I have read the four hundred and so pages (almost five hundred) of the first book of a six volume literary epic written by the Norwegian writer Karl Ove Knausgaard on him and his family in an almost unstoppable way.
What mostly fascinated me throughout the whole reading of My Struggle: 1 - A death in the family were his writing artistry, at times raw and almost painfully harsh and yet highly philosophical in their approach other times, the meticulous details of daily life made noticeable and special and above all the need to write down about his childhood, teenage years and early adulthood with honesty, painful as it would for those mentioned in its gathering of written memoirs.
Some of his feelings and aspirations as an adolescent resonated with several of mine (... possibly with most adolescents) and I coudn't help copying down two of them ...
"(...) I saw time as a stretch of terrain that had to be covered, with the future as a distant prospect, hopefully a bright one, and never boring at any rate (...)"
"I have always had a great need for solitude. I require huge swathes of loneliness, and when I do not have it (...) my frustration can sometimes become almost panicked, or aggressive."
Despite the extreme opinions on the part of the critics and readers, I feel it's really worth reading.
"A masterpiece ... Meticulously detailed, harrowing, oddly beautiful, its depiction of a family's disintregation is one of the most powerful pieces of writing I've read in years." - Observer
"Karl Ove Knausgaard's six volume autobiographical novel My struggle is one of the most absorbing literary projects of recent times, one that has seen the Norwegian writer dubbed the Scandinavian Proust." Spectator
"A national obsession in Norway, this autobiographical epic is somewhat indigestible." - Michel Faber
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