Description:

A New York Times bestseller, My Struggle: Book 1 introduces American readers to the audacious, addictive, and profoundly surprising international literary sensation that is the provocative and brilliant six-volume autobiographical novel by Karl Ove Knausgaard.

It has already been anointed a Proustian masterpiece and is the rare work of dazzling literary originality that is intensely, irresistibly readable. Unafraid of the big issues―death, love, art, fear―and yet committed to the intimate details of life as it is lived, My Struggle is an essential work of contemporary literature.

Review

“Powerfully alive . . . Knausgaard is intense and utterly honest, unafraid to voice universal anxieties . . . He wants us to inhabit the ordinariness of life, which is sometimes visionary, sometimes banal, and sometimes momentous, but all of it perforce ordinary because it happens in the course of a life, and happens, in different forms, to everyone . . . There is something ceaselessly compelling about Knausgaard's book.” ―James Wood, The New Yorker (selected as one of the Books of the Year)

“A fantastic novel . . . I cannot say anything other than that I am looking forward desperately to the rest of it.” ―Dagsavisen (Norway)

“Knausgaard's thinking is magnificently unbridled.” ―Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (germany)

“Between Proust and the woods . . . Like granite, precise and forceful. More real than reality.” ―La Repubblica (Italy)

“I can't stop, I want to stop, I can't stop, just one more page, then I will cook dinner, just one more page . . .” ―Västerbottens-kuriren (Sweden)

About the Author

Karl Ove Knausgaard was born in Norway in 1968. My Struggle has won countless international literary awards and has been translated into at least fifteen languages. Knausgaard lives in Sweden with his wife and four children.

Don Bartlett has translated dozens of books of various genres, including several novels and short story collections by Jo Nesbø and It's Fine by Me by Per Petterson. He lives in Norfolk, England.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

My Struggle: Book 1

Name: My Struggle: Book 1 (My Struggle, 1)
Brand: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
SKU: U0374534144
Price: 73.49 AED
Availability: InStock
Rating: 4.2 (7 reviews)

