My Struggle: Book 2: A Man in Love

I am putting off downloading Book 3 because Knausgaard's books take over my life. Love his honesty, identify with his "struggle" as parent, human, writer, spouse - Book 2 is better than Book 1 because now we know Karl Ove and can't wait to read more. So when I am ready will savor Book 3 - and go into withdrawl until Books 4-6 are made available in English (first time I ever wished I read Norwegian) - don't know how he does it, I am not a lierary critic but I love these books.

Interesting book. After reading both Volumes One and Two, I'm more puzzled than ever by the critics who are tripping over themselves proclaiming Knausgaard the 21st Century Proust blah blah blah. I suspect we'll all look back in 20 years and chuckle at the over the top critical reception Knausgaard received, which speaks more to the herd like mentality of many critics than it does to Knausgaard himself.
The writing is fine; tight and spare. The narrative is interesting, even the little mundane details often take on a luminance of their own via the writing. But, frankly, when all is put into the balance, there's something thin and unremarkable about the whole thing, almost as if it's an inside joke. It just doesn't cohere into something larger than the sum of it's parts.

In the second installment of his six volume magnum opus, Karl Ove moves from a minute-by-minute accounting of his early life (focusing on The Death of Dad) to his new experiences with marriage (#2) and fatherhood (3 of the little tykes scampering about by book's end). In so doing, Karl Ove transmogrifies from Karl-the-Semi-Sensitive-Rocker to Karl the Conflicted.

The preponderance of volume the second deals with Karl Ove's internal dialectic regarding his new wife and his new family members. Intermittently maudlin and nauseatingly uxorious, Karl Ove punctuates the narrative with Karl-the-Viking sentiments. These latter preoccupations concern the feminization of Swedish (and Norwegian) society, the effete hipsters he encounters and mixed anger/sentimentality to his friend, confessor and unofficial reader who serves as a convenient foil to K.O. himself.

As before, Karl Ove devotes hundreds of pages to the most quotidian details of his generally mundane existence. Either the fellow has total recall capacities or he covertly tape recorded every encounter, musing, rumination and epiphany that crossed his cognitive threshold. In so doing, K.O. has angered some of the real people depicted in the story but, no matter! It's for Art and Karl Ove lives for art. In fact, he brings relationships (including his marriage) to the threshold of catastrophe by his insistence on uninterrupted work time. When he indulges in shared marital tasks, he ricochets between indulging his "feminine" (sensitive, homebody) side, castigating his capitulation to these matters and fancying some sort of 19th Century re-establishment of male-female roles.

Volume #1 had the salient advantage of novelty. In some ways, it was a 21st Century Proustian enterprise and its faults were few compared to its virtues. Volume #2 has more of the former and fewer of the latter. A bit of editing might have helped its focus, but if such was done, it must have been done with a light touch.

Despite very high sales figures in Norway, the books have been less-than-stellar performers in the USA even though highbrow reviewers have lauded the translations so far published here. It seems as if a real commitment is required of any reader to complete the series. Still, one hopes for evolution and Karl Ove has around 4000 more pages to demonstrate that...or not.

Quoting from Michel Serres' GENESIS,

"One must swim in language and sink, as though lost, in its noise, if a proof or a poem that is dense is to be born."

...this is the effect — or affect — of reading Karl Ove Knausgaard's My Struggle Book 2: A Man in Love — I'm in the final pages [429], sink or swim!

I read the first volume, and enjoyed his unusual style and form, but the second loses something, for me, so I doubt I will finish the cycle.
And honestly, who has cover photos of authors smoking these days. Even in Sweden this is very odd.

The story is literally about a guy who is moderately more interesting than I am going about his daily life. I don't know why I kept reading it but I couldn't seem to stop, his writing captivated me. And I loved the end of this volume so the payoff in the end was worth it.

Wszyscy, których znudził lub przeraził pierwszy tom - dajcie szansę drugiemu. Jest wspaniały! Nie wiem, jak teraz będę bez niego żył! Czy po tym Knausgaard może mieć jeszcze cokolwiek do napisania?

This author is able to present wonderful descriptions of how a man thinks at different ages and stages of life. As a Psychiatrist I found this very interesting and engrossing. I am now reading the other volumes. This volume has wonderful descriptions of life in Stockholm.

People have compared him to Proust. I agree but only in the scope of the novel...this is very modern, but as honest as Proust in the detail and depth of feeling. I love knausgaard's searing authenticity. Every sentence rings true as a bell,and I have found myself in tears several times in the first two volumes. I can't wait for the next installment in English! There is something sobering about these books, but he does have a sense of humor (for a Norweigian) and I have laughed out loud as well while reading this.

