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 Book One, Knausgaard received the Brage Award in 2009, the 2010 Book of the Year Prize in Morgenbladet, and the P2 Listeners’ Prize. My Struggle has been translated into more than fifteen languages. Knausgaard lives in Sweden with his wife and three children.
FINALIST - THE INDEPENDENT FOREIGN FICTION PRIZE
A 2013 Wall Street Journal Best Book of the Year
"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
"Knausgaard doesn't always present himself as father-of-the-year
material, sweating how much time he'll have to research and write
his second novel and squabbling with his family and fussy neighbors
in the search for some peace and quiet. . . But his candor, if not
his attitude, is admirable—he's not rationalizing his behavior but
flatly, honestly representing it. A patient exploration of
courtship and fatherhood stripped clean of
politesse." — Kirkus Reviews (Starred Review)
"...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
"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
"Knausgaard has written one of those books so aesthetically
forceful as to be revolutionary ... The digressiveness of Sebald or
Proust is transposed into direct, unmetaphorical language, pushing
the novel almost to the edge of unreadability, where it turns out
to be addicting and hypnotic. A man has written a book in which a
man stays at home with his kids, and his home life isn’t
trivialized or diminished but studied and appreciated, resisted and
embraced. An almost Christian feeling of spiritual urgency makes
even the slowest pages about squeezing lemon on a lobster into a
hymn about trying to be good." --The Paris Review
"Why would you read a six-volume, 3,600-page Norwegian novel about
a man writing a six-volume, 3,600-page Norwegian novel? The short
answer is that it is breathtakingly good, and so you cannot stop
yourself, and would not want to ... Arrestingly beautiful."
—The New York Times Book Review
"I read both books [One and Two] hungrily and find myself already
missing Knausgaard just a few days after turning A Man in
Love’s last page, searching the Web for inexpensive crash
courses in Norwegian, mostly just wishing Volume Three were
available in English now." —Jonathan Callahan, The
Millions
"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
"His work ranks as one of the most memorable reading experiences of
my life. There has been, for me, nothing quite like it. Karl Ove
makes me see better. I have not wanted his books to end because I
have not wanted to unmerge with him. He writes of longing to be
back in 'the maniacal, the lonely, the happy place' he achieved
while writing. In my own maniacal, lonely happiness, away from the
world for a time, away from the human pull, I found comfort in
knowing that, despite his deep craving for distance and work,
Knausgaard remains loyal to the human world, to being open to what
it offers." — Nina MacLaughlin, L.A. Review of Books
"[T]he book sears the reader because Knausgaard is a passionate
idealist and not just a tetchy complainer. He wants to create great
art, and he wants to fight the conformity and homogeneity of modern
bourgeois existence." —James Wood, The New Yorker
"While not unconcerned with finding objective truth in the moments
he recounts, Mr. Knausgaard aims first to simply record them, to
try to shape the banal into something worth remembering.
Beautifully rendered and, at times, painfully observant, his book
does a superlative job of finding that 'inner core of human
existence.' If his first volume was his struggle to cope with
death, this is his struggle to cope with
life."
— The Wall Street Journal
"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
"That something subtitled “Book 2” might be called the most
interesting literary development of the year surprises me; also
surprising to me is that something I feel comfortable terming “the
most interesting literary development” includes a long section
detailing the narrator’s attendance at “Rhythm Time,” a music class
for infants. But Book 2 (of six) of the Norwegian writer Karl Ove
Knausgaard’s 3,600-page autobiographical novel of family life, “My
Struggle,” reveals that the tome grows only more substantive,
comical and artistically singular as it
proceeds." — Rivka Galchen, New York Times Book
Review
"A masterpiece of staggering originality, the literary event
of the century ... Life here and now, examined at a fever pitch,
daily recollections recounted in exhausting but exhilarating
detail." — Arlice Davenport, Wichita Eagle
"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
"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)
"Karl Ove Knausgaard continues to astound, with this second volume
concentrating on his marriage and his art. Sometimes it’s marriage
versus art, and that friction gives this book a terrific range of
emotions. Conversations with his friends provide a good view into
the different ways Norwegians and Swedes go about life. Is it
fiction? Memoir? No one could remember verbatim the conversations
recounted at length here, and that, too, is as fine a balancing act
as Knausgaard’s depiction of himself as writer and
father/husband." — Jeff Bursey, in Conversational
Reading
"Quite simply this is one of the best novels ever written." — Tyler
Cowen, professor of economics at George Mason University and
co-author of the Marginal Revolution blog, in Bloomberg
"The way in which Knausgaard seeks to expose the dark, regressive
aspects of his own character within the context of a life that is,
in most respects, quite ordinary is precisely what allows these
books to transcend their narrowly personal foundations."— Sydney
Review of Books
"Volumes 1 and 2 of Karl Ove Knausgård's epic novel/memoir My
Struggle (Harvill Secker) blew me away: totally immersive,
collapsing the wall between author and reader as you live his life
alongside him. It's somehow triumphant and redemptive – and
powerfully addictive – even as it recounts the most apparently
mundane aspects of life. He's a genius." — Simon Prosser,
Publisher, Hamish Hamilton, in The Guardian
"Second in a six-volume magnum opus that Archipelago has bravely
committed to bring us, this magisterial work gives us a character
named Karl Ove Knausgaard who abandons his wife, moves to
Stockholm, and discovers new love—and the travails of starting a
new family." — Library Journal (Best Fiction in
Translation 2013)
"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
"...The structure of Vol 2 is intricate and fascinating
... Knausgaard strings out for the length of the entire volume
this utterly hilarious and tabloid-level fascinating story ... the
sort of an anecdote that Knausgaard tells like nobody else can.
(Oh, and on that subject, the section where Knausgaard’s wife gives
birth to their first child is simply AMAZING; it is long and
drawn out and excruciating and simply shows realist writing at its
very, very best. I think I almost fainted.)" — Scott Esposito,
Three Percent
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