“My Struggle: Book 2”
At the age of forty the life you have lived so far, always pro tem, has for the first time become life itself, and this reappraisal swept away all dreams, destroyed all your notions that real life, the one that was meant to be, the great deeds you would perform, was somewhere else. When you were forty you realized it was all here, banal everyday life, fully formed, and it always would be unless you did something. Unless you took one last gamble.
Karl Ove Knausgaard – a Norwegian living in Sweden, nearing 40, on his second marriage with three children under the age of 4 – finds himself joyless, overwhelmed with the demands of marriage and fatherhood. A lifelong reader and writer, Knausgaard has also lost faith in literature and turns to his personal diaries and essays for inspiration. From those writings, two elements that shaped his life – his father and a lifelong feeling of not belonging – lead him to write My Struggle: a 6-volume autobiography published between 2009-2012 in Norway. Read more 
“My Struggle: Book 1”
My father was an idiot, I wanted nothing to do with him, and it cost me nothing to keep well away from him. It wasn’t a question of keeping away from something, it was a question of the something not existing; nothing about him touched me. That was how it had been, but then I had sat down to write, and the tears poured forth.
In Norway, revealing personal information and family secrets is considered shameful so when Karl Ove Knausgaard, the award-winning, best-selling author wrote a 6 volume autobiographical account of his life, the public took notice, read the critics’ reviews but ultimately decided to buy the books. Read more
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