I was skeptical before buying this novel. Did I really want to read a roman à clef based loosely on the author's life? Can he really succeed in making a seemingly ordinary life interesting enough to fill 4, 5 or 6 volumes? Is he the Scandinavian equivalent of the fat-head fiction writers mass produced here to dazzle the cognoscenti with a memoir of M.y F.abulous A.gony, or, worse, a supercilious philosophizing intellectual boor who will lose me by chapter 3 in his quest to bless the world with his intelligence and snooty wit?

I skimmed several reviews prior to deciding my worries were misguided and that Volume 2 (subtitled "A Man in Love") seemed the best place to start. Note: each novel is self-contained so you can start with any volume and need not fear you will be sucked into reading any of the other 5 volumes; though, if you're like me, you'll want to read at least one more.

Knausgard's writing style is so honest, hypnotic, habit-forming, enduring, cozing. It is not arrogant or hyper-intellectual or ranting; one reviewer even complemented his style as "unliterary." Reading this work is like having a bright, congenial, ordinary fellow (who happens to be a world-wise Norwegian artist) sit down and converse with you "on the level" at an anodyne dinner for hours, discussing ordinary things that happen in the course of life to us all, in varied forms, such as falling in (and out of) love, in-laws, parents, pets, neighbors, child-rearing, reading books, being forced to attend a party where you only know a few people or attended by those you despise, living quarters, career moves, traveling, restaurants, music, sports, work, old loves, old friends, returning to the place you grew up. There is no subject he will deign to discuss, but he's never boring. You'll want to keep buying him more drinks to beg him to stay.

He reifies Socrates' famous quote that the "unexamined life is not worth living." With attention to detail and genuine inquisitiveness of the significant and the mundane, Knausgaard helps one see that, to quote Henry Miller, "we have only to open up to discover what is already there." That is to say, Knausgaard winkles the extraordinary out of the ordinary as pearls from oysters in a way that, as Italy's La Republica observed, is "more real than reality."

I completely concur with the New Yorker's reviewer who assessed that Knausgaard's hit on "the epic side of truth, wisdom."

The controversial, incomparable, whiny, real, massive, sprawling, unnecessary My Struggle. The bandwagon. The chitterchatter on a massive tome that can barely fit on an entire bookshelf. My Struggle. What is there to say about a book that seems to have so much already said about it?

My opinion, I suppose.

I picked up book two after reading book one almost immediately, finding solace, interpersonal charm, and my own identity in the character of Knausgaard. I wanted to continue to look into the life of this man who I felt was so often a mirror to my own. Not entirely a mirror of my life, but enough of my identity to form emotional, dialectical, and artistic similarities and feel for this man careening through his life. In book two he finds love and his first child, and he faces demons in the life of his lover and inside himself as they work through the relationship along with the new responsibilities of parenthood.

As I read, I began to recognize some things - that much of what the audience might find shocking and unparalleled in modern literature is much the same thing that we ignore as a western culture about masculinity, parenthood, and mental illness. Essentially, these are all things we have to deal with assuming we interact with them, and being a man who has had to interact with all of them, I recognize that these books do what no other has done before... Portray this as honestly as possible.

Is Knausgaard a monster because of his reaction (or even setting down) of his parent or spouse's mental illness? Is he a monster for exploring his own feelings in regards to his new baby? Is he a monster because he wants to work and leave the world with something important rather than give a hundred percent of his attention and time to a wife and child? Is he a monster because of what he thinks of other people? Because of what he says? Because of what he does to his first wife?

The honesty and lack of shame with the events of his life and his reactions to them is what I think makes this book so very unique and brings a great deal of the controversy associated with it. Fact: it sucks to be a parent. Fact: men lust after women, even when they are in a relationship. Fact: alcohol is a terrible, wonderful, controlling, and senseless drug that forces the user to make bad decisions, including ignoring when it may be too much. Fact: Love hurts, love hurts, love hurts. Fact: Men cry. Fact: we no longer live in a patriarchal society (there is even a portion where the lack of importance to gender identity in Norway and Sweden is highlighted) and that tends to mean that perhaps the natural inklings, urges, and thoughts of men that may go beyond norms in the current cultural climate of non-gender (in and out of the book). Those tend to be highly criticized in both. Fact: art is difficult, even more so with a full time job, kids, wife, responsibilities, obligations, and ever increasing demands on our time. Fact: Marriage is so difficult.