By Karl Ove Knausgaard, Don Bartlett

Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Excerpt

PART ONE

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 blood will begin to run toward the body’s lowest point, where it will collect in a small pool, visible from outside as a dark, soft patch on ever whitening skin, as the temperature sinks, the limbs stiffen and the intestines drain. These changes in the first hours occur so slowly and take place with such inexorability that there is something almost ritualistic about them, as though life capitulates according to specific rules, a kind of gentleman’s agreement to which the representatives of death also adhere, inasmuch as they always wait until life has retreated before they launch their invasion of the new landscape. By which point, however, the invasion is irrevocable. The enormous hordes of bacteria that begin to infiltrate the body’s innards cannot be halted. Had they but tried a few hours earlier, they would have met with immediate resistance; however everything around them is quiet now, as they delve deeper and deeper into the moist darkness. They advance on the Havers Channels, the Crypts of Lieberkühn, the Isles of Langerhans. They proceed to Bowman’s Capsule in the Renes, Clark’s Column in the Spinalis, the black substance in the Mesencephalon. And they arrive at the heart. As yet, it is intact, but deprived of the activity to which end its whole construction has been designed, there is something strangely desolate about it, like a production plant that workers have been forced to flee in haste, or so it appears, the stationary vehicles shining yellow against the darkness of the forest, the huts deserted, a line of fully loaded cable-buckets stretching up the hillside.
The moment life departs the body, it belongs to death. At one with lamps, suitcases, carpets, door handles, windows. Fields, marshes, streams, mountains, clouds, the sky. None of these is alien to us. We are constantly surrounded by objects and phenomena from the realm of death. Nonetheless, there are few things that arouse in us greater distaste than to a see a human being caught up in it, at least if we are to judge by the efforts we make to keep corpses out of sight. In larger hospitals they are not only hidden away in discrete, inaccessible rooms, even the pathways there are concealed, with their own elevators and basement corridors, and should you stumble upon one of them, the dead bodies being wheeled by are always covered. When they have to be transported from the hospital it is through a dedicated exit, into vehicles with tinted glass; in the church grounds there is a separate, windowless room for them; during the funeral ceremony they lie in closed coffins until they are lowered into the earth or cremated in the oven. It is hard to imagine what practical purpose this procedure might serve. The uncovered bodies could be wheeled along the hospital corridors, for example, and thence be transported in an ordinary taxi without this posing a particular risk to anyone. The elderly man who dies during a cinema performance might just as well remain in his seat until the film is over, and during the next two for that matter. The teacher who has a heart attack in the school playground does not necessarily have to be driven away immediately; no damage is done by leaving him where he is until the caretaker has time to attend to him, even though that might not be until sometime in the late afternoon or evening. What difference would it make if a bird were to alight on him and take a peck? Would what awaits him in the grave be any better just because it is hidden? As long as the dead are not in the way there is no need for any rush, they cannot die a second time. Cold snaps in the winter should be particularly propitious in such circumstances. The homeless who freeze to death on benches and in doorways, the suicidal who jump off high buildings and bridges, elderly women who fall down staircases, traffic victims trapped in wrecked cars, the young man who, in a drunken stupor, falls into the lake after a night on the town, the small girl who ends up under the wheel of a bus, why all this haste to remove them from the public eye? Decency? What could be more decent than to allow the girl’s mother and father to see her an hour or two later, lying in the snow at the site of the accident, in full view, her crushed head and the rest of her body, her blood-spattered hair and the spotless padded jacket? Visible to the whole world, no secrets, the way she was. But even this one hour in the snow is unthinkable. A town that does not keep its dead out of sight, that leaves people where they died, on highways and byways, in parks and parking lots, is not a town but a hell. The fact that this hell reflects our life experience in a more realistic and essentially truer way is of no consequence. We know this is how it is, but we do not want to face it. Hence the collective act of repression symbolized by the concealment of our dead.
What exactly it is that is being repressed, however, is not so easy to say. It cannot be death itself, for its presence in society is much too prominent. The number of deaths reported in newspapers or shown on the TV news every day varies slightly according to circumstances, but the annual average will presumably tend to be constant, and since it is spread over so many channels virtually impossible to avoid. Yet that kind of death does not seem threatening. Quite the contrary, it is something we are drawn to and will happily pay to see. Add the enormously high body count in fiction and it becomes even harder to understand the system that keeps death out of sight. If the phenomenon of death does not frighten us, why then this distaste for dead bodies? It must mean either that there are two kinds of death or that there is a disparity between our conception of death and death as it actually turns out to be, which in effect boils down to the same thing. What is significant here is that our conception of death is so strongly rooted in our consciousness that we are not only shaken when we see that reality deviates from it, but we also try to conceal this with all the means at our disposal. Not as a result of some form of conscious deliberation, as has been the case with funeral rites, the form and meaning of which are negotiable nowadays, and thus have shifted from the sphere of the irrational to the rational, from the collective to the individual – no, the way we remove bodies has never been the subject of debate, it has always been just something we have done, out of a necessity for which no one can state a reason but everyone feels: if your father dies on the lawn one windswept Sunday in autumn, you carry him indoors if you can, and if you can’t, you at least cover him with a blanket. This impulse, however, is not the only one we have with regard to the dead. No less conspicuous than our hiding the corpses is the fact that we always lower them to ground level as fast as possible. A hospital that transports its bodies upward, that sites its cold chambers on the upper floors is practically inconceivable. The dead are stored as close to the ground as possible. And the same principle applies to the agencies that attend them; an insurance company may well have its offices on the eighth floor, but not a funeral parlor. All funeral parlors have their offices as close to street level as possible. Why this should be so is hard to say; one might be tempted to believe that it was based on some ancient convention that originally had a practical purpose, such as a cellar being cold and therefore best suited to storing corpses, and that this principle had been retained in our era of refrigerators and cold-storage rooms, had it not been for the notion that transporting bodies upward in buildings seems contrary to the laws of nature, as though height and death are mutually incompatible. As though we possessed some kind of chthonic instinct, something deep within us that urges us to move death down to the earth whence we came.
