My Struggle: Book Three

Author:   Karl Ove Knausgaard ,  Don Bartlett ,  Don Bartlett
Publisher:   Archipelago Books
Volume:   3
ISBN:  

9781935744863


Pages:   432
Publication Date:   27 May 2014
Format:   Hardback
Availability:   In Print   Availability explained
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My Struggle: Book Three


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Overview

"A family of four--mother, father and two boys--move to the South Coast of Norway to a new house on a newly developed site. It is the early 1970s and the family's trajectory, upwardly mobile: the future seems limitless. In painstaking, sometimes self-lacerating detail, Knausgaard paints a world familiar to anyone who can recall the intensity and novelty of childhood experience, one in which children and adults lead parallel lives that never meet. Perhaps the most Proustian in the series, Book Three gives us Knausgaard's vivid, technicolor recollections of childhood, his emerging self-understanding, and the multilayered nature of time's passing, memory, and existence. ""Of course, I remember nothing from this time. It is completely impossible to identify with the infant my parents photographed; this is in fact so difficult it almost seems wrong to use the word 'I' when referring to it, lying in the baby bath, for instance, its skin unnaturally red, its arms and legs sprawling, and its face distorted in a scream no one remembers the reason for anymore ... Is that creature the same as the one sitting here in Malmö, writing this?"" --from Book Three of My Struggle More praise for Book Three: ""A superbly told childhood story ... Knausgaard writes about everyday life as a child with a flow and continuity that all hangs together ... the text has a gravitational pull that draws the reader in only further."" --Dag Og Tid (Norway) ""An aesthetic pleasure ... A patient, chiseled, and intense portrayal of a child's sensory experience. Book Three is a classic."" --Klassekampen (Norway) ""Compelling reading ... Knausgaard has an equally good eye for small and large events."" --Aftenposten (Norway) ""A gripping novel ... This childhood portrayal drifts off with a lightness and sensitivity that not many will associate with him ... There is no doubt that the series is worth following the author all the way."" --Dagens Næringsliv (Norway) ""The man can write a novel about a solid, pretty traditional upbringing too ... A sensitive, sharp depiction of growing up in the 70's."" --Adresseavisen (Norway)"

Full Product Details

Author:   Karl Ove Knausgaard ,  Don Bartlett ,  Don Bartlett
Publisher:   Archipelago Books
Imprint:   Archipelago Books
Volume:   3
Dimensions:   Width: 16.50cm , Height: 3.80cm , Length: 19.80cm
Weight:   0.680kg
ISBN:  

9781935744863


ISBN 10:   1935744860
Pages:   432
Publication Date:   27 May 2014
Audience:   General/trade ,  General
Format:   Hardback
Publisher's Status:   Active
Availability:   In Print   Availability explained
This item will be ordered in for you from one of our suppliers. Upon receipt, we will promptly dispatch it out to you. For in store availability, please contact us.
Language:   English

Table of Contents

Reviews

What's notable is Karl Ove's ability, rare these days, to be fully present in and mindful of his own existence. Every detail is put down without apparent vanity or decoration, as if the writing and the living are happening simultaneously. There shouldn't be anything remarkable about any of it except for the fact that it immerses you totally. You live his life with him. . . . The overweening absurdity of Ove's title is a bad joke that keeps coming back to you as you try to construct a life worthy of an adult. How to be more present, more mindful? Of ourselves, of others? For others? -- Zadie Smith, The New York Review of Books The book investigates the bottomless accumulation of mysteries everyday life imposes. . . Knausgaard's approach is plain and scrupulous, sometimes casual, yet he never writes down. His subject is the beauty and terror of the fact that all life coexists with itself. A living hero who landed on greatness by abandoning every typical literary feint, an emperor whose nakedness surpasses royal finery. -- Jonathan Lethem, The Guardian .. .reading My Struggle, you have the sense that Knausgaard has made a wonderful discovery, an almost scientific innovation. My Struggle is something new, something brave... -- n + 1 KARL OVE KNAUSGAARD. MY STRUGGLE. It's unbelievable. I just read 200 pages of it and I need the next volume like crack. -- Zadie Smith, via Twitter Achieves an aching intimacy, one that transcends the personal and makes Knausgaard's pursuit of grand artistic ideals, his daily joys and misgivings, strangely familiar. -- Time Out New York A six-volume literary experiment in which a contemporary Norwegian author describes his own life may sound dull. But Knausgaard's literary experiment is both brutally honest and far from dull. Trust me, it'll be worth waiting for volumes three through six to appear in English translation. -- Jo Nesbo, in The Week (one of Jo Nesbo's six favoriteh


