AshehougAgency

My Struggle - vol. 4

After high school Karl Ove moves to the Northern part of Norway, where he starts working as a substitute teacher. A new world meets him, as well as experiences he fails to understand.

The fourth novel in the MY STRUGGLE series emphasizes a young man's grand self-image, his self-inflicted humiliations, his sincerity and immaturity, and his hunger after existential and sexual relief.

Praise for My Struggle - Fourth Book:

”My struggle is still an amazing project … The intense joy of the extreme sorrow that lies on the surface of young minds is portrayed with precision and humour … Equally impressive is the portrayal of the feeling of omnipotence back to back with the immense lack of confidence … The author takes the adult reader close to the feeling of those teenage years full of questions and emotions, yet simultaneously unclear and with no sense of where one is heading. Despite the lightly repetitive plot and level of reflection, the thread is tied up against this. Thereby it is safe to say that also this volume has enough material to keep the conversations going; among readers and the opinionated, and that in itself is a fine quality”

(NRK)

”The serial publication has ended up making My struggle into something more reminiscent of performance than publication, a large-scale stunt involving the entire literary public in a fascinating cultural process … It is the ambition to reflect the common structure of the experience that makes My struggle great literature … What is most impressive about it is Knausgård’s ability to make this diversity readable, even exciting, for huge numbers of people, through a narrative which is as relentless no matter what the topic is, as a thriller is about absolutely nothing. When was the last time a Norwegian author portrayed nature in such a sincere and un-ironic way?”
(Dagbladet)

”Isolated, volume 4 is a pleasure to read, Knausgård writes with a catching ease. The book is a page-turner without dimension”
(VG)

"To create such amounts of good prose is amazing ... Trivia is universal, and makes the reader recognize the text and identify with It. It is well portrayed"
(Dag og Tid)

”I will read it to the very end. There is a current in Knausgård’s prose, a mobility in his photographic memory and a stubborn penetration into the mind which awakens feelings in me that Proust’s images from the Parisian aristocracy in the early 18th century never succeeded in moving”
(Expressen, Sweden)

"Realistic and believable in its almost pornographical unfolding of life in all its turns and phases (...) Vol. 4 is a page-turner as well as a novel that makes you stop reading and reflect upon your own existence"
(Agderposten)

First published: 2010, Forlaget Oktober
Karl Ove Knausgård: Biography and bibliography

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