My Struggle: Book One - Hardcover

Knausgaard, Karl Ove

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0914671006 ISBN 13: 9780914671008

Publisher: Archipelago, 2014

Synopsis

Almost ten years have passed since Karl Ove Knausgaard's father drank himself to death. Vulnerable and assailed by doubts, he is now embarking on a new novel. With an uncanny eye for detail, Knausgaard breaks down his own life story to its elementary particles, reliving memories, reopening wounds, and examining with candor the turbulence and the epiphanies that emerge from his own experience of fatherhood, the fallout in the wake of his father's death, and his visceral connection to music, art, and literature. Karl Ove's dilemmas strike nerves that give us raw glimpses of our particular moment in history as we witness what happens to the sensitive and churning mind of a young man trying- as if his very life depended on it- to find his place in the disjointed world around him. This Proustian masterpiece opens a window into one of the most original minds writing today.

Intense and vital... The need for totality . . . brings superb, lingering, celestial passages . . .
The concluding sentences of the book [are] placid, plain, achieved. They have what Walter Benjamin called 'the epic side of truth, wisdom.' --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." --The Wall Street Journal

Steadily absorbing, lit up by pages of startling insight and harrowing honesty, My Struggle introduces into world literature a singular character and immerses us in his fascinating Underground Man consciousness. -- Philip Lopate

Karl Ove--with his shyness, his passion, his honesty--can take on any subject and make it his own. -- Edmund White

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

Knausgaard's preternatural facility for description, the dreamy thickness of his prose, speaks not only to the sheer pleasure his fiction affords, but to the philosophical stakes of that pleasure. -- Mark Sussman, Los Angeles Review of Books

About this title

About the Author:

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.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.:

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 towards 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...

About this edition

• Publisher: Archipelago
• Publication date: 2014
• ISBN 10: 0914671006
• ISBN 13: 9780914671008
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 2
• Number of pages: 430