Reader Score
84%
84% of readers
recommend this book
Critic Reviews
Good
Based on 6 reviews on
A New York Times bestseller, My Struggle: Book 1 introduces American readers to the audacious, addictive, and profoundly surprising international literary sensation that is the provocative and brilliant six-volume autobiographical novel by Karl Ove Knausgaard.
It has already been anointed a Proustian masterpiece and is the rare work of dazzling literary originality that is intensely, irresistibly readable. Unafraid of the big issues--death, love, art, fear--and yet committed to the intimate details of life as it is lived, My Struggle is an essential work of contemporary literature."Powerfully alive . . . Knausgaard is intense and utterly honest, unafraid to voice universal anxieties . . . He wants us to inhabit the ordinariness of life, which is sometimes visionary, sometimes banal, and sometimes momentous, but all of it perforce ordinary because it happens in the course of a life, and happens, in different forms, to everyone . . . There is something ceaselessly compelling about Knausgaard's book." --James Wood, The New Yorker (selected as one of the Books of the Year)
"A fantastic novel . . . I cannot say anything other than that I am looking forward desperately to the rest of it." --Dagsavisen (Norway) "Knausgaard's thinking is magnificently unbridled." --Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (germany) "Between Proust and the woods . . . Like granite, precise and forceful. More real than reality." --La Repubblica (Italy) "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 . . ." --Västerbottens-kuriren (Sweden)