*   *   *
It might thus appear that death is relayed through two distinct systems. One is associated with concealment and gravity, earth and darkness, the other with openness and airiness, ether and light. A father and his child are killed as the father attempts to pull the child out of the line of fire in a town somewhere in the Middle East, and the image of them huddled together as the bullets thud into flesh, causing their bodies to shudder, as it were, is caught on camera, transmitted to one of the thousands of satellites orbiting the Earth and broadcast on TV sets around the world, from where it slips into our consciousness as yet another picture of death or dying. These images have no weight, no depth, no time, and no place, nor do they have any connection to the bodies that spawned them. They are nowhere and everywhere. Most of them just pass through us and are gone; for diverse reasons some linger and live on in the dark recesses of the brain. An off-piste skier falls and severs an artery in her thigh, blood streams out leaving a red trail down the white slope; she is dead even before her body comes to a halt. A plane takes off, flames shoot out from the engines as it climbs, the sky above the suburban houses is blue, the plane explodes in a ball of fire beneath. A fishing smack sinks off the coast of northern Norway one night, the crew of seven drown, next morning the event is described in all the newspapers, it is a so-called mystery, the weather was calm and no mayday call was sent from the boat, it just disappeared, a fact which the TV stations underline that evening by flying over the scene of the drama in a helicopter and showing pictures of the empty sea. The sky is overcast, the gray-green swell heavy but calm, as though possessing a different temperament from the choppy, white-flecked waves that burst forth here and there. I am sitting alone watching, it is some time in spring, I suppose, for my father is working in the garden. I stare at the surface of the sea without listening to what the reporter says, and suddenly the outline of a face emerges. I don’t know how long it stays there, a few seconds perhaps, but long enough for it to have a huge impact on me. The moment the face disappears I get up to find someone I can tell. My mother is on the evening shift, my brother is playing soccer, and the other children on our block won’t listen, so it has to be Dad, I think, and hurry down the stairs, jump into shoes, thread my arms through the sleeves of my jacket, open the door, and run around the house. We are not allowed to run in the garden, so just before I enter his line of vision, I slow down and start walking. He is standing at the rear of the house, down in what will be the vegetable plot, lunging at a boulder with a sledgehammer. Even though the hollow is only a few meters deep, the black soil he has dug up and is standing on together with the dense clump of rowan trees growing beyond the fence behind him cause the twilight to deepen. As he straightens up and turns to me, his face is almost completely shrouded in darkness.
Nevertheless I have more than enough information to know his mood. This is apparent not from his facial expressions but his physical posture, and you do not read it with your mind but with your intuition.
He puts down the sledgehammer and removes his gloves.
“Well?” he says.
“I’ve just seen a face in the sea on TV,” I say, coming to a halt on the lawn above him. The neighbor had felled a pine tree earlier in the afternoon and the air is filled with the strong resin smell from the logs lying on the other side of the stone wall.
“A diver?” Dad says. He knows I am interested in divers, and I suppose he cannot imagine I would find anything else interesting enough to make me come out and tell him about it.
I shake my head.
“It wasn’t a person. It was something I saw in the sea.”
“Something you saw, eh,” he says, taking the packet of cigarettes from his breast pocket.
I nod and turn to go.
“Wait a minute,” he says.
He strikes a match and bends his head forward to light the cigarette. The flame carves out a small grotto of light in the gray dusk.
“Right,” he says.
After taking a deep drag, he places one foot on the rock and stares in the direction of the forest on the other side of the road. Or perhaps he is staring at the sky above the trees.
“Was it Jesus you saw?” he asks, looking up at me. Had it not been for the friendly voice and the long pause before the question I would have thought he was poking fun at me. He finds it rather embarrassing that I am a Christian; all he wants of me is that I do not stand out from the other kids, and of all the teeming mass of kids on the estate no one other than his youngest son calls himself a Christian.
But he is really giving this some thought.
I feel a rush of happiness because he actually cares, while still feeling vaguely offended that he can underestimate me in this way.
I shake my head.
“It wasn’t Jesus,” I say.
“That’s nice to hear,” Dad says with a smile. Higher up on the hillside the faint whistle of bicycle tires on pavement can be heard. The sound grows, and it is so quiet on the estate that the low singing tone at the heart of the whistle resonates loud and clear, and soon afterward the bicycle races past us on the road.
Dad takes another drag at the cigarette before tossing it half-smoked over the fence, then coughs a couple of times, pulls on his gloves, and grabs the sledgehammer again.
“Don’t give it another thought,” he says, glancing up at me.
*   *   *
