It's a lucky reader who gets buried alive in the literary avalanche of Karl Ove Knausgaard's My Struggle--a free-wheeling, funny, smart, provocative chunk of narrative that just keeps on coming, a flashback-laced plunge into one man's life, with memories within memories rattled off like a simpler, friendlier modern-day Proust. Instead of dissecting elderly dukes and princesses, however, Knausgaard perceptively and comically describes middle-class teenagers and young married couples with kids. And this compulsively readable Norwegian magnum opus is just the first of six volumes.
My Struggle opens with a savagely witty exposure of our cultural need to keep death out of sight. At the book's center is Karl Ove Knausgaard himself, telling his own story in a montage of memories, primarily as a 16-year-old with illegally obtained beer on New Year's Eve in Part One, then, in Part Two, as an adult accompanying his brother to the home of his grandparents to remove a houseful of his father's bottles and alcoholic debris to prepare for his father's funeral.
Bravely dog-paddling into this river of language, the reader encounters dozens of characters from Knausgaard's life: his bungling, domineering father, his aloof but devoted brother, his elusive mother, both of his wives, his best friends, his first crushes, his uncles and aunts and cousins and--most of all--his incontinent, repetitive, alcoholic Grandma, once torn between her love for two brothers, now consumed by her clinging son. Looping backward and forward in time, through the angst of adolescence, the exhaustion of childrearing, the flickering changes in his parents as they grow apart and decide upon a divorce, Knausgaard records hyperrealistic impressions with scalpel precision.
It's a life transformed into words. That My Struggle is so often warm and funny belies all the stereotypes of bleak, humorless Scandinavian writing. Sidestepping obvious melodramatic plot points, Knausgaard builds emotional momentum out of the ordinary, making a profoundly moving climactic sequence out of cleaning an obscenely dirty house, or out of a mother and her two sons drinking in the evening, reliving their memories. With exhilarating faithfulness to reality, Knausgaard relentlessly exposes himself as he ponders his book's own creation: "The only thing I have learned from life is to endure it, never to question it, and to burn up the longing generated by this in writing." --Nick DiMartino
Shelf Talker: The first of a six-volume Norwegian epic laying out the author's life in hyper-realistic detail through a flashback-laced narrative piled thick with memories, laughter and anguish.