In western society, much of this is ignored, and because of our cultural identity, our manners, and our strict dedication to patriarchal and parochial rules, we all resort to repressing all of our feelings and thoughts. In this book, we are seeing the various ways in which Knausgaard's identity and sense of self are threatened by the compromises he has to make for his family. One character comments that writing seems less like the glamorous drug-ridden insomniac life, and is instead mostly cleaning the house. Knausgaard might give up his office and time away from home. Knausgaard might not get any writing done. At thirty-something with a wife and a child and the threat of his profession careening away from him just like all of the people who come to his house for dinner one night, Knausgaard might not be Knausgaard anymore.

That scares him.
That scares me.
So doesn't commitment, parenthood, adulthood, a diminished sex life, addiction, work, money, location, being in the middle of everything, being away from everything, art, completing as much as possible before I die, accomplishing nothing before I die,...everything. Everything is scary. Life is only bearable in small snippets - a beer with a friend, a conversation, a story, your children asleep in the back seat, poetry.

So reading this book at the age when Knausgaard was living its events was fascinating, terrifying, familiar - myself a writer, father, and spouse. His writing is approachable and common, and at the same rate the book is peppered with some incredibly beautiful prose that is striking with absolute power, skill, and its ability to sneak up on his reader took my breath away. Furthermore, being so close to the experience of our narrator, I felt the pain and modern frustration that may have been difficult to communicate to audience members who are not intimately familiar with the elements of modern existence that Knausgaard.

Book 2 is an incredible, beautiful, touching, and real narrative about writing, art, life, marriage, parenthood, and love - it is about love and living just as much as it is about everything else. Knausgaard's breezy, modern, colloquial style contributes voice to the thematic wonder of the piece, and as I have mentioned before in my review of 1, resembles Eggers' Heartbreaking Work in style and substance. I loved this book - enjoyed it a great deal better than book 1 likely because of his age and the contents of the piece. I look forward to continuing on with book 3.

‘The life around me was not meaningful. I always longed to be away from it, and always had done. So the life I led was not my own. I tried to make it mine, this was my struggle, because of course I wanted it, but I failed, the longing for something else undermined all my efforts.' This, in a nutshell, is what the My Struggle cycle of four books is about, though at 3,000 plus pages altogether, this lends itself less than any other work to any nutshell characterisation.

A Man in Love Family is the second of four volumes which, while they can be read entirely independently, purport together to tell the story of Karl Ove Knausgaard’s own life. Ostensibly autobiographical, the books appear to have been fictionalised in areas, or at least in the detail, though in the main it checks out. But the point is that Knausgaard’s life is no different from that of any average denizen of the modern, developed world, save perhaps that a writer is free from some of the professional constraints most people find themselves labouring under. His life is meant as an ordinary life, with a more or less fraught relationships, the search for professional success and meaning, friends, marriage, divorce, and so on. His struggle is everyone’s struggle.

A Man in Love, zooms in on the author’s relationship with his second wife, the Swede Linda. At first dazzled by Linda and entirely fulfilled, Knausgaard finds that the magic wears off as he gets used to married life and young children put pressure on his couple. Debates about the time and dedication each must invest in child rearing takes the place of unquestioning mutual devotion. And once again, Knausgaard labours to recover the sense of meaning he thought he had found in his everyday life.

Much else happens, ranging from the semi-tragic to the entirely comical. Knausgaard’s writing, indeed, proceeds by open and never-closed parenthesis, one subject or anecdote recalling another one, and so forth without always closing the first. His narration has a rambling, Russian-doll structure that creates the impression of a table-corner or pub-counter confession, and gives it the aura of a friend’s confidence. The book is occasionally long-winded, but it is never boring nor heavy-going. Perhaps my only criticism of this second volume is that actually Linda does not come across as very likeable. It is no coincidence, finally that the cycle title, My Struggle, or in Norwegian Min Kamp, is the same as Hitler’s Mein Kampf. Obfuscation, misdirection: these are also part and parcel of this dense, rich, and fascinating work.

After reading Volume 1 of the six volume My Struggle, I could hardly wait for Volume 2. For once my enthusiasm was rewarded. The first third of Knausgaard's six book opus is extremely well done. Volume 2 is a distinctive work in form, in descriptive power, in insight into character, in sensibility, and in depth and breadth of vision. Also well translated by Don Bartlett.

I only hope that the difficulties of the form do not give this work too limited an audience. This book is not an easy read, but the effort made to comprehend it is very rewarding. Knausgaard switches quickly from scene to scene, goes back and forth in time, and zooms in and out on particular characters and motifs. You have to focus and pay close attention or you can easily get lost.