I was eight years old that evening, my father thirty-two. Even though I still can’t say that I understand him or know what kind of person he was, the fact that I am now seven years older than he was then makes it easier for me to grasp some things. For example, how great the difference was between our days. While my days were jam-packed with meaning, when each step opened a new opportunity, and when every opportunity filled me to the brim, in a way which now is actually incomprehensible, the meaning of his days was not concentrated in individual events but spread over such large areas that it was not possible to comprehend them in anything other than abstract terms. “Family” was one such term, “career” another. Few or no unforeseen opportunities at all can have presented themselves in the course of his days, he must always have known in broad outline what they would bring and how he would react. He had been married for twelve years, he had worked as a middle-school teacher for eight of them, he had two children, a house and a car. He had been elected onto the local council and appointed to the executive committee representing the Liberal Party. During the winter months he occupied himself with philately, not without some progress: inside a short space of time he had become one of the country’s leading stamp collectors, while in the summer months gardening took up what leisure he had. What he was thinking on this spring evening I have no idea, nor even what perception he had of himself as he straightened up in the gloom with the sledgehammer in his hands, but I am fairly sure that there was some feeling inside him that he understood the surrounding world quite well. He knew who all the neighbors on the estate were and what social status they held in relation to himself, and I imagine he knew quite a bit about what they preferred to keep to themselves, as he taught their children and also because he had a good eye for others’ weaknesses. Being a member of the new educated middle class he was also well-informed about the wider world, which came to him every day via the newspaper, radio, and television. He knew quite a lot about botany and zoology because he had been interested while he was growing up, and though not exactly conversant with other science subjects he did at least have some command of their basic principles from secondary school. He was better at history, which he had studied at university along with Norwegian and English. In other words, he was not an expert at anything, apart from maybe pedagogy, but he knew a bit about everything. In this respect he was a typical schoolteacher, though, from a time when secondary school teaching still carried some status. The neighbor who lived on the other side of the wall, Prestbakmo, worked as a teacher at the same school, as did the neighbor who lived on top of the tree-covered slope behind our house, Olsen, while one of the neighbors who lived at the far end of the ring road, Knudsen, was the head teacher of another middle school. So when my father raised the sledgehammer above his head and let it fall on the rock that spring evening in the mid-1970s, he was doing so in a world he knew and was familiar with. It was not until I myself reached the same age that I understood there was indeed a price to pay for this. As your perspective of the world increases not only is the pain it inflicts on you less but also its meaning. Understanding the world requires you to take a certain distance from it. Things that are too small to see with the naked eye, such as molecules and atoms, we magnify. Things that are too large, such as cloud formations, river deltas, constellations, we reduce. At length we bring it within the scope of our senses and we stabilize it with fixer. When it has been fixed we call it knowledge. Throughout our childhood and teenage years, we strive to attain the correct distance to objects and phenomena. We read, we learn, we experience, we make adjustments. Then one day we reach the point where all the necessary distances have been set, all the necessary systems have been put in place. That is when time begins to pick up speed. It no longer meets any obstacles, everything is set, time races through our lives, the days pass by in a flash and before we know what is happening we are forty, fifty, sixty … Meaning requires content, content requires time, time requires resistance. Knowledge is distance, knowledge is stasis and the enemy of meaning. My picture of my father on that evening in 1976 is, in other words, twofold: on the one hand I see him as I saw him at that time, through the eyes of an eight-year-old: unpredictable and frightening; on the other hand, I see him as a peer through whose life time is blowing and unremittingly sweeping large chunks of meaning along with it.
*   *   *
The crack of sledgehammer on rock resounded through the estate. A car came up the gentle slope from the main road and passed, its lights blazing. The door of the neighboring house opened, Prestbakmo paused on the doorstep, pulled on his work gloves, and seemed to sniff the clear night air before grabbing the wheelbarrow and trundling it across the lawn. There was a smell of gunpowder from the rock Dad was pounding, of pine from the logs behind the stone wall, freshly dug soil and forest, and in the gentle northerly breeze a whiff of salt. I thought of the face I had seen in the sea. Even though only a couple of minutes had passed since I last considered it, everything had changed. Now it was Dad’s face I saw.
Down in the hollow he took a break from hammering at the rock.
“Are you still there, boy?”
I nodded.
“Get yourself inside.”
I started to walk.
“And Karl Ove, remember,” he said.
I paused, turned my head, puzzled.
“No running this time.”
I stared at him. How could he know I had run?
“And shut your maw,” he said. “You look like an idiot.”
I did as he said, closed my mouth and walked slowly around the house. Reaching the front, I saw the road was full of children. The oldest stood in a group with their bikes, which in the dusk almost appeared as an extension of their bodies. The youngest were playing Kick-the-Can. The ones who had been tagged stood inside a chalk circle on the pavement; the others were hidden at various places in the forest down from the road, out of sight of the person guarding the can but visible to me.
The lights on the bridge masts glowed red above the black treetops. Another car came up the hill. The headlights illuminated the cyclists first, a brief glimpse of reflectors, metal, Puffa jackets, black eyes and white faces, then the children, who had taken no more than the one necessary step aside to allow the car to pass and were now standing like ghosts, gawking.
It was the Trollneses, the parents of Sverre, a boy in my class. He didn’t seem to be with them.
I turned and followed the red taillights until they disappeared over the summit of the hill. Then I went in. For a while I tried to lie on my bed reading, but could not settle, and instead went into Yngve’s room, from where I could see Dad. When I could see him I felt safer with him, and in a way that was what mattered most. I knew his moods and had learned how to predict them long ago, by means of a kind of subconscious categorization system, I have later come to realize, whereby the relationship between a few constants was enough to determine what was in store for me, allowing me to make my own preparations. A kind of metereology of the mind … The speed of the car up the gentle gradient to the house, the time it took him to switch off the engine, grab his things, and step out, the way he looked around as he locked the car, the subtle nuances of the various sounds that rose from the hall as he removed his coat – everything was a sign, everything could be interpreted. To this was added information about where he had been, and with whom, how long he had been away, before the conclusion, which was the only part of the process of which I was conscious, was drawn. So, what frightened me most was when he turned up without warning … when for some reason I had been inattentive …
