
humor, irony and melodrama in ways that he studiously avoided in
previous episodes. But he's done so not to pander but to criticize,
echoing the mindset of a sex-obsessed and callow young man still in
his teens and unshaped as a person and as a writer. And when the
story arrives at its climax (and you can likely guess what that
involves), Knausgaard uses the plainspokenness that defined his
previous books to powerfully evoke the depth of his obliviousness,
the hollowness of his triumph. An entertaining portrait of the
artist as a young lout." — Kirkus Reviews (Starred Review)
"Unapologetically crude, this entry is the funniest and least
self-conscious in the series to date; there’s a humorous momentum
propelling the narrative as Karl Ove attempts to lose his
virginity." — Publishers Weekly"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
"Knausgaard perfectly captures the heady mixture of elation and
confusion to be found in late adolescence... My
Struggle remains addictive, intensely funny and intensely
serious. Like the young man here portrayed, it is 'full to the brim
with energy and life'." — The Times Literary Supplement
"Knausgaard is an advocate for writing the unsayable, for plumbing
the deepest recesses of human consciousness and experience. As
such, he’s relentless in airing his most honest, and therefore
often least admirable, self. I think it’s precisely this that
makes My Struggle such a generous, dealienating and
necessary endeavor." — Readings (Australia)
"[Book Four] is another substantial piece of the vast,
contradictory, intriguing, solipsistic puzzle that is My
Struggle . . . The aspect that . . . makes it genuinely
compelling . . . is its ambitious attempt to establish a connection
between Knausgaard’s commonplace experiences and the grand
philosophical and ideological currents of modernity, and in doing
so to arrive at some kind of intimate understanding of the violent
history that has been generated by those ideas." — Sydney Review of
Books
"With each volume of My Struggle that is published in English,
Knausgaard emerges more clearly, in all his human ambiguity. Volume
Four presents a portrait of the artist as a young man, marinated in
alcohol and sexual failure. It is awkward, painful, occasionally
shocking and often very funny, particularly if you have ever been
(or known) a teenage boy." — Hari Kunzru
"It is one of the most important artistic projects of our time." —
Flavorwire
"It's an utterly absorbing, possibly essential literary
experience in any language... Somewhere in that space between
ludicrous ambition and microscopic examination, the series spins
literary straw into odd, but beautiful, gold." — Doug
McLean, Winnipeg Free Press"My Struggle represents a
monumental undertaking and a significant aspect of the early
21st-century literary zeitgeist... Knausgaard forces us to confront
life on both a grand and intimate scale. If its only redeeming
quality is to encourage readers to focus a bit more carefully on
individual moments and form slightly better memories, then My
Struggle is worth its (considerable) weight." — Connor
Ferguson, Libretto
"Knausgaard’s work is an ongoing fight against impermanence... the
details accrete to make a thrilling and momentous record of one
person’s passage through time." — Catherine Holmes, The
Post and Courier
"Who are the artistic geniuses of today?... I’ve been thinking
about this lately — who might last and why — moved by immersion in
two wildly differing bodies of work. The first is the
much-discussed six-volume magnum opus 'My Struggle,' in which the
Norwegian writer Karl Ove Knausgaard slices the mundane details of
his life the way Paul Sorvino sliced garlic in 'Goodfellas' — into
translucent rounds of prose that melt in your head rather than your
mouth... Will people read Knausgaard in 100 years the way they
read Proust, a much more lyrical, consciously artful literary
narcissist? Impossible to say, but I’d bet on yes; the paradox of
'My Struggle' is that the mundane details are what make it
timeless. The sequence late in volume 1, in which the author cleans
out his dead alcoholic father’s house, goes on for dozens of pages,
way too long, yet in its length and fanatically recorded specifics
it illuminates all the coming to terms a child can have with a
parent. If people are willing to listen, I think the books may
continue to speak." — The Boston Globe
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