Coupled with that is his amazing descriptive power. The author has a telling eye for detail. Whether it is a meal, a walk through downtown Stockholm, the living area of someone's apartment, he gets it all right in precise, deftly realized detail. The reader feels that he is there. While the form is hardly "realistic" in the conventional sense, the description is as naturalistic as anything Zola or a writer of that stripe would have offered. It all seems accurate as well. Having been to Stockholm a number of times, this reviewer can vouch for the accuracy of the rendering of the locale where most of the book is set. The streets are accurately named and placed. I have shopped in the bookstore that Karl Ove frequents in the downtown shopping center, Stureplan, on Birger Jarlsgatan. It is all there.

But these things, as well done as they are, are mere parlor tricks compared to the feat Knausgaard has pulled off in portraying the characters psychologically. I don't think the title does the book justice. It is not just about a man in love, it is about a man growing into maturity, meeting and falling in love with (yes), the woman with whom he has three children, and taking more and more responsibility for himself as he actualizes himself as a father, husband and writer. Karl Ove and Linda, the wife, are imperfect human beings, but so lovingly and accurately rendered. We see playing out here exactly what Karl Ove tells us his struggle is: to connect meaningfully with the world and the people around him even while he has a strong tug in the other direction, towards introversion and self-involvement. And as the book progresses, Karl Ove realizes and helps us realize just what he is becoming as a responsible, although always imperfect human being.

Toward the end of the book, Karl Ove opines that in showing us himself and in our knowing him we can come to know ourselves and the world around us. As I said in reviewing Volume 1 of My Struggle, this reminds me of Montaigne, the Renaissance essayist. That is what he did, ever so expertly, and Knausgaard does it as well.

This is not Proust. We are not sitting around sipping tea and savoring the taste of madeleines. Nor are we in search of lost time or time past. We are at a New Year's dinner party, or in Pelikanen, here and now, the Stockholm bar and restaurant that Karl Ove and Geir, his pal, frequent, working out just who they and we are and who we and they want to be as we go down the road of life, into the future.

A bonus: Karl Ove throws in his insights on Dostoevsky, on the Norwegian poet Olav H. Hauge, on Holderlin and a host of other writers. It is rewarding and educational. I have added to my must read list. You will too.

This is an amazing achievement. I recommend it wholeheartedly.

Back in December 2013 I reviewed Karl Ove Knausgaard’s “My Struggle – Book One, A Death In The Family” and spoke highly of his attention to the most trivial of details, the minutiae which makes up our daily existence. How often does a novel go into such triviality? Of course taking three pages to describe the ordering of a takeaway cup of coffee could be considered frustrating, but when you’re struggling with the reasons for existence it could well be the minor details which shape the person we are. A “novel” which constantly reads like an open sore of a biography, how on earth is it so gripping?

Book two of Karl Ove’s six book series, moves from his struggle with his father’s death from alcoholism to his move from Norway to Sweden and his falling in love and having children. My edition is 573 pages and basically starts and ends with our writer taking his children to a broken down fair ground, but it is the flashbacks to how his children came into being and his reactions to becoming a family man that is the real story here. Or the story of Karl Ove’s struggle to just be a good person is probably more to the point.

For my full review go to [...]

A review of Books One, Two, and Three by Tailwinds Press. www.tailwindspress.com
“A life is simple to understand,” Karl Ove Knausgaard declares in the second volume of My Struggle, “the elements that determine it are few.” Thousands of pages later, it seems that this reductionist aphorism was most likely a joke. The complete account of Knausgaard’s life so far—an excruciatingly detailed, introspective warts-and-all expose of everyday life in Norway and Sweden, as lived by a blue-eyed Gen-X male from Southern Norway—clocks in at over 3500 pages. The small conundrums of Knausgaard’s life pale beside the larger enigma of educated readers in Western industrialized countries: for some reason, a quasi-fictive memoir written by an occasional stay-at-home dad which devotes countless pages to the onerous social obligations presented by his kids’ birthday parties, the various hygiene failings of his vodka-sipping grandma’s house near Kristiansand, and the Byzantine intricacies of Stockholm’s apartment rental market, sells surprisingly well. It’s been reported that one out of every ten Norwegians have, if not read, at least purchased the book. Ever since Brooklyn-based Archipelago Press published the first English language version of Book One in 2012, American critics have awaited each new installment of Knausgaard’s maybe-life story with baited breath.