How on earth did he know I had been running?
This was not the first time he had caught me out in a way I found incomprehensible. One evening that autumn, for example, I had hidden a bag of sweets under the duvet for the express reason that I had a hunch he would come into my room, and there was no way he would believe my explanation of how I had laid my hands on the money to buy them. When, sure enough, he did come in, he stood watching me for a few seconds.
“What have you got hidden in your bed?” he asked.
How could he possibly have known?
Outside, Prestbakmo switched on the powerful lamp that was mounted over the flagstones where he usually worked. The new island of light that emerged from the blackness displayed a whole array of objects that he stood stock-still ogling. Columns of paint cans, jars containing paintbrushes, logs, bits of planking, folded tarpaulins, car tires, a bicycle frame, some toolboxes, tins of screws and nails of all shapes and sizes, a tray of milk cartons with flower seedlings, sacks of lime, a rolled-up hose pipe, and leaning against the wall, a board on which every conceivable tool was outlined, presumably intended for the hobby room in the cellar.
Glancing outside at Dad again, I saw him crossing the lawn with the sledgehammer in one hand and a spade in the other. I took a couple of hasty steps backward. As I did so the front door burst open. It was Yngve. I looked at my watch. Twenty-eight minutes past eight. When, straight afterward, he came up the stairs with the familiar, slightly jerky, almost duck-like gait we had developed so as to be able to walk fast inside the house without making a sound, he was breathless and ruddy-cheeked.
“Where’s Dad?” he asked as soon as he was in the room.
“In the garden,” I said. “But you’re not late. Look, it’s half past eight now.”
I showed him my watch.
He walked past me and pulled the chair from under the desk. He still smelled of outdoors. Cold air, forest, gravel, pavement.
“Have you been messing with my cassettes?” he asked.
“No,” I answered.
“What are you doing in my room, then?”
“Nothing,” I said.
“Can’t you do nothing in your own room?”
Below us, the front door opened again. This time it was Dad’s heavy footsteps traversing the floor downstairs. He had removed his boots outside, as usual, and was on his way to the washroom to change.
“I saw a face in the sea on the news tonight,” I said. “Have you heard anything about it? Do you know if anyone else saw it?”
Yngve eyed me with a half-curious, half-dismissive expression.
“What are you babbling on about?”
“You know the fishing boat that sank?”
He gave a barely perceptible nod.
“When they were showing the place where it sank on the news I saw a face in the sea.”
“A dead body?”
“No. It wasn’t a real face. The sea had formed into the shape of a face.”
For a moment he watched me without saying anything. Then he tapped a forefinger on his temple.
“Don’t you believe me?” I said. “It’s absolutely true.”
“The truth is you’re a waste of space.”
At that moment Dad switched off the tap downstairs, and I decided it was best to go to my room now so that there was no chance of meeting him on the landing. But I did not want Yngve to have the last word.
“You’re the one who’s a waste of space,” I said.
He could not even be bothered to answer. Just turned his face toward me, stuck out his top teeth and blew air through them like a rabbit. The gesture was a reference to my protruding teeth. I broke away and made off before he could see my tears. As long as I was alone my crying didn’t bother me. And this time it had worked, hadn’t it? Because he hadn’t seen me?
I paused inside the door of my room and wondered for a moment whether to go to the bathroom. I could rinse my face with cold water and remove the telltale signs. But Dad was on his way up the stairs, so I made do with wiping my eyes on the sleeve of my sweater. The thin layer of moisture that the dry material spread across my eye made the surfaces and colors of the room blur as though it had suddenly sunk and was now under water, and so real was this perception that I raised my arms and made a few swimming strokes as I walked toward the writing desk. In my mind I was wearing a metal diver’s helmet from the early days of diving, when they bestrode the seabed with leaden shoes and suits as thick as elephant skin, with an oxygen pipe attached to their heads like a kind of trunk. I wheezed through my mouth and staggered around for a while with the heavy, sluggish movements of divers from bygone days until the horror of the sensation slowly began to seep in like cold water.
A few months before, I had seen the TV series The Mysterious Island, based on Jules Verne’s novel, and the story of those men who landed their air balloon on a deserted island in the Atlantic had made an enormous impact on me from the very first moment. Everything was electric. The air balloon, the storm, the men dressed in nineteenth-century clothing, the weather-beaten, barren island where they had been marooned, which apparently was not as deserted as they imagined, mysterious and inexplicable things were always happening around them … but in that case who were the others? The answer came without warning toward the end of one episode. There was someone in the underwater caves … a number of humanoid creatures … in the light from the lamps they were carrying they saw glimpses of smooth, masked heads … fins … they resembled a kind of lizard but walked upright … with containers on their backs … one turned, he had no eyes …
I did not scream when I saw these things, but the horror the images instilled would not go away; even in the bright light of day I could be struck with terror by the very thought of the frogmen in the cave. And now my thoughts were turning me into one of them. My wheezing became theirs, my footsteps theirs, my arms theirs, and closing my eyes, it was those eyeless faces of theirs I saw before me. The cave … the black water … the line of frogmen with lamps in their hands … It became so bad that opening my eyes again did not help. Even though I could see I was in my room, surrounded by familiar objects, the terror did not release its grip. I hardly dared blink for fear that something might happen. Stiffly, I sat down on the bed, reached for my satchel without looking at it, glanced at the school timetable, found Wednesday, read what it said, math, orientation, music, lifted the satchel onto my lap and mechanically flipped through the books inside. This done, I took the open book from the pillow, sat against the wall and began to read. The seconds between looking up soon became minutes, and when Dad shouted it was time for supper, nine o’clock on the dot, it was not horror that had me in its thrall but the book. Tearing myself away from it was quite an effort too.