FINALIST - THE IMPAC DUBLIN LITERARY AWARD Halfway through, this (six-volume) series is starting to look like an early-21st-century masterpiece. -- Kirkus Reviews (starred review) My Struggle is a truly original and enduring and great work of literature. -- The New York Times Book Review I fell into the first two books of My Struggle as if I were falling into a malarial fever. I did little else for four days except devour them, leaving email unanswered, dogs unwalked, dishes piling up in the sink. The steady headlamps of his prose stun and mesmerize you, as if you were a lumbering mammal caught in the middle of a highway . . . [Knausgaard] is contemporary fiction's alchemist of the ordinary. . . . This writer is constructing a towering edifice, in what feels like real time. Few artistic projects of our era feel more worth attending to. -- Dwight Garner, The New York Times No writer has emerged on the world stage to more acclaim in at least a decade ... readers of every stripe, it seems, are talking about Knausgaard. -- Evan Hughes, The New Yorker He has managed to transform self-abasement into a kind of grandeur, humiliation into a purified form of pride, and--above all--fiction into the most painful mode of truth-telling. -- The Daily Beast What's notable is Karl Ove's ability, rare these days, to be fully present in and mindful of his own existence. Every detail is put down without apparent vanity or decoration, as if the writing and the living are happening simultaneously. There shouldn't be anything remarkable about any of it except for the fact that it immerses you totally. You live his life with him. . . . The overweening absurdity of Ove's title is a bad joke that keeps coming back to you as you try to construct a life worthy of an adult. How to be more present, more mindful? Of ourselves, of others? For others? -- Zadie Smith, The New York Review of Books The book investigates the bottomless accumulation of mysteries everyday life imposes. . . Knausgaard's approach is plain and scrupulous, sometimes casual, yet he never writes down. His subject is the beauty and terror of the fact that all life coexists with itself. A living hero who landed on greatness by abandoning every typical literary feint, an emperor whose nakedness surpasses royal finery. -- Jonathan Lethem, The Guardian [ My Struggle is] a confessional outpouring that became a sensation. . . You imagine yourself as Karl Ove because it's impossible to get inside anyone else's head. -- Slate This segment of a genre-defying and unusual novel will leave readers hungry for the following installments, and serves as a fine entry point into the series. -- Publishers Weekly (starred review) Notable for his meticulous attention to the quotidian details of everyday life, Knausgaard's pared-down style and plainspoken narrator manage to propel these long books, concerned less with sustaining plot than with the accumulation of tiny intensities and candid disclosures, which makes for strangely engaging, compulsively page-turning prose. -- Booklist Online (starred review) Both Knausgaard's Proustian style and the fact that his work is one long book stretched out into many volumes, just like In Search of Lost Time, should signal that it's a literary event the likes of which we probably will not see again in our lifetimes. . . . Unlike almost every other work of art released in the 21st century, Knausgaard's massive book is an ongoing cultural event that we're being afforded the opportunity to savor. -- Jason Diamond, Flavorwire .. .reading My Struggle, you have the sense that Knausgaard has made a wonderful discovery, an almost scientific innovation. My Struggle is something new, something brave... -- n + 1 KARL OVE KNAUSGAARD. MY STRUGGLE. It's unbelievable. I just read 200 pages of it and I need the next volume like crack. -- Zadie Smith, via Twitter Achieves an aching intimacy, one that transcends the personal and makes Knausgaard's pursuit of grand artistic ideals, his daily joys and misgivings, strangely familiar. -- Time Out New York A six-volume literary experiment in which a contemporary Norwegian author describes his own life may sound dull. But Knausgaard's literary experiment is both brutally honest and far from dull. Trust me, it'll be worth waiting for volumes three through six to appear in English translation. -- Jo Nesbo, in The Week (one of Jo Nesbo's six favorite books) MY STRUGGLE is a revolutionary novel that is highly approachable, even thrilling to read. The book feels like a masterpiece--one of those genuinely surprising works that alters the tradition it inherited. -- Bookforum Knausgaard's cycle...is poised to become a true global sensation ...there is an utterly unique genius to the books. -- The Christian Science Monitor Boyhood, so little given to evaluation, assessment, or argumentation, is instead a study of immersion. It is a pure-state immersion: not immersion in something, not a study of something, but immersion per se. With a nod to Roland Barthes's dream of a language returned to its simplest, Adamic roots, we might call this immersion degree zero, a similarly paradisiacal (or childlike) fantasy. It is the function of the novel as a genre stripped to its barest essential. Little in Boyhood is allowed to get in the way of that goal. Not the prose, which in Don Bartlett's translation is as swift and unornamented and unmannered as possible, as if aiming for pure continuation and sequence, as if driven by an almost childlike desire to keep moving to the next thing. Not the narrative rhythm, in which the sheer mass of a few random childhood days exerts a gravitational pull that distends and stretches into a time almost equivalent to the time of reading itself...Glistening surfaces, constantly in the act of opening up--and always, as a result, transfixing. - Nicholas Dames, Public Books My Struggle is a book so private it feels like a sanctuary. . . [Knausgaard is] the great chronicler of the modern condition. -- Ian Brown, The Globe and Mail One of the most anticipated books of the year (or the decade). -- Financial Times (UK) [Knausgaard is] one of the most remarkable authors who have emerged in recent years ... he is in the process of becoming a global superstar. -- The Economist (UK) Via his visceral, immersive art, Knausgaard makes the heart visible as he conjures 'the intensity that only exists in childhood'. -- The Independent (UK) A compelling memoir of times we cannot know. -- The London Evening Standard an immediacy as astonishing as that of its two predecessors. . . . In Don Bartlett's lively vernacular translation, My Struggle will, I am convinced, outlive the furore, welcoming or hostile, of its first appearance. -- Paul Binding, The Spectator (UK) extreme artlessness creates a far more intense realism than we might have thought possible, a confessional novel that outdoes most confessions. -- Times Literary Supplement (UK) .. .With each subsequent book of his that is translated into English, Mr. Knausgaard continues to solidify his reputation as one of the most vital writers working today. -- The Observer It would be wrong to suggest that Karl Ove is just an Everyman-plus-shading, and that Knausgaard has simply lucked out. Historical factors may account for why My Struggle has become a phenomenon but they can neither explain nor dilute the novels' richness. Yes, Knausgaard appeals to the modern appetite for warty portraiture and off-page bust-ups and has chronicled middle-class Norwegian life during the country's exceptionalist phase. To a loud anglophone minority, he constitutes a thrillingly boring alternative to boringly diverting invention. But he also displays a tremendous and irreducible zeal for penetrating what Karl Ove, reeling after a date with Linda, calls the inner core of human existence - an effort that brings fame to some but not others, and in which he has no obvious superiors among the writers now available to an English-reading public. -- The New Statesman MY STRUGGLE is a revolutionary novel that is highly approachable, even thrilling to read. The book feels like a masterpiece--one of those genuinely surprising works that alters the tradition it inherited. . . . What makes MY STRUGGLE so hypnotizing--a word more than one reviewer has used to describe it--is in part the pleasurable surprise of seeing habits of mind (your apathy at a dinner party, or envy of a friend's tracksuit, or momentary frustration with your partner) that normally go unrecorded put down in exhaustive detail. But it's also the interplay between those lengthy, hyperrealistic scenes of everyday experience and what are in effect meditative essays. -- Meghan O'Rourke, Bookforum Though a boyhood so honestly rendered cannot claim the title of 'innocence, ' it can be termed wondrous. -- AskMen When Knaugaard writes about culture and art, his observations are transcendent; not only has he fully digested what he has seen and read, his references fit seamlessly. . . This is quintessential Knausgaard: a complexity of ideas generated out of true observation. . . relentless, fascinating and unflagging self-scrutiny. --The Rumpus While many are busy bemoaning the death of bookshops and literature, Knausgaard is a surprising, relieving phenomenon that is sweeping the world. . . [he is] undoubtedly the literary star of the moment. -- Outlook India