Is the cheap thrill of carrying a book called My Struggle on the subway really going to get you through a six-volume tome? Probably not, unless you love the idea of seeing how Scandinavians outside of Ikea catalogues really live. Book One contains the highlights of Knausgaard’s teen years in southern Norway and his adulthood as a struggling writer in both Norway and Sweden: meticulously documented quantum bricks of long-sentenced memory, focusing primarily on the degeneration of Karl Ove’s troubled alcoholic father, are bracketed by philosophical observations on death, memory, meaning, and family. The collected essays in Book Two address the tensions between familial obligations and desires, the banality of day-to-day life, and the social engineering of the Swedish state, all bracketed by Karl Ove’s move to Sweden in a moment of personal crisis and his growing relationship with Linda, his future wife and the eventual mother of his three children. Book Three, by contrast, is pure narrative: it begins with Karl Ove’s earliest memories as a boy in 1970s Tromøya, Norway, and ends with his last days in school before moving off the island for his father’s work-related relocation.

Knausgaard’s magnum opus draws its strength from the author’s faith that writing tomes that blur the boundaries between fiction and memoir is meaningful, which is mirrored by the faith of his European readers (and lately his American ones): while the commercial success of My Struggle is probably overhyped, considering that (at its most sensational) it’s essentially the story of a relatively perceptive Everyman going about his own business in the stodgiest of European settings, the book has made a spectacular splash. At 3500 plus pages, Knausgaard and his readers definitely manifest stamina, not to mention heroic commitment. But commitment to what?

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As is traditional for books about a problematic relationship with a parent, Book One ends with the numbness of funeral planning. “A town that does not keep its dead out of sight, that leaves people where they died, on highways and byways, in parks and parking lots, is not a town but a hell, “ Knausgaard declares early in Book One, “The fact that this hell reflects our life experience in a more realistic and essentially truer way is of no consequence.”

Death, according to Knausgaard, is the one thing in life that has not been destroyed, perverted, commodified, or generally left bereft of meaning by society. Consequently, it is the one thing that is hidden from view, at any cost, by modern social normative standards. Once a sacred rite framed by momentous religious or philosophical trappings, Knausgaard observes, death is now a subset of nihilistic teenaged angst. In his view, Western liberal society—as epitomized by the extreme of the Swedish socialist utopia--has positioned “equality and justice” as the overriding goal of life and society, to the exclusion of anything that is truly meaningful.

And yet death is not merely a sociological phenomenon. It also has a literary element. A compelling review by Ben Lerner essentially posits that much of the tension and success of My Struggle stems from our latent sense that the very act of writing—at least the very act of writing a work that either is, or resembles, a memoir written by a living man—is a tango with mortality. The “all-in” commitment of this type of writing—the type that exposes everything in its shameful and gory vividness—is an authorial death-wish that can only reach closure with the conclusion of the final book and the destruction of the writer’s career and authorial identity. It is only with death, metaphorical or actual, that the long-promised, semi-mythical “tying together” of all the endless data, the "one thing after another" aspect of a personal history, will be revealed.

To some extent, this background preoccupation with death is present in all works that have a strong connection to a nonfictional reality. But it is forefront in the thematic concerns of My Struggle. In the closing paragraphs of Book One, Karl Ove identifies his father’s body, spends [several days] cleaning up the squalid house where Knausgaard senior died, and then has second thoughts. He calls the undertaker, urgent and sheepish. He wants to see the body again.

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Insufficient preoccupation with mortality, of course, is not the only problem that Knausgaard has with the Swedish nanny state and the Western liberal social program at large. Knausgaard sees modernity as an enemy to meaning—which is actually dead on, if you interpret meaning (as he does with a wink and a nudge, along with most of the Game of Thrones viewership) as synonymous with the traditional Nordic virtues of running around stabbing at things with spears and eating food skewered on dead tree branches as your enemies lie dead at your feet. Discussing a friend’s book about a boxing gym in Sweden, Knausgaard observes that at the gym, “the values that the welfare state had otherwise subverted, such as masculinity, honor, violence, and pain, were upheld, and the interest for me lay in how different society looked when viewed from that angle, with the set of values that they had retained.”

To confront this more primal world without the baggage of the modern world, he declares, is an “art”: you must “try to see it as it was on its own terms, that is, and then, with that as a platform, look outwards again.” From this acknowledgment of an older world comes insight. In one sense, Knausgaard is making a culturally universal observation about the warrior past that still lurks in the psyches of many peoples that are not currently devoted to relentless rape, pillage, and the wearing of hats with horns on them. This compelling description of life as a Swedish “house husband” references the primal man still lurking inside:

In the class and culture we belonged to, that meant adopting the same role, previously called the woman’s role. I was bound to it like Odysseus to the mast: if I wanted to free myself I could do that, but not without losing everything. As a result I walked around Stockholm’s streets, modern and feminized, with a furious nineteenth-century man inside me.

