A Death in the Family: My Struggle Book 1
Among the most shocking scenes is when his father greets Knausgaard with a shopping list, and between asking him to "nip down to the shop for me" and remembering that he forgot to put potatoes on the list mentions, by the way: You won't notice any difference. Much of the first section of this novel centers on a New Year's eve, with young Knausgaard and a friend trying to get to a party, an opportunity for Knausgaard to describe at length his teenage circumstances and self.
Arguably almost entirely uneventful, beyond the trivial -- the difficulties of buying some beer, keeping it hidden, and then retrieving it at the appropriate time which actually turns out to be terribly complicated -- it nevertheless allows Knausgaard to riff at length but also agreeably incidentally on his life and youth. The second section of the novel centers on his father's death in and the aftermath; there's some tidying of affairs to deal with, but it's the cleaning of the filthy house that is most prominent.
And death, of course, brings up with many unresolved emotions and memories. As he explains to someone typically: We're wading through his death. He died in the chair in the room next door, it's still there. And then there's everything that happened here, I mean, a long time ago, when I was growing up, all that's here too, and it's surfacing.
I'm somehow very close to everything.
To the person I was when I was younger. To the person Dad was. All the feelings from that time are resurfacing. Nevertheless, it takes him years before he can work through much of this as he eventually does in these pages. And this volume, the first of six, is also clearly only the beginning of the process.
Knausgaard has, in fact, revealed relatively little about himself so far, the books zooming in on only a few periods of time -- his middle teenage years, the time of his father's death, the present. There are intriguing mentions of other times, including a year spent as a teacher, and early admission to a creative writing program in what appears to have been an aborted start to his writing career. But beyond the present, there is, for example, little mention of his relationships with the two women he married and his teenage fumblings are striking in how they don't get very far: My Struggle is also a writer's book.
Yes, music was always important, too, and he went through a band-phase, too -- clearly intentionally comically presented in its abysmal failure -- but it's always writing that draws him in. Specifically, it an act of overcoming, too: I wanted to open the world by writing, for myself, at the same time this is also what made me fail. The feeling that the future does not exist, that it is only more of the same, means that all utopias are meaningless.
Literature has always been related to utopia, so when the utopia loses meaning so does literature. What I was trying to do, and perhaps what all writers try to do -- what on earth do I know? But it's a long, drawn-out process -- of which, to reiterate, this volume is very much only the beginning. My Struggle is so precise in its dialogue and detail, yet Knausgaard repeatedly mentions how little he remembers, whether in the present "ask me what I did three days ago and I can't remember" or the past "I remember hardly anything from my childhood" , undermining the documentary plausibility of the work.
How much is projection, how much real? Presumably, it's best to read it as fiction. So, I don't recommend choosing this one. Knausgard pretends that his work is something it is not, which is one of the worst crimes a writer can commit. Ostala sam hladna na ovu knjigu. Oprostite ljudi, ali ova knjiga je bila i moja borba.
Ima toliko autobiografskih knjiga koje su toliko bolje od ove!!
2014 Shortlist
Blake Butler put it in words that I'd rather quote than steal or paraphrase: I don't usually stop reading a book once I start it, but my struggle with "My Struggle" was that I don't give a shit about reading a year-old's Livejournal. You were young once and wanted to fuck chicks but now you have a wife and a kid and life is hard? This book embodies everything I hate about contemporary literature: If this kind of thing is all that's left for the future, take me out back and shoot me. Knausgaard has said himself that writing for him is not cathartic: And that kind of selflessness [goddamn, if you write a book of 36k pages you surely think there is a lot nobody has ever told before, or not like you, and that the world needs it, so you are more attached to your ego than Kanye effing West, goddammit] is the best part of writing.
John Kennedy Toole killing himself? And if you tell me about Pessoa, bear in mind that most of his works were inside a vault during his lifetime, so, unlike Karl, he was not a "famous 'tortured' artist" , and the first one coming from a poseur, from someone who is actually doing pretty okay. My Struggle is a blindly bold turn into trite extremism, a horror story well, horror non-story whose horrific qualities e. I stumbled upon Tom Waits's quote: I choose My Struggle is a blindly bold turn into trite extremism, a horror story well, horror non-story whose horrific qualities e.
I choose to hold onto the skepticism that twenty pages a day is good writing.
Certainly having read this, I see why it is not true. In comparing it to "crack" I can only agree that, yes, "crack" is bad for you. How could this long-form, automatically-generated stunt of "recall" even be considered raw, authentic, or intrinsically good?
