My Struggle, Book 1

By: Karl Ove Knausgaard, Don Bartlett - translator

Narrated by: Edoardo Ballerini

My Struggle: Book One introduces American listeners to the audacious, addictive, and profoundly surprising international literary sensation that is the provocative and brilliant six-volume autobiographical novel by Karl Ove Knausgaard. It has already been anointed a Proustian masterpiece and is the rare work of dazzling literary originality that is intensely, irresistibly readable. Unafraid of the big issues - death, love, art, fear - and yet committed to the intimate details of life as it is lived, My Struggle is an essential work of contemporary literature.

©2009 Karl Ove Knausgaard (P)2014 Recorded Books

Deserves all the praise it got

It's a truly phenomenal book, just persevere through the 1st part, it's so worth it the further you go. Very real and honest.
The person who read it for the audiobook is the perfect voice for this, an amazing audiobook!
I read it while simultaneously reading the book - beware that this is a US edition.

I'm Defintely Intrigued...

"My Struggle" is Karl Ove Knausgaard's first book in the ambitious six part series, and one I had been hearing so much about in recent months that I finally decided to give it a try. As the title might suggest, this is not a comedy, so if you are struggling through a gray, bleak winter, stay well away!

Knausgaard is kind of like sharp cheese. At first you think you hate it, but then it's actually not bad at all. The first half of the book, he came across as arrogant and, keeping in mind that a man who isn't even fifty is writing six books about himself, very self-indulgent. Nonetheless, even mildly irritated as I was, I had to admit that there was something about his style that made this book compulsively readable. About two thirds of the way through, something happens, "the big event" in Knausegaard's life and his voice softens. His mind turns to others and his vulnerability even as a grown, relatively successful man is exposed. It is this last third that makes me want to keep going with Knausegaard's books, though their length and number is a little daunting. Sometimes his recording of all the minutiae of his daily life and the airing of all his frustrations is a little annoying, and the setting reads like a gray-washed Scandinavian crime drama, but I suppose this is his attempt to provide an honest and transparent account of his inner and outer world. Undeniably he is a good writer, and his observations, though sometimes tediously conveyed, are often astute gems of human insight, which elevate this book from an autobiography, to a text that possesses philosophical musings and reads like a well-polished novel.

Something that initially irritated me was the title, "My Struggle" is, of course, "Mein Kampf" in German. Being German, I couldn't understand why anyone would chose to give their book such a name, but reading My Struggle, it becomes clear that he in no way associates his very personal story with Hitler's disgusting book.
When you read Knausegaard's story, the title does seem very apt, because he really highlights and dissects all the areas in his life that are rife with struggles.

Though I think I'll read something slightly lighter next, I will definitely return for Book Two.

The best book I listen in the last 10 years

I never heard about Karl Ove before. Thanks to Audible for the sale buy 2 pay 1 with a credit because book 1 and book 2 where in that sale. Karl Ove has a great style of writing this book is his autobiography and I loved I enjoyed every minute of the book.
The last time I enjoyed a book like this one was A pray for Owen Meany, and I had listen to this book 4 times and I never got tired.
I love to find books like this one. Thanks Karl Ove.

Not for me

Performance: wonderful job by the reader, it fits the town of the book and the author perfectly.

The Story: it's not for me. Although the descriptions of memories are beautiful, astounding in the attention to detail and their emotional impacts, it is not enough. There seems to be no conflict at all. So for all the beauty, I found it challenging to engage with because I have no reason to care or empathize for the protagonist. There isn't rise and fall to the story, really there is no story at all. The intensity of the narrative is a flat line, with no apparent culmination.

Unlike pretty much anything

Think of those Rousseau writing his confessions in the voice of Samuel Beckett, revised by Marcel Proust. K compels you to pay attention to the most minute details of his daily existence, and somehow makes it all compelling and fascinating.

Taboo Breaking Author

He cleaves close to the bone and hits societal nerves exposing us all for the pathetically small narratives we lug around on a daily basis . He is a living hall of mirrors.

I am impressed with the fact that he has broken the literary taboos by writing in excruciating detail and thumbed his nose at the critical elites.

It’s going to be interesting to see, as an author, if he has emptied himself and will have nothing more of interest to say or if he has laid fertile creative ground by emptying himself of his baggage to explore something beyond his auto-fictional ground.

It is yet to be seen if all this self revelatory therapy leads to self correction. Does he become a more empathetic person (balancing the “I” needs with your “your” needs.) Otherwise for him, he just spewed personal vomit and made money off of it, rather than it becoming the compost change.

Anatomy of the Disease of the Self

Have you listened to any of Edoardo Ballerini’s other performances before? How does this one compare?

He's really a brilliant narrator. He has a subtle and insistent voice, reading efficiently and quickly without losing clarity. A real champ.

Any additional comments?

I’ve heard such hype around this Norwegian Proust, that I finally had to make time to read it. At least two friends I respect very much have been raving about him, and they’ve encouraged me in my fits and starts through it.

I suppose I can see the appeal.