Copyright © 2009 by Karl Ove Knausgaard
English language translation copyright © 2012 by Don Bartlett

(Continues...)Excerpted from My Struggle: Book 1 by Karl Ove Knausgaard. Copyright © 2013 by Karl Ove Knausgaard. Excerpted by permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

Reviews:

5.0 out of 5 stars Wonderful, haunting, healing and transcendent.

G.L. · October 14, 2012

Just finished this book. I had discovered this author via a radio interview and subsequently hearing him speak, read from the work at a panel I attended at the recent Brooklyn Book Festival. The panel was described as:"Ice or Salt:The Personal in Fiction.W.B. Yeats wrote, "All that is personal soon rots; it must be packed in ice or salt." Authors Siri Hustvedt (Living, Thinking, Looking), Norwegian author Karl Ove Knausgård (My Struggle) and Sheila Heti (How Should a Person Be?) will consider how writing technique--"ice or salt"--transforms the personal into art that connects to a broad audience. Moderated by Phillip Lopate."I appreciated and immediately bought each author's work. I was, however, most drawn to the Norwegian's work. An author from Norway who manages to penetrate the infotainment telesector bubble of American culture. "Hell", I thought, "I gotta see this."Sure enough the man friggin' looked like a Viking. Not like Thor of the recent Avengers movie. I have an eight year old son and have seen the film twice - thinking about My Struggle while watching it - perhaps not in the way that Knausgard intended. But f'real - Karl Ove has that Viking look thing going on, long hair, chiseled looks, deep sonorous voice: the real thing, more lean, mean even wolf-like. But gentle too. I'd cast him in a Lord of the Rings film in a heartbeat.It was explained by Ms. Hustvedt, an American-Norwegian I believe, that his work was ripping a new one in Norway's repressive, "we don't talk about such things in public" cloak of stoic silence on things related to the personal, the family; on things that mattered. I realized, reading My Struggle, they may not talk much about it in private either.Statistics were provided on just how many people were reading all seven volumes of the work in Norway. Massive attack at the bookstores and in the hearts of other Nordic writers, for sure.I was most intrigued by this author and his reading. I went up to him afterwards where he was standing outside having a cigarette and speaking to an attractive woman. I congratulated him on the work and, based on the selection he'd read, became hyper self-conscious that this fellow might not really care to conversate. I couldn't blame him. Besides, I had the book on my kindle (that's right damn it, as I'd purchased it on the spot) and could start getting to know him at my own pace.This is a great book for anyone with a drinking problem and an estranged relationship with a father and/or family they love dearly. This is a great book for anyone who loves writing; detailed, descriptive, "open a soul vein and bleed-draw it on the page" writing. This is a great book for anyone who likes Vikings, and/or any kind of spiritual warrior. This is because Karl Ove Knausgard is a kind of modern day Viking spiritual warrior. He's an artist and a craftsman. Folks inculcated with the need for bullet point documents and/or suffering from ADD may have a hard time with this one.It strikes me - seeing him in person, listening to him talk, watching his movements, reading the book reflecting on what he has done here with this work; etc, - this fellow is also a guy, a man who seems to be writing to accomplish two things: to realize the extraordinary wonder of being an ordinary imperfect human being and to truly realize (as the American writer Raymond Carver once explained as a goal of his own) what it means to love and to be loved.It's also a great book for anyone who knows nothing or a little or a lot about Norwegian culture.The only dangerous thing about reading this book is one's fear that the other six won't come out in the English language. I'm too old to learn Norwegian.The only shameful thing you will feel in regards to this book is when anyone asks you to clean something up. This dude does not mess around when it comes to cleaning up a mess. Guys who avoid housework - get ready to be inspired or die.The only sad thing about this book is how his family and/or friends are perceiving it. There seems to be some controversy. They don't like seeing their own names in print attached to descriptions that may or may not mirror their own perceptions of themselves.I identify. I was once described in a famous writer's book as an English film maker who wore animal print underpants when I'm actually an American who wears boxers. I knew immediately upon reading the book that this was the writer's way to punish me for canceling a REAL DATE we were supposed to have IN REAL LIFE because she called me about eight times prior to the date to discuss how it would go. Hell hath no fury. The woman's book was writing about her delusional struggles, abuse of all kinds of legal and illegal drugs, and she attached my real name to a fictional character (or some other guy she'd scared away) to mix fiction and memoir in the very exact opposte way that this writer does. I also heard through trusted sources that she was spotted hanging out at AA meetings in Manhattan looking for stories to write about.SHE SHOULD DEFINITELY READ KNAUSGARD'S MY STRUGGLE.So, I feel your pain - but honestly - it really has no lasting effect. Let's be Nordic about this and agree that what doesn't kill us - makes us stronger - if we relate to it with knowledge, understanding, compassion and skillful means.I hope those offended by Knausgard's work can inhabit the literature in the same way as so many others seem to be doing: as a work of fiction dressed up as memoir. As a fictionalized memoir that edges ever closer to very human truths by forging lies like truth and/or telling the truth in imaginary circumstances. After all, none of us are the same person we were yesterday or even a moment ago...and we are all edging closer to the truth when we tell our stories - even if we are lying through out teeth. But those dualistic notions - what's "really true" what's "not really true" - fall away like snow on a leaf as the work takes us to another dimension where truth is like the water is to the fish, or the wind to the falcons, hawks and eagles.The one most inspiring thing from this work is that Karl Ove now wants to open a publishing house. He's written himself out of writing in a way that conveys a sense of liberation, emptiness and luminosity.Oh Mr. Knausgard, let's be life long friends!! Or look for me in the Park Slope Reader...Siri will send it to you...winter edition!! Coming out soon!! (I'm using first names not because I'm a personal friend of these folks - just because they are so personable and I used to work in a community book store in Park Slope that both Siri and her husband - Paul Auster - would come and buy books there. I would stood in reverential silence (for a while) then eased back into the nothing special ethos of Brooklyn culture. All readers of this should come to the Brooklyn Book Festival next year to get a taste of Brooklyn, our famous book-reading culture and a slice of pizza!!Bravo to the writer. Bravo to you who buy and read Knausgard's My Struggle!!You will have amazing dreams, want to have some good fish, be looking under your elderly mother whenever, wherever she is sitting in a chair; possibly forgiving anyone (particularly a father) whom you are holding resentments against; looking up obscure punk rock bands and reading wiki biographies of other Norwegian writers and poets. You may cry but it will be a good cry. You will never look at or see clouds the same way again. You may even go to Norway to see them. You may even, as I was lucky enough to have happen, discover new depths of feeling and consciousness in your own being - just by reading a book - on a KINDLE, no less.Bravo once again to Karl Ove who is now cursed to live as if everyone is related to him now that he has written a work that has revealed the universal kinship of humanity. A drink from an ancient well we could all use more of.Heck, I might want to disappear too.Enough - Get the book - and enjoy!!