But Knausgaard is also sending an unsubtle Norwegian jab in the eye of the hyper-liberal, ultra-PC postwar Swedish establishment. The modern front lines of this conflict reside no longer in a medieval Anglo-Saxon village, but rather in, for example, a birthing class in Stockholm:

We went to the pre-natal classes together, the room was packed and the audience sensitive to every word spoken from the podium; if there was anything remotely controversial, from a biological point of view, a low sucking of breath ran through the rows, for this was taking place in a country where gender was a social construct for the body, outside what everyone agreed was common sense, there was no place. Instinct, came a voice from the podium. No, no, no! the angry women in the room whispered. How could you say such a thing! I saw a woman sobbing on a bench, her husband was ten minutes late for the course, and I thought, I am not alone.

None of these cultural tensions are particularly unique to Knausgaard or even to Scandinavia. But they are poignant to Knausgaard as a writer because they represent the transition from nature and direct experience to knowledge and abstraction. How do you suck out the real meaning from a moment or experience, and therefore life, if you live in a modern world that discounts the primal and instinctive as childish? And worse: how do you do it if you are a writer, someone who is by definition an agent of abstraction?

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There is a pervasive sense in My Struggle of a commitment to art in the very deepest sense. On a basic and accessible level, there’s something refreshing about the idea, in a postmodern age, that writing can “solve” anything, not least the tangled knots in Knausgaard’s dysfunctional family drama, his mundane struggles with raising three children with his poet wife, and so on.

More problematically, Knausgaard’s commitment to the aesthetic enterprise results in criticisms of the sanctimonious, unstylish Swedish social structure that look disingenuous. Only in a socialist utopia, one suspects, could two artists with no visible source of steady cash flow afford an apartment in the trendiest parts of Stockholm and send their children to daycare with those from the upper middle class. Such unspoken elephants in the discursive space, which are a common feature (for example) of Michael Moore productions, do not necessarily detract from the merit of a work. But they convert Knausgaard’s social commentary into mere belles-lettres. They are stylistic exercises in how a writer and an artist connects to the outside world. That Knausgaard acknowledges the place of his commentary is evident from the title of his work.

Knausgaard’s true predecessor, of course, is not Hitler, but rather Proust. In many obvious ways, My Struggle takes its cue from another six-volume work that chronicles every aspect of an individual life in meticulous and sometimes distressing detail. Yet the fundamental posture of Knausgaard’s work does not follow Proust; it mirrors, and is opposite to, Proust. The Marcel of In Search of Lost Time is a privileged and distanced version of Proust himself—wealthy, heterosexual, and politically establishmentarian; the relatively non-mainstream aspects of Proust’s own life (his Jewishness, his homosexuality, and his Dreyfusard beliefs) are relegated to the characters of Bloch, Swann, and a seemingly limitless list of openly or closeted friends. By contrast, Knausgaard has somehow managed to pass off his own place in society—as a respected writer, romantically successful white heterosexual male, father, and member of a cosmopolitan literary elite—as that of a vulnerable underdog. The Karl Ove of My Struggle, the narrative emphasizes, is the victim of an unending string of indignities large and small. He doesn’t get on with his father; he’s bullied by his older brother as a child; Swedes are annoying; it’s hard to get an apartment in Stockholm; and we are constantly reminded of a string of devastating sexual rejections (beginning with adolescence and culminating in a disastrous first meeting with his now-wife). Knausgaard comes from a different age than Proust, with distinct needs. It is the age of Oprah, which originates in our ancestors’ preoccupation with Freud: it is the age of fascination with the undercurrents of darkness hiding behind confident and conventional exteriors.

In this sense, Knausgaard—and his alter ego, Karl Ove—are merely what the elite cosmopolitan establishment has always unconsciously anticipated and desired. It is not necessarily his talent that makes him compelling to the critics, but more what he is and represents. In an age where literature is struggling mightily against the widespread (perhaps correct) notion that reading is kind of neurotic and nerdy, the domain of bespectacled small women with cats and pasty asexual guys who play World of Warcraft for money, Knausgaard is not just any guy: he is a representation of the writer par excellence--a dose of domestic and existential angst, assembled in a tall, compelling, grungy, rock star-like Norwegian writer. A sensitive, tall, male of the Scandinavian variety: bad boy, lover, writer and doting father. Brad Pitt is probably signing up for Berlitz classes so he can play the guy in the movie.

