My Struggle: Book 1

Is My Struggle: Book 1 brilliant, or just exhausting?

Both.

Knausgaard writes about his own life, with real names and his real family, and reading it feels less like reading a novel than living inside someone else's memories in real time. He gives extraordinary attention to the most ordinary things: teenage embarrassment, drinking, making food, cleaning. Sometimes that attention is mesmerizing. Sometimes it's maddeningly self-indulgent.

Then his father dies, and all that ordinary detail turns out to be the point. When Karl Ove and his brother clean the house their father drank himself to death in, the mundane finally acquires an almost unbearable weight, and it only works because of the hundreds of pages of dishes and cigarettes that came before it.

"For the heart, life is simple: it beats for as long as it can. Then it stops."

A radical, hypnotic experiment that occasionally made me want to throw the book across the room. I'm continuing to Book 2. Cautiously.

4/5 ⭐️