FINALIST - THE IMPAC DUBLIN LITERARY AWARD Halfway through, this (six-volume) series is starting to look like an early-21st-century masterpiece. -- Kirkus Reviews (starred review) My Struggle is a truly original and enduring and great work of literature. -- The New York Times Book Review I fell into the first two books of My Struggle as if I were falling into a malarial fever. I did little else for four days except devour them, leaving email unanswered, dogs unwalked, dishes piling up in the sink. The steady headlamps of his prose stun and mesmerize you, as if you were a lumbering mammal caught in the middle of a highway . . . [Knausgaard] is contemporary fiction's alchemist of the ordinary. . . . This writer is constructing a towering edifice, in what feels like real time. Few artistic projects of our era feel more worth attending to. -- Dwight Garner, The New York Times No writer has emerged on the world stage to more acclaim in at least a decade ... readers of every stripe, it seems, are talking about Knausgaard. -- Evan Hughes, The New Yorker He has managed to transform self-abasement into a kind of grandeur, humiliation into a purified form of pride, and--above all--fiction into the most painful mode of truth-telling. -- The Daily Beast What's notable is Karl Ove's ability, rare these days, to be fully present in and mindful of his own existence. Every detail is put down without apparent vanity or decoration, as if the writing and the living are happening simultaneously. There shouldn't be anything remarkable about any of it except for the fact that it immerses you totally. You live his life with him. . . . The overweening absurdity of Ove's title is a bad joke that keeps coming back to you as you try to construct a life worthy of an adult. How to be more present, more mindful? Of ourselves, of others? For others? -- Zadie Smith, The New York Review of Books The book investigates theF


