The adult Karl Ove is failing to write a novel, and his antagonists are many and small: his wife’s requests, city construction, noisy snowplows. the way he looked around as he locked the car, the subtle nuances of the various sounds that rose from the hall as he removed his coat-everything was a sign, everything could be interpreted.”Īs the protagonist ages, this struggle grows into the larger question of how to carry out meaningful work in the face of everyday demands. Through these pieces of the physical world, Knausgaard ruminates on the meaning-charged world that a child inhabits, and one senses that part of the “struggle” of the adult is that of finding a balance where meaning exists but does not terrorize, as happened in his childhood: “I knew his moods and had learned how to predict them long ago. Details pile up early on: his mother’s keys lying on the telephone table, a ceramic vase of dried flowers, the sound of the protagonist’s eight-year-old feet on the shingles and his father’s subsequent anger. The ambition is enormous, and the work follows through on it. Starfish-like, Knausgaard wraps his mind around a thousand remembered moments and pulls them back into the great gut of his autobiographical novel.

My Struggle, Book One by Karl Ove Knausgaard, translated by Don Bartlettīook One of Karl Ove Knausgaard’s much-discussed six-volume series, Min kamp (My Struggle), captures the pulse and tempo of being alive.

Karl knausgaard