This observation invites some troubling questions about where culture is headed generally. We all struggle; in fact, if you’re in the West and middle-class, you probably struggle in the same ways Knausgaard does, with the same First World Problems and the same cosmopolitan urban intellectual experience. Why is his struggle the one to receive a box set? Put another way: could an African immigrant living in London have written a similar work to such rapturous applause? What about a Chinese-American woman practicing law in San Jose? My Struggle is the ultimate literary SWPL (Stuff White People Like) of our time: post-millennial existence articulated through the words of a really tall, blond, long-haired, bearded Norwegian guy who seems pretty cool. The kind of self-deprecating (but good-looking) guy whom you’d like to hang out with after one of his readings, maybe getting drunk on craft beer and talking about Dostoyevsky as he grumbles about how much he actually hates and feels shamed by the acclaim, just as other good-looking scruffy intellectual Scandinavians stop by to say hello and roast a wild boar together on the steps of a Williamsburg bar. It’s the kind of guy who secretly loves talking about how Japanese tourists are totally obsessed with him:

What once had irked me, walking through the town with a stroller, was now history, forgotten and outlandish, as I pushed a shabby carriage with three children on board around the streets, often with tow or three shopping bags dangling from one hand, deep furrows carved in my brow and down my cheeks, and eyes that burned with a vacant ferocity I had long lost any contact with. I no longer bothered about the potentially feminized nature of what I did, now it was a question of getting the children to wherever we had to go, with no sit-down strikes or any other ideas they could dream up to thwart my wishes for an easy morning or afternoon. Once a crowd of Japanese tourists stopped on the other side of the street and pointed at me, as though I were the ringmaster of some circus parade or something. They pointed. There you can see a Scandinavian man! Look, and tell your grandchildren what you saw!

The Japanese tourists are not unique. We are all Japanese tourists, fascinated by juxtapositions of power and vulnerability, anticipating the release of the English language version of Book Four.

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According to Knausgaard, we lose the battle against the destruction of meaning on two fronts. On one hand, it is part of a process of aging and becoming an adult. On another level, it is due to larger sociological forces associated with modernity. My Struggle is arguably an attempt to return to some childlike level of connection to reality. Describing an incident when he was eight, Karl Ove observes:

So when my father raised the sledgehammer above his head and let it fall on the rock that spring evening in the mid-1970s, he was doing so in a world he knew and was familiar with. It was not until I myself reached this same age that I understood that there was indeed a price to pay for this.

Knausgaard goes on to explain that this price is the one that comes with the reconfiguration of the relationship between aging, knowledge and time:

As your perspective of the world increases not only is the pain that it inflicts on you less but also its meaning….At length we bring it within the scope of our senses and we stabilize it with fixer. When it has been fixed, we call it knowledge. Throughout childhood and teenage years, we strive to attain the correct distance to objects and phenomena. We read, we learn, we experience, we make adjustments. Then one day we reach the point where all the necessary distances have been set, all the necessary systems have been put in place. This is when time picks up speed.

We thus lose meaning and have lost meaning. The modern liberal project, post-Renaissance, has placed knowledge and abstraction, above the spiritual, natural, and primal. We are unable to see things as they are, to step beyond the representations that we have created (and photography has only accelerated this curious process). The world has closed, the universe is known, distances and time have shrunk. The global projects of government and of a society dedicated to full equality and justice can now proceed, full steam ahead.

We film our lives on Go-Pro cameras and take selfies. Real meaning once was to be found while slowly pouring milk on cornflakes in a Tromøya house in the 1970s, watching and appreciating the moment in all its intensity.

Having just finished My Struggle book II I find myself agreeing with another reviewer in that it was unputdownable. My question that I keep coming back to though is why? What makes these books so compelling and readable? At first this one actually started out a bit slow for me; the first 20-30 pages I started to feel a bit bored but then before I even knew it I was sucked in again into Karl Ove’s world. The writing is good, but to be honest it’s nothing extraordinary. There is a certain visceral honesty and unforgiving openness that draws the reader into this fascinating but altogether ordinary world where he deals with love, family, children, friends, parties, alcoholic neighbor, and some of the struggle that comes with fame. A part of me cringes at how honest and ruthless he can be in his descriptions of his kids and their Mom and I can only wonder the effect it had on his relationship afterwards. At the same time one has to respect someone who is that honest and open with their feelings; his book is almost like a heavy dose of reality TV only all the action takes place inside his head. I also think another part of the appeal is that it’s so foreign. It takes place in Norway and Sweden and I find myself wondering from time to time if I would feel this compelled to follow his life and thoughts if it took place in Nebraska or even in Chicago or New York? A big part of me I think was intrigued by how someone in Norway and Sweden lives. It strikes home the point that no matter where we live, what country what city, we are all basically the same in that we all struggle with the same fears, anxieties over family and jobs and children and love; the struggle that Karl Ove describes is universal. Can't wait for book III!

