Leland de la Durantaye
Why would you read a six-volume, 3,600-page Norwegian novel about a man writing a six-volume, 3,600-page Norwegian novel? The short answer is that it is breathtakingly good, and so you cannot stop yourself, and would not want to…Knausgaard has a tremendous essayistic talent, and Book 2, like Book 1, is rich in reflections on everything from the sociology of death to the psychopathology of everyday life. As with all great writers, the ideas or theories are woven into the story, dramatized, and this is as true of the question of what gives meaning as of any other question in the book.
From the Publisher
Intense and vital . . . Where many contemporary writers would reflexively turn to irony, Knausgaard is intense and utterly honest, unafraid to voice universal anxieties . . . The need for totality . . . brings superb, lingering, celestial passages . . . He wants us to inhabit he 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 . . .” —James Wood, The New Yorker
“Steadily absorbing, lit up by pages of startling insight and harrowing honesty, My Struggle introduces into world literature a singular character and immerses us in his fascinating Underground Man consciousness.” —Phillip Lopate
“A rope round the neck, a knife in the heart. The book is full of magic. The world simply opens up . . . Knausgaard will have the same status as Henrik Ibsen and Knut Hamsun.” —Kristeligt Dagblad (Denmark)
“Ruthless beauty.” —Aftenposten (Norway)
“This first installment of an epic quest should restore jaded readers to life.” —The Independent
“Between Proust and the woods . . . Like granite, precise and forceful. More real than reality.” —La Repubblica (Italy)
“Breathtakingly good.” —The New York Times Book Review
“[Knausgaard's] preternatural facility for description . . . speaks not only to the sheer pleasure his fiction affords, but to the philosophical stakes of that pleasure.” —Mark Sussman, Los Angeles Review of Books
Kirkus Review
★ 2015-01-29
Raising a family, making art and the difficulty of reconciling the two drives the remarkable second installment of this six-volume novel-as-memoir.At the end of the first volume of this series, Knausgaard (Out of This World, 2005; A Time for Everything, 2009) recalled bumbling as an adolescent and burying his father as an adult. This time, he remembers falling in love and becoming a father himself. As the novel-memoir opens, he's at loose ends with his wife, Linda, and three children, whom he can't help but see as intrusions upon his efforts to write. From there, the story swings back to nine years earlier as he leaves Norway for Stockholm, where he meets Linda in 1999 at a writers' seminar, falls in love and starts a family. Knausgaard's strategy throughout the series is to build immersive effects by delivering highly detailed descriptions of his minor experiences and paths of thought; in this case, much of the heart of the book is taken up by Linda's pregnancy and their anticipation of their first child, from crib shopping to miscarriage scares to the actual birth itself. He presents all of it in plainspoken terms; the power and relief of the birth isn't drawn in triumphant rhetoric but in a sense of exhaustion. ("Two women began to tidy up around us as we watched this creature that was suddenly there.") Knausgaard doesn't always present himself as father-of-the-year material, sweating how much time he'll have to research and write his second novel and squabbling with his family and fussy neighbors in the search for some peace and quiet. "Relationships were there to eradicate individuality, to fetter freedom and suppress that which was pushing through," he whimpers. But his candor, if not his attitude, is admirable—he's not rationalizing his behavior but flatly, honestly representing it. A patient exploration of courtship and fatherhood stripped clean of politesse.