Halfway through, this (six-volume) series is starting to look like an early-21st-century masterpiece. -- Kirkus Reviews (starred review) What's notable is Karl Ove's ability, rare these days, to be fully present in and mindful of his own existence. Every detail is put down without apparent vanity or decoration, as if the writing and the living are happening simultaneously. There shouldn't be anything remarkable about any of it except for the fact that it immerses you totally. You live his life with him. . . . The overweening absurdity of Ove's title is a bad joke that keeps coming back to you as you try to construct a life worthy of an adult. How to be more present, more mindful? Of ourselves, of others? For others? -- Zadie Smith, The New York Review of Books The book investigates the bottomless accumulation of mysteries everyday life imposes. . . Knausgaard's approach is plain and scrupulous, sometimes casual, yet he never writes down. His subject is the beauty and terror of the fact that all life coexists with itself. A living hero who landed on greatness by abandoning every typical literary feint, an emperor whose nakedness surpasses royal finery. -- Jonathan Lethem, The Guardian Both Knausgaard's Proustian style and the fact that his work is one long book stretched out into many volumes, just like In Search of Lost Time, should signal that it's a literary event the likes of which we probably will not see again in our lifetimes. . . . Unlike almost every other work of art released in the 21st century, Knausgaard's massive book is an ongoing cultural event that we're being afforded the opportunity to savor. -- Jason Diamond, Flavorwire .. .reading My Struggle, you have the sense that Knausgaard has made a wonderful discovery, an almost scientific innovation. My Struggle is something new, something brave... -- n + 1 KARL OVE KNAUSGAARD. MY STRUGGLE. It's unbelievable. I just read 200 pages of it andf


Author Information

Karl Ove Knausgaard was born in Norway in 1968. His debut novel Out of This World won the Norwegian Critics Prize in 2004 and his A Time for Everything (Archipelago) was a finalist for the Nordic Council Prize. For My Struggle, Knausgaard received the Brage Award in 2009 (for Book One), the 2010 Book of the Year Prize in Morgenbladet, and the P2 Listeners' Prize. It is also a finalist for The Believer Fiction Prize. My Struggle has been translated into more than fifiteen languages. Knausgaard lives in Sweden with his wife and three children. The author lives in Sweden.

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