My Struggle, Book 1

De: Karl Ove Knausgaard, Don Bartlett - translator

Narrado por: Edoardo Ballerini

My Struggle: Book One introduces American listeners 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.

©2009 Karl Ove Knausgaard (P)2014 Recorded Books

Deserves all the praise it got

It's a truly phenomenal book, just persevere through the 1st part, it's so worth it the further you go. Very real and honest.
The person who read it for the audiobook is the perfect voice for this, an amazing audiobook!
I read it while simultaneously reading the book - beware that this is a US edition.

Not for me

Performance: wonderful job by the reader, it fits the town of the book and the author perfectly.

The Story: it's not for me. Although the descriptions of memories are beautiful, astounding in the attention to detail and their emotional impacts, it is not enough. There seems to be no conflict at all. So for all the beauty, I found it challenging to engage with because I have no reason to care or empathize for the protagonist. There isn't rise and fall to the story, really there is no story at all. The intensity of the narrative is a flat line, with no apparent culmination.

Unlike pretty much anything

Think of those Rousseau writing his confessions in the voice of Samuel Beckett, revised by Marcel Proust. K compels you to pay attention to the most minute details of his daily existence, and somehow makes it all compelling and fascinating.

Taboo Breaking Author

He cleaves close to the bone and hits societal nerves exposing us all for the pathetically small narratives we lug around on a daily basis . He is a living hall of mirrors.

I am impressed with the fact that he has broken the literary taboos by writing in excruciating detail and thumbed his nose at the critical elites.

It’s going to be interesting to see, as an author, if he has emptied himself and will have nothing more of interest to say or if he has laid fertile creative ground by emptying himself of his baggage to explore something beyond his auto-fictional ground.

It is yet to be seen if all this self revelatory therapy leads to self correction. Does he become a more empathetic person (balancing the “I” needs with your “your” needs.) Otherwise for him, he just spewed personal vomit and made money off of it, rather than it becoming the compost change.

I'm Defintely Intrigued...

"My Struggle" is Karl Ove Knausgaard's first book in the ambitious six part series, and one I had been hearing so much about in recent months that I finally decided to give it a try. As the title might suggest, this is not a comedy, so if you are struggling through a gray, bleak winter, stay well away!

Knausgaard is kind of like sharp cheese. At first you think you hate it, but then it's actually not bad at all. The first half of the book, he came across as arrogant and, keeping in mind that a man who isn't even fifty is writing six books about himself, very self-indulgent. Nonetheless, even mildly irritated as I was, I had to admit that there was something about his style that made this book compulsively readable. About two thirds of the way through, something happens, "the big event" in Knausegaard's life and his voice softens. His mind turns to others and his vulnerability even as a grown, relatively successful man is exposed. It is this last third that makes me want to keep going with Knausegaard's books, though their length and number is a little daunting. Sometimes his recording of all the minutiae of his daily life and the airing of all his frustrations is a little annoying, and the setting reads like a gray-washed Scandinavian crime drama, but I suppose this is his attempt to provide an honest and transparent account of his inner and outer world. Undeniably he is a good writer, and his observations, though sometimes tediously conveyed, are often astute gems of human insight, which elevate this book from an autobiography, to a text that possesses philosophical musings and reads like a well-polished novel.

Something that initially irritated me was the title, "My Struggle" is, of course, "Mein Kampf" in German. Being German, I couldn't understand why anyone would chose to give their book such a name, but reading My Struggle, it becomes clear that he in no way associates his very personal story with Hitler's disgusting book.
When you read Knausegaard's story, the title does seem very apt, because he really highlights and dissects all the areas in his life that are rife with struggles.

Though I think I'll read something slightly lighter next, I will definitely return for Book Two.