AshehougAgency

My Struggle - vol. 2

Winner of the Sørlandet Literary Prize 2010 (for MY STRUGGLE 1-3)
“Over the last years, my faith in literature had grown weaker and weaker. I read, and thought: Someone has made this up. Maybe the reason for this was that fiction and stories had besieged our lives completely. That there had been an inflation. No matter where you turned, there was fiction. All these millions of pocket books, hardback books, DVDs and TV series; they were all about made-up people in a made-up, but realistic world. And the news in the papers, on TV and on the radio, they had the exact same form, the documentaries had the same form - that, too, was stories, and it made no difference whether the story being told had actually taken place or not. […] I was unable to write within this reality, it didn’t work; every single sentence made me think: but this is just something you’re making up. It has no value. Fiction has no value; the documentary has no value. The only thing I found valuable, that still yielded meaning, was diaries and essays, those areas of literature that weren’t about story-telling, weren’t about anything, but only consisted of a voice, the unique personality’s voice, a life, a face, eyes you could meet. What is a piece of art, if not the eyes of another human being?”
from MY STRUGGLE - SECOND BOOK

Whereas MY STRUGGLE - FIRST BOOK focused on the main character's troubled relationship with his father, SECOND BOOK shifts the attention to love and family life with wife and children. While brilliantly portraying both the madness of being in love and the earthshaking experience of becoming a father, the book is also a furious immersion in daily life, with nightmarish birthday parties for children, quarrels with disturbed neighbours, dinner parties with your spouse's friends and the writer's frustration with not having the space and time to write.

Praise for MY STRUGGLE - SECOND BOOK:

“Ruthless beauty… This whole idea seems incredibly risky, but here, this risk is translated into literary suspense of the finest quality… In my view, My Struggle is brilliant and irresponsible literature, both at once. And maybe this is the source of its strong appeal.”
(Aftenposten)

“I know it sounds unbearable. And throughout the book, you find everything you fear in a text like this: Whining and quarrelling, coffee-shop conversations from hell, moaning about the times we’re living in, loud assertions about the author’s pitifulness. Mixed with piercing exposures of other people’s secrets and stories. All the same, it feels impossible to stop reading. This is not only due to the literary form, the talent of portrayal, all the wisdom the text contains. But also because you understand that you’re witnessing an existential project, which, on one level, will meet challenges known to all of us.”
(Dagbladet)

“My Struggle. Second Book confirms that Knausgård is about to create and publish a truly exceptional literary work”
(6 of 6 stars, Fædrelandsvennen)

“A bewitching novel. Just as autobiographical, just as challenging, and just as good as volume one”
(Bergens Tidende)

“Second Book is a scream, a paradoxical cry for belonging. The life of a hermit-like, child-watching author pulls in many directions. No reason to stop here; I’ll continue reading.”
(Klassekampen)

“We have to do with an author who writes on a first rate international level, while exposing the most private and embarrassing things, something that most likely will go on for a couple of thousand of pages… There is no getting around that My Struggle is great literature”
(5 of 6 stars, VG)

“Impressive from Knausgård. There are tons of reasons not to write like Knausgård does. But when he does, the result is radiant literature… The trivial, the painful, the sublime, the original and the embarrassing are placed side by side… The raw urge to leave everything in order to do the one necessary thing – to write – is placed next to the tenderest description of a little child.”
(NRK)

First published: 2009, Forlaget Oktober
Karl Ove Knausgård: Biography and bibliography

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