Have you ever read a writer whose ideas are so intriguing, their reflections so acutely human, that you want to crawl into their mind and let their thoughts envelop you for a while? For me, that writer is Knausgaard and he wrote a 3600-page novel, broken into six volumes, so …
Knausgaard’s work is a bildungsroman, focusing on his formative years and the various relationships that had deep and profound impacts on him. Book One focuses primarily on Knausgaard’s relationship with his father and his preoccupation with death. As you read, you are privy to each excruciating detail of his life, the painful and the enlightening, which often exist simultaneously. Reading the minutia of another’s life, much like the process of writing one’s life, is laborious, and you begin to question the necessity of some scenes, but then the more you read the more you recognize that every single moment has its own revelatory ordinariness that contributes to the whole, the whole book but also the whole person in whose life you’ve become invested.
While reading, I found myself thinking about the mundane repetition of life, the routines we create, whether intentionally or inadvertently—how the routines feel monotonous, yet they color our experience and our perception. So many events feel small until we have the perspective to see their impact. This reading experience was corporal and cerebral. Now on to Book Two, which is about love.
Synopsis: “My Struggle: Book One 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.”
Have you read this? Have you read Proust? Does this sound like your kind of book? 💛
Read It Like Rory 