This is not impeccably engineered recollection. It is hastily-scrambled recollection. This is fiction insofar as, well, a lot of this is made up because the brain makes shit up. An attempt to defy that inability to pristinely capture the moment would be defiant, glorious. He submits to the will of a filtering, biased machine, in complete subservience to neurological mechanism. Is he oblivious to this? To take automatic thoughts at face value? To assume that a life lived is one that is outlined only in the most procedural and shallow of manners? Is that true candor, pure recollection?
It is a faulty premise, and as such, My Struggle feels decidedly anti-Proustian to me. Proust copped to the malleability and reformulation of memory itself. He questioned the very act of memory and the memory as an item of inherent value. Knausgaard writes them all out with insufficient skepticism. If he did imbibe Proust, he did it poorly. Knausgaard at least cops to only superficially reading Adorno because of the prestige factor of it, and I wonder if Knausgaard Nation is doing the same What separates Proust from Knausgaard — and why the comparison is insulting — is simply that Proust knew that taking a recall at face value is not the pursuit of truth.
I cannot see merit in the claim that this is authentic memory; a past recollected is never collected totally. This is still edited rawness, filtered through the biased lens of a recollecting mind, and, just on conceit alone, it is a failure. Rumor has it Knausgaard discusses this later, but, too little, too late. As far as being compelled by bearing witness to his need to capture everything, I suppose I can see why these things must be captured But for a reader, I wonder why any of this material needed to be captured, in this way, again.
I leave complaining about the book's triteness, familiarity, bad prose, awful dialogue, and unrelenting tedium to the book's supporters. No need for its detractors to pursue that. But it is fair to say, I think, that a writer is being a bit presumptuous when they write as if those two are synonymous. A captured moment is not by definition precious. Some find it engrossing and not particularly dense - oftentimes good qualities - and also enjoy its fast pace.
The way the language is notated — strings of clauses hung together with commas — keep the pace up by acceleration. But this is more of a mechanical means to keep up the pace, of using grammar as a performance-enhancing drug.
The corpse in A Death in the Family belongs to the author's father, and this in Norwegian – Min Kamp ("My Struggle"), deliberately echoing Hitler's We're asking our US readers to help us raise one million dollars by the. Editorial Reviews. Review. Knausgaard's thinking is magnificently unbridled, a veritable flood A Death in the Family: My Struggle Book 1 Kindle Edition. by.
I wish I could have been more immersed; I kept wondering if I was missing something, anything. I agree with The Nation that the issue is not that nothing happens, it's that nothing is happening in the writing. At best I could argue that Knausgaard's feat is giving his reader so much nothing, that eventually people will believe that the so much of nothing turns into something. The nicest thing I can say about My Struggle is that I was sporadically transfixed by its over-saturating banality. Knausgaard is fiction's new John Cage; My Struggle being the 4'34". I think this is a decent comparison, and it holds up the more I toy with it.
I get why they're suing. The book is exploitative and disturbing in that families are alienated, privacy disregarded, relationships ravaged, slander stoked, in the name of unbearably pedestrian insight. It is the closest literature can come to snuff, and truly, to what ends? Judging by its artlessness, none.
Perhaps this is why the reading was the most sickening, suffocating reads of my life. It is like watching the animals die onscreen in Cannibal Holocaust - animals killed for an intellectually tepid film - on repeat.
Overrated, a successful marketing product. I tried a lot to finish this book but unfortunately I could make it only until page There is no such a miracle in terms of literature or any kind of tecnique. First couple of pages were promising, very interesting observations about death. I was excited so much. But then pages detail of a new year night was totally meaningless. There are cult books, as Sterne's Tristram Shandy, that the author keeps on writing the daily routine but with an exce Overrated, a successful marketing product.
There are cult books, as Sterne's Tristram Shandy, that the author keeps on writing the daily routine but with an excellent taste of a creative style. But this book gave nothing to me but a giant disappointment after reading many positive reviews. I questioned myself if I have a missing point, made online research to understand what makes this book such popular but this is my final review.
I can't imagine to read 5 more books similar to this one. Aug 04, Mohawkgrl rated it did not like it. I should have stopped reading after page 1. What a waste of precious time. I borrowed this first volume from the library. Thank sweet father Christmas because I wouldn't even own this piece of garbage if you gave it to me. This is being compared to Proust's Remembrance of Things Past.
Yes, Proust had his moments but Knausgaard takes the cake, hands down! As well, Don Bartlett's English translation is awkward and often grammatically incorrect. The editing of this translation is very poor indeed. I found so many mistakes, I cringed more times than I can count. Thankfully, he's done better with Jo Nesbo's Harry Hole novels. I had also taken out the second volume to read from the library at the same time but at plus pages, I will not bother.
