My Struggle 1

“Intense and utterly honest . . . There is something ceaselessly compelling about Knausgaard’s book: even when I was bored, I was interested.” —James Wood, The New Yorker

“Until the recent publication of My Struggle, a 3,600-page work in six volumes, the career of the Norwegian writer Karl Ove Knausgaard had followed a fairly conventional trajectory: A young man besotted by the beauty of words, nature, music and painting writes a coming-of-age novel that earns him prizes and praise and then tries something more ambitious, which becomes an international best seller and wins more prizes.
“But with his latest project, My Struggle, whose title deliberately evokes Hitler’s infamous autobiography and political screed, everything has changed. Though My Struggle, a minutely detailed examination of Mr. Knausgaard’s family life, has done extremely well in Europe—in Norway, about half a million copies have been sold, the equivalent of one for every 10 people—it has also put Mr. Knausgaard (pronounced Kuh-NOWS-guard) squarely at the center of a debate about literary ethics and made him a kind of bad boy of European letters.” —Larry Rohter, The New York Times

My Struggle is the provocative, audacious, brilliant six-volume autobiographical novel of Karl Ove Knausgaard that has unquestionably been the main event of contemporary European literature. It has earned favorable comparisons to its obvious literary forebears A la recherche du temps perdu and Mein Kampf—but it has also been celebrated as the rare magnum opus that is intensely, addictively readable. From country to country, the fever has spread:

NORWAY: “Knausgaard’s intense, hungry prose propels the reader forward . . . A fantastic novel . . . I cannot say anything other than that I am looking forward desperately to the rest of it.” —Dagsavisen

DENMARK: “The Norwegian public have fallen on their knees in awe of this ambitious author, and with good reason . . . Knausgaard’s realism and literary skills are . . . raw and fearless.” —Information

GERMANY: “Knausgaard’s thinking is magnificently unbridled.” —Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung

ITALY: “Certainly, Knausgaard’s strength lies in his detailed descriptions of nature and the human psyche. But it is the gravity and truth occurring between the lines that make this text authentic and necessary.” —WUZ

SWEDEN: “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 . . .” —Vasterbottens-kuriren

And the sales have followed, in the hundred of thousands. Finally, it arrived on U.S. shores, greeted with a full embrace from The New Yorker, The New York Times, and everyone else.

The acclaim is unanimous: It is a modern masterpiece; it is a classic in the making.