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Book Cover for: My Struggle, Book Four, Karl Ove Knausgaard

My Struggle, Book Four

Karl Ove Knausgaard

Reader Score

84%

84% of readers

recommend this book

Critic Reviews

Good

Based on 10 reviews on

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The New York Times Best Seller
2015 The New York Times Best Seller

The fourth installment in the beloved, internationally celebrated My Struggle series from Karl Ove Knausgaard.

My Struggle: Book 4 finds an eighteen-year-old Karl Ove Knausgaard in a tiny fishing village in northern Norway, where he has been hired as a schoolteacher and is living on his own for the first time. When the ferocious winter takes hold, Karl Ove--in the company of the Håfjord locals, a warm and earthy group who have spent their lives working, drinking, and joking together in close quarters--confronts private demons, reels from humiliations, and is elated by small victories. We are immersed, along with Karl Ove, in this world--sometimes claustrophobic, sometimes serenely beautiful--where memories and physical obsessions burn throughout the endless Arctic winter. In Book 4, Karl Ove must weigh the realities of his new life as a writer against everything he had believed it would be.

"My Struggle: Book Four is an elegiac kind of comic novel, and it is pure Karl Ove Knausgaard. This is to say, it comprises intimate descriptions of daily life, descriptions that build to something improbably greater than the sum of their parts." --Dwight Garner, The New York Times

Book Details

  • Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
  • Publish Date: Apr 19th, 2016
  • Pages: 512
  • Language: English
  • Edition: undefined - undefined
  • Dimensions: 8.20in - 5.50in - 1.30in - 0.90lb
  • EAN: 9780374534172
  • Categories: LiteraryBiographicalWorld Literature - Norway

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About the Author

Knausgaard, Karl Ove: - 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.
Bartlett, Don: - 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.

More books by Karl Ove Knausgaard

Book Cover for: The Third Realm, Karl Ove Knausgaard
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Critics’ reviews

Praise for this book

"What makes his book extraordinary is not what happens, which couldn't be more familiar or ordinary. It's that Knausgaard aims to capture the unending blizzard of feelings, objects, people and situations that make up a life."--NPR

"In exposing himself as a bundle of contradictions, Knausgaard also allows us to see ourselves. And for the most part, however unattractive his teenage self looks in this volume, it works wonderfully well."--The Guardian

"In one sense, My Struggle is exactly what the digital age was supposed to have killed off: an extraordinarily long, detailed, basically plotless, diffuse, serious, weighty literary novel. But it somehow manages to be absolutely addictive."--The Globe and Mail

"Rock 'n' roll!" the 18-year-old Knausgaard writes in his journal, exhorting himself on in his literary calling. That's the spirit of Book 4: a cry from a kid with an amazing record collection who dreams of being a writer, written by the great -writer he finally becomes."--The New York Times