4.0 out of 5 stars death unites us all under the banner of speciel communion--that we are all one in the same and thus will meet the same fate--a f

J.N. · March 29, 2015

My Struggle: Part 1 by Karl Ove Knausgaard is the first of a six part autobiographical series through which he details the excruciating intimacies and trifles of life, demonstrating its seemingly insufferable banality amongst shimmers of radiance--an idea this luminous novel mirrors to the letter.It's ironic that Knausgaard begins his tome on life with a digression on death; he muses about how the most profoundly mysterious of human experiences is one that is never consciously experienced at all. In Part 1 of 2 (in the overall Part 1) amidst seemingly endless wanderings and musings, anecdotes and semi-pleasurable yarns on living in Norway in the 80's, Knausgaard grounds the novel between two overarching narratives: that which represents youth--his outing as an adolescent on New Years Eve (the banal), and adulthood--his coming to terms with his father's death (the powerfully radiant) amidst the debris-ridden remnants left behind by a staunch alcoholic.Alternating between adolescence and adulthood, Knausgaard covers events sprawling in topic and impression. From the teenage troubles of trying to sneak drinks on New Years Eve, or desperately vying for the hand of a seemingly bottomless crush, to sifting through the remains, bottles, decay, and debris left behind by his alcoholic father, Kausgaard sporadically covers ideas as they strike him, giving the piece an organic, naturally harmonious cadence. Beneath it all, however, is the fact that despite past misgivings and lingering compunction, death unites us all under the banner of speciel communion--that we are all one in the same and thus will meet the same fate--a fact that is simultaneously beautiful and discomforting.Proust minus the poetry, a meandering chronicler, Knausgaard sets down his life without remorse. He communicates the brutal truth behind past apprehensions and present day aberrations. Successful in its verbosity and marathon scope--prescient in its truthfulness and honesty, My Struggle is unrelentingly digressive and candid.Although the book has glimmers of what I'm going to dub "insouciant prescience," the difficulty behind this text lies in it's inability to linger in any one singular moment. Rather, Knausgaard jet sets between events with little regard for cohesion. But the lack of cohesion is perplexingly beautiful in it's frankness. Knausgaard reminds us throughout that life is not cohesive. More so, it is fragmented and far less linear than we believe--and so, too, is this strangely intriguing novel.For more great book reviews check out www.bookguyreview.com

slowly compelling and compellingly slow

S.S. · August 8, 2014

So slow yet so compelling. My new Stephen King novel, Mercedes, purchased as a change of pace respite, remains untouched. On to volume ll