Some of the philosophical meanderings totally confused me. I had to read and reread paragraphs to try to understand where these conversations with his friends were going. The swings in his perceptions about his life were also frustrating.
The minutiae of his life kept me reading, I kept hoping for some dramatic arc, but the gaps in explaining his life's certain events
led me to a certain frustration. Also, references to Scandinavians unfamiliar to me, left me cold. This could have been a much more
memorable read with editorial guidance and cuts.

In Knausgaard's My Struggle: Book 1 I was fascinated by his ability to find meaning in the most banal and mundane of moments. At one point he wrote that "what we see every day is what we never see" and I think that one sentence is at least a decent summation of what makes these books interesting.

I have to admit that while I did enjoy this Book 2, my fascination with the overall premise has definitely subsided. This is at least partly due to the inevitable familiarity which I've developed with the style, but it is also partly due to the content. Where Book 1 dealt so deeply with the death of Knausgaard's father, Book 2 deals mainly with falling in love and having children, and while both of these subjects are certainly interesting, they don't carry the same philosophical weight with me that death does. That being said, I remain interested and will continue to work through the series.

Knausgaard's talent for the meaningful observation of the ordinary was for me the great strength of this novel. His honesty (can it be called honesty when it's technically fiction?) in all situations really stands out, even (or especially) when it shows him in a negative light. For instance, as you read about him describing some of his seemingly selfish anxieties about marriage and parenting, you realize that you'd rarely hear such negativity or brutal honesty expressed in the company of even your close friends, and you will almost certainly recognize that some of the same angsts have crossed your own mind. These raw emotions feel authentic and that authenticity drives this novel as effectively as it did in Book 1.

While it's hard for me to describe reading the first two books in this series as pleasant, I would most definitely refer to these experiences as interesting, sometimes fascinating and certainly worthwhile; and that's why I read. Enjoy!

I thought that the first volume in this series was fantastic. I began the second with hopes of it being as good or even better.

I soon found that volume two unfortunately does not manage to rise above its own detail to the level of universal experience. As a reader, I cannot relate to the experiences of a writer navigating the Scandinavian literary scene. Can I relate to his experience of falling in love? Unfortunately not, as here we're too close to his reality. All I need to do is look up his wife on the Internet and discover that she's an ordinary person like you or me. This shatters the illusion; and I for one then begin to wonder what it is about this man's life that is so important. Of course, maybe this is exactly the point: there's nothing important about his life. But if we accept that, we still have to be able to understand as readers why he writes for us -- why we should care about his experiences. Reading volume one, we're clear that this man's experiences are ours too, despite the detail with which he depicts them; volume two leaves this question unanswered, and thus seems mired in self-indulgence.

The writing in these books is not for everyone (my husband, for example)--but it is most definitely for me. I pick up so many novels and can't get into them, so it's not as if I am a particularly patient reader. And I initially thought I wouldn't like these books because I read in reviews that they "don't have a plot" and nothing much happens. They do have "plots" and indeed some rather dramatic things happen. Book 2 is partly a romance! So love happens (sex, not so much). And heartbreak and lots of agony and despair as well as incredible joy. But as other readers have noted, the suspense and tension are more a product of the writing style, so that you might have to remind yourself to breathe while reading a passage about walking down a street and entering a building. But these books are more than just entertainment. I am always thinking about them when I am not reading. I feel I have more appreciation for life as a result of having read them. Thank you, thank you, Karl Ove Knausgaard for struggling.

The thrill I experienced with Book 1 was not reproduced in Book 2, but I still loved it. I will gladly read Book 3, but may take a break to get someone else's voice inside my head for awhile. I love Karl Ove, but I am so thankful that he doesn't know me; I don't like being skewered, and no one but Geir escapes his Sauron-like gaze.

Several critics I trust mentioned that a reader could start with Vol. 2 and always go back to Vol. 1. Once I got past the opening scene, I was riveted. My favorites passages were when he struggles with his will to write and his often conflicting obligations to his friends, family and wife.

the honestly and sinserity of these books are just truly amazing. my girlfriend complained that not enough was happening, but I like just that. It's just life. But it's life viewed through the eyes of a brilliand and keen observer.