My Struggle: Book Three Hardback - 2014

Media reviews

FINALIST - THE IMPAC DUBLIN LITERARY AWARD

"Halfway through, this (six-volume) series is starting to look like an early-21st-century masterpiece." -- Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

“My Struggle is a truly original and enduring and great work of literature." -- The New York Times Book Review


"I fell into the first two books of My Struggle as if I were falling into a malarial fever. I did little else for four days except devour them, leaving email unanswered, dogs unwalked, dishes piling up in the sink. The steady headlamps of his prose stun and mesmerize you, as if you were a lumbering mammal caught in the middle of a highway . . . [Knausgaard] is contemporary fiction’s alchemist of the ordinary. . . . This writer is constructing a towering edifice, in what feels like real time. Few artistic projects of our era feel more worth attending to." -- Dwight Garner, The New York Times

"He has managed to transform self-abasement into a kind of grandeur, humiliation into a purified form of pride, and—above all—fiction into the most painful mode of truth-telling." -- The Daily Beast


"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

"This segment of a genre-defying and unusual novel will leave readers hungry for the following installments, and serves as a fine entry point into the series." -- Publishers Weekly (starred review)

"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


"...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

"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

"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 

"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)

"MY STRUGGLE is a revolutionary novel that is highly approachable, even thrilling to read. The book feels like a masterpiece––one of those genuinely surprising works that alters the tradition it inherited." — Bookforum

“My Struggle is a book so private it feels like a sanctuary. . . [Knausgaard is] the great chronicler of the modern condition." — Ian Brown, The Globe and Mail


“One of the most anticipated books of the year (or the decade).” — Financial Times (UK)

 "[Knausgaard is] one of the most remarkable authors who have emerged in recent years … he is in the process of becoming a global superstar." — The Economist (UK)

 "Via his visceral, immersive art, Knausgaard makes the heart visible as he conjures 'the intensity that only exists in childhood'."— The Independent (UK)

"A compelling memoir of times we cannot know." — The London Evening Standard

 "an immediacy as astonishing as that of its two predecessors. . . . In Don Bartlett’s lively vernacular translation, My Struggle will, I am convinced, outlive the furore, welcoming or hostile, of its first appearance." — Paul Binding, The Spectator (UK)

“extreme artlessness creates a far more intense realism than we might have thought possible, a confessional novel that outdoes most confessions.” — Times Literary Supplement (UK)

 "...With each subsequent book of his that is translated into English, Mr. Knausgaard continues to solidify his reputation as one of the most vital writers working today." — The Observer

"It would be wrong to suggest that Karl Ove is just an Everyman-plus-shading, and that Knausgaard has simply lucked out. Historical factors may account for why My Struggle has become a “phenomenon” but they can neither explain nor dilute the novels’ richness. Yes, Knausgaard appeals to the modern appetite for warty portraiture and off-page bust-ups and has chronicled middle-class Norwegian life during the country’s “exceptionalist” phase. To a loud anglophone minority, he constitutes a thrillingly boring alternative to boringly diverting invention. But he also displays a tremendous and irreducible zeal for penetrating what Karl Ove, reeling after a date with Linda, calls “the inner core of human existence” – an effort that brings fame to some but not others, and in which he has no obvious superiors among the writers now available to an English-reading public." — The New Statesman

"MY STRUGGLE is a revolutionary novel that is highly approachable, even thrilling to read. The book feels like a masterpiece––one of those genuinely surprising works that alters the tradition it inherited. . . . What makes MY STRUGGLE so hypnotizing––a word more than one reviewer has used to describe it––is in part the pleasurable surprise of seeing habits of mind (your apathy at a dinner party, or envy of a friend's tracksuit, or momentary frustration with your partner) that normally go unrecorded put down in exhaustive detail. But it's also the interplay between those lengthy, hyperrealistic scenes of everyday experience and what are in effect meditative essays." — Meghan O'Rourke, Bookforum

"Though a boyhood so honestly rendered cannot claim the title of 'innocence,' it can be termed wondrous." — AskMen

Citations

• Christian Century, 04/29/2015, Page 26
• Entertainment Weekly, 07/11/2014, Page 72
• Kirkus Best Fiction, 11/15/2014, Page 29
• Kirkus Reviews, 04/15/2014, Page 0
• New York Times Book Review, 05/25/2014, Page 13
• NY Times Notable Bks of Year, 12/07/2014, Page 27
• Publishers Weekly, 04/14/2014, Page 0