A life revealed in all its anguish

M.M. · June 12, 2015

I’ve never read such an open and full account of a person’s life.Karl Ove combines pure honesty with a focused writing skill to reveal himself to the world completely.We get a richer and deeper impression of him than any character from fact or fiction I’ve ever read.He is a suburban family man who has laid down his worries, his anxieties, his troubles without sentimentality or self-pity, from the painful relationship with his father to admitting being bored playing with his children and questioning his “I love you too” to his wife.There is even meaning in the small details of making a pot of coffee or a walk to the shops which give it an existentialist touch.The earlier parts of the book on his school years dragged a bit but most of it, especially as a married man around the time of his father’s death, were utterly absorbing.Through his sheer honesty he shows how an ordinary person and an ordinary life are full of humanity and meaning.It’s a simple concept delivered with powerful style and it’s no surprise he has won awards in his native Norway.

beautiful book, addictive prose

G.T. · September 5, 2021

the book is beautifully built, the jacket has a nice papery texture, the formatting needs some getting used, since the book is square, but you quickly get accustomed to it.as for the content, Knausgaard writes precise, crystalline prose, he makes the very mundane life of a white Norwegian guy seem relatable to you. The translation shows a real labour of love.

Better than I expected

M. · February 25, 2021

Have only just started reading this but find it really hard to put down. Glad I bought the series.

A mixed bag

B.C. · June 23, 2025

I'm usually excited to read books by writers who have gone their own path, taken risks and been honest at the risk of failure and ridicule. This looked like one of those books and it is to some extent. Knausgaard's choice to make his own life the subject is bold - particularly since his life isn't especially eventful or different to anybody else's. The project depends on his writing ability.Vol. 1 starts strong with some impressive writing about death, though this later feels like a bait-and-switch. The narrative soon lapses into detailed memory of boyhood and his daily life as an adult remembering his past. The book is broadly split between a few kinds of writing: boyhood reminiscence, thoughtful adult digressions and, later, the details of his father's death. The writing is solid and carries you along, but it's not so good that it makes quotidian detail more interesting. Large sections of the book, especially the boyhood, are simply dull and could be skipped entirely without affecting the experience.The book follows the tradition of Rousseau, Proust, Nietzsche, Henry Miller and Bukowski in recounting everyday truths with startling and sometimes brutal honesty. Ultimately, I found that the events being recounted and the language being used weren't sufficient to justify the effort. It was like reading somebody's diary – more interesting if you know them but less so if you don't.I lost interest in this and struggled to go back to it, hoping for something like those initial pages to reoccur. I can't see that reading the rest of the series is worthwhile. If you've read the first one, it seems you've got the point of what he's doing. There's little expectation of change or surprise. Maybe the book is electrifying in the original Norwegian, but it often felt quite pedestrian in English. Proficient and readable, yes. Striking and innovative, no.

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Visit the Farrar, Straus and Giroux Store

My Struggle: Book 1 (My Struggle, 1)

Product ID: U0374534144

Condition: New

4.2

Type: Paperback

^AED73⁴⁹

Price includes VAT & Import Duties

Availability: In Stock

Quantity:

Order today to get by 7-14 business days

Delivery fee of AED 20. Free for orders above AED 200.

Returns & Warranty policies

Imported From: United States

At BOLO, we work hard to ensure the products you receive are new, genuine, and sourced from reputable suppliers.

Your trust is our top priority, and we are committed to maintaining transparency and integrity in every transaction.

Unless otherwise stated, all prices displayed on the product page include applicable taxes and import duties.

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Description:

Review

About the Author

My Struggle: Book 1

By Karl Ove Knausgaard, Don Bartlett

Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Excerpt

Reviews:

5.0 out of 5 stars Wonderful, haunting, healing and transcendent.

G.L. · October 14, 2012

4.0 out of 5 stars death unites us all under the banner of speciel communion--that we are all one in the same and thus will meet the same fate--a f

J.N. · March 29, 2015

slowly compelling and compellingly slow

S.S. · August 8, 2014

So slow yet so compelling. My new Stephen King novel, Mercedes, purchased as a change of pace respite, remains untouched. On to volume ll

A life revealed in all its anguish

M.M. · June 12, 2015

beautiful book, addictive prose

G.T. · September 5, 2021

Better than I expected

M. · February 25, 2021

Have only just started reading this but find it really hard to put down. Glad I bought the series.

A mixed bag

B.C. · June 23, 2025

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