On the one hand, Knausgaard writes with wonderful precision. When he takes in a scene, we take it in. He is a master at switching from one sense to another. Some scenes come to us visually with a range of details lining up into a full picture. Others come emotionally, where he recognizes and probes a feeling that hovers over some memory. Still others are rooted in sound, and we often get catalogues of the music he was enjoying (or attempting to play) at one time or another. That variety of representation shows real skill, and it keeps this from bogging down.

On top of that, he writes from a philosophical perspective. Like Proust, he seems to sense that something in his experience holds the key to understanding who he was and, through that, who he is. And underlying all of that is the implicit promise that his discovery will help us readers make our own discovery. Unlike Proust, he has the machinery of 20th century philosophy to contend with. Things don’t always represent what we expect them to represent; some of our certainties are no longer certain but rather evocative of a cultural past that threatens to mock us.

As he puts it in a meditation about looking at paintings of angels halfway through this, “the great and the good were dubious entities.” He means that what art once contemplated now feels beyond us. Instead, art has turned in on itself, made itself its subject. As he puts it, “Art has become a spectator of itself.” As a result, our burden (our “struggle”, I suppose) is with the self, with what I sometimes think of as the postmodern Disease of the Self, an inability to get outside ourselves and relate to a larger community. As he sums up that particular meditation, “We understand everything, and we do so because we have turned everything into ourselves.”

And I will even admit to a slice of what Knausgaard’s admirers claim for this: when you read it at length, you start to absorb his rhythms and perceptions. I have spent chunks of the last week or two feeling more like a middle-aged Norwegian novelist than like myself, a middle-aged professor from Ohio by way of Chicago and Pennsylvania. His perception is so insistent, so compelling, that he pulls you in. If Al Franken once urged us to follow up the “Me Decade” of the 1970s with the “Al Franken Decade” of the 1980s, this book makes a good case for living at least a month in the mind of Knausgaard. (And a month is probably selling it short if you plan to make it through all six volumes of this.)

So, that’s my case for “getting” this. There is something there there (or here here if you’re caught up in the experience of the book as you check out this review.)

But I can’t help feeling the opposite reaction as well. There is simply no central narrative here. I suppose that reflects the deconstructed memoir we have going here, but it seems to me ask an awful lot of a reader. It’s not just that Knausgaard finds himself wallowing in self-ness; he imposes it on us. For most of the time I was reading this, I had no idea how it would end. And by that I don’t mean I didn’t know how things would wrap up but that I had no idea how I would even know it was over other than by the fact that there were no more words. When the particular magic of the prose failed – less as a result of any lack of skill than from my own tendency to drift to my personal experiences – I sometimes felt like an overworked therapist, sitting down to another session with my Norwegian patient, listening to him circle around the same central mystery of his life while I wondered what I would make the family for dinner once his hour was over.

And, while I admire the engagement with postmodern impulses, I have to admit a bias in the opposite direction: for me at least, in a world where we are pulled in so many directions, I want art to be selective. I want it to be efficient as it delivers its truths. I prize the clever and the funny. I want my writers to be tour guides who take me to curious insights of character and contradiction, and I want them to trust me to fill in a lot of the context around those insights. I want them to choose (and frame) the best of what they have to say and in so doing to spare me the tendentious and the unframed.

One of the friends recommending this also praised Elena Ferrente to me. I like Ferrente, but I don’t love her, and I don’t love her for the same reason I don’t love this: it moves so leisurely through a rich life that I start to lose sight of the life around that life. (I think Ferrente does that better than Knausgaard, but I still wish she’d move her narrative forward more quickly, and I wish she’d be more selective in the stories she shares.)

The other friend is a big David Foster Wallace advocate, and I can see the similarity in the way both writers seem so caught up in the empire of the self, so intent on sharing every scrap of experience no matter how tendentious it seems. While I’ve tried on several occasions, I don’t “get” Foster Wallace. He not only seems to suffer from the same Disease of Self – and not only revels in that sickness rather than seeking a way out of it – but he lets it infect his prose. So much of it strikes me as heavy, that sentence by sentence I tire of his work. In Knausguaard’s defense, his prose (as we get it in translation) always seems to beckon, always seems open to some new possibility, some new quirk of his own memory.

I’m glad Knausguaard is out there, and I don’t regret having read this much. Still, as I found myself counting down the final pages of the book as I turned them, I’m glad to be outside him and back into my own self. Good luck to him (and to his many readers) but I don’t see myself making it through five more volumes of this.

Expected More

There weren't any great insights I gleaned from this book. Instead, it was rather mundane, lacking punctuatation, and depressing due to the narrator's tone. Yawn. 2.5 stars.

The detail and building to the finish

I loved the story and the reader. I read Morning star first and so enjoyed it I wanted more

Still trying to understand the hype.

I'm not sure if it's a result of translation but I find Knaussgaurdd extremely dry, with little to no sense of humor which makes the entire novel feel leaden with ACTUAL struggle, not the type hinted at by the referential joke of a title. This feeling is magnified by the almost unbearable narration. This guy is prone to dramatics, slipping into ill advised voices for female characters that are so distracting and giving Karl Ove a desperate pleading tone throughout. I'm hearing Knaussgaurdd speak in a couple of weeks and cannot wait to hear what he actually sounds like to get this narrators whiny affectation out of my head.

Man, I don't usually leave reviews like this but I just did not like the book that much and the narration made it worse.