AshehougAgency

My Struggle - vol. 3

Winner of the Sørlandet Literary Prize 2010 (for MY STRUGGLE 1-3)

"My fear of foxes let go when I was around seven, but the void it left was quickly filled by other things. One morning I walked past the television, which had been left on although no one was watching, they were showing a matinee, and there, oh no, there was a man without a head walking up a staircase! Oooooh! I ran into my room, but that didn’t help much, of course; I was just as alone and defenceless there, so I had to try to find mum, if she was home, or Yngve. The image of the headless man haunted me, and not only in the dark, like all my other horrible visions. No, the headless man could come over me in broad daylight, and if I was alone when it happened, it didn’t help that the sun was shining and the birds were singing; my heart pounded and the fear spread out to every last nerve cell. It was almost worse – that the darkness was in the light, too. Yes, if there was something I was really afraid of, it was the darkness in the light. The horrible thing was that nothing could be done about it. Screaming for help didn’t help, standing in the middle of an open square didn’t help, running didn’t help."
from MY STRUGGLE - THIRD BOOK

In MY STRUGGLE - THIRD BOOK we return to the world to the world of childhood and early adolescence. Karl Ove grows up in a small island community in the 70s and 80s, and in many ways his childhood years are ordinary. He spends time with friends, listens to music, starts noticing girls. At the same time, Karl Ove often feels alienated and mystified by his surroundings.

MY STRUGGLE - THIRD BOOK describes a world where children and adults lead parallel lives, lives that never meet. We follow a child’s rising self-awareness in a world in which the present is constantly shaped by the past, a world in which one is filled with longing after another way of being, after other worlds within what is known.

Praise for MY STRUGGLE - THIRD BOOK:

”In My Struggle. Third Book, sensuous descriptions of childhood are interwoven with reflections about time, memory and existence. This combination works brilliantly… this is extremely literary… My Struggle. Third Book is not only riveting and well-written; it is also thoughtful and intelligent. In short: Knausgård has done it again”
(Norwegian Broadcasting Corporation)

“a captivating read”
(Aftenposten)

“fascinating…. I am still breathlessly waiting for more… He recreates the seemingly grey everyday existence with a sensory richness which, at its best, is fabulous… In an outstanding manner, this book has a “pageturner” feel to it… Something sensational is about to happen to Knausgård and his boundlessly ambitious six-volume experiment. In my years as a professional reader, I cannot remember having experienced a similar enthusiasm for a literary project: My Struggle is being discussed in a way that is stimulating for the entire literary field. Equally important, Knausgård increaslingly emerges as an author whose novels possess the power and the qualities to challenge the hegemony of Norwegian fiction… The Solstad generation is finally about to have a worthy contender for the top positions in the Norwegian literary hierarchy”
(Dagbladet)

“a poignant novel… this coming-of-age novel flows with a lightness and sensitivity few others can copy”
(Dagens Næringsliv)

“Karl Ove Knausgård makes young and old, men and women, discuss pain, life and literature. The readers gather around Knausgård’s self-consuming, dark novel… He lays out his body, his pain, his defeats, as literature, with a power of persuasion similar to an act of Communion… In scale, this testimony of its time might beat anything that has ever been written in Norwegian. The work has indisputable qualities. And its power of fascination is formidable.”
(Klassekampen)

“My Struggle. Third Book is supported by the same incredibly rich and supple language found in the previous [novels] –and in all of Knausgård’s books… Do I want to read more? Absolutely.”
(Fædrelandsvennen)

“a marvel of a novel… This is magnificent.”
(Stavanger Aftenblad)

“reading on becomes an obsession… [Knausgård’s] accomplishment as an author is that he can dig out his subjective truth and convey it in a manner that produces an existential echo in all of us”
(Agderposten)

“an exceptional description of childhood”
(Dag og Tid)

“It is its language and its novelistic qualities that make My Struggle a masterpiece… Knausgård writes about Karl Ove in the way Proust writes about Marcel… The novel My Struggle appears, at half time, as a masterpiece… Let it be Knausgård’s problem that he, as it says in Second Book, is about to lose faith in literature. For the rest of us, My Struggle is a confirmation of the power and possibilities of literature”
(Morgenbladet)

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

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