What make Knausgaard's struggle more interesting than anyone else's? Except perhaps his ability to go on and on about banalities of how he cleaned his grandmother's house in painful detail, I might add over the course of a week after his father's death but oh!!
Min kamp 1
How screwed up is this man? Don't waste a second reading this crap. The only insight that Knausgaard proffers is his own self-aggrandizement to his wishful writing talents. I may have missed the entire point to this novel in that Knausgaard's genius is he managed to get 5 or is it 6 volumes published? Paraphrasing James Wood's review that he felt compelled to keep reading despite the boredom throughout the books.
Perhaps Knausgaard's genius is that he manages to detail every human daily struggle as something so beguiling that he just has to write it down, detail by excruciating detail.
A Death in the Family
Thanks but no thanks Mr. My own struggle to get through this first volume should have earned me the best reader of the century for finding my way to the very end without falling into a deep coma or simply chucking this hogwash as far as I could throw. Don't waste your time, nor money. Borrow from the library to perhaps satiate your curiosity, that way you can return it at anytime when you've reached the end of your patience.
Un libro che non mi ha detto niente, che non mi ha lasciato niente. E che ha un titolo ben fuorviante. Leggi che ti leggi: Karl Ove racconta con passione documentaristica della peggior specie la sua vita: Una sorta di Recherche nordica Ora, come la mettiamo che in italiano si intitola: La morte del padre??
Knausgard piace a molti, vedo su Goodreads. Ha vinto un sacco di premi. Buon per lui, ne sono sincera.
I had to read this book like the author apparently eats his fish: And like the author feels about his fish, it wasn't so much the taste I couldn't stand I could get through most of it without getting too annoyed or bored it was the structure. He takes a substance, in this case the death of his father, then waters it down, heavily, with all sorts of word I had to read this book like the author apparently eats his fish: He takes a substance, in this case the death of his father, then waters it down, heavily, with all sorts of worded and detailed trivialities -- for example, descriptions of how tea is made, or of how the color of salmon changes when it's being cooked, or of a dialog of a man having second thoughts about whether he likes the onions with his gas station sausage raw or fried -- until there's hardly a molecule of substance left per liter of letters.
Common sense would dictate that the literature you're trying to create would become pointless and boring, but homeopathic theory states that the newly added 'water' -- get this -- will take on the properties of the substance that was dissolved in it. I think this is what KOK attempted to do. According to some, it even worked. Personally, I think it that's due to the placebo effect. The book isn't without strengths, of course -- like I said, it didn't bore me too often, which is a stunning feat for a book that I found essentially boring, and the characters are convincingly real and that's not because they actually are real, a bad writer can't turn real people into real feeling people in writing -- but for its very lengthy weaknesses, it's still less than 'ok' to me.
The overall reading experience was disappointing. Dec 11, Maria Victoria Sanchez rated it did not like it Shelves: I did not like this book! Some people may enjoy his over pretentious way of writing but i spend half of the book screaming: I read this book because it was compare to Marcel Proust in many reviews but Knausgard does not hold a lamp to Proust in form style and writing or in theme. If you are interested in reading modern literature that sound sincere and critic about the era we live in which is how this book was sold to me please feel welcome to read Milan Kundera and Javier Marias their work are true master pieces and if you want to read something Proust like: Go and read Proust for God sake!
He is in the cover, the book is about him, he made a Series of his family problems like they are some kind of social experiment and he does photo shots in the middle of a green grass, and then he goes in interviews saying that he "hates" the fact that he wrote a bestseller, really? I made it about two hundred pages before bailing.
As someone who writes self-indulgent memoir about minor events Your book either needs to be about something interesting or it has to be funny. It can't just be sad observations about nothing. Millions of trees must have died for Karl Ove to tell us about that time he thought he saw a face in the sea or that other time he we Full disclosure: Millions of trees must have died for Karl Ove to tell us about that time he thought he saw a face in the sea or that other time he went to a party where nothing happened and then came home more than a hundred pages on that one.
He uses ten sentences where one will do, and that one sentence should have been cut anyway because it was describing some sign on a street in his childhood home that isn't relevant for establishing plot, or character, or setting, or theme. His descriptions of women might be honest, but they're kind of cringe-y to read, and we spent an awful lot of time in the head of this man who I just flat-out dislike.
His style of digressive writing is so off-putting, too-plots are dropped for pages upon pages so he can wax on about whatever the crap other piece of pointless associative memory he feels like.
Will we ever go back and find out what his dad said to him that day? It's not like any of the scene-work has a point, either concrete or allegorical. One of the more unusual books I've ever read. It's a meandering, stream of consciousness autobiographical novel from Norway, divided into only 2 chapters with paragraphs that run for pages, organized by no real chronology, theme, or - God forbid - a point.