my struggle karl ove knausgaard goodreads

Now, one feels a tad silly talking about My Struggle in a short review - I have one word for every 27 pages I've read - but luckily Knausgaard's project isn't arcane. In its ambition, narcissism and exhausting exhaustiveness, the book feels like the culmination of our current obsession with the memoir. You see, My Struggle - which is heroically well-translated by Don Bartlett - is surely the grand monument to our selfie-absorbed times. Well, I finally gave in a few weeks ago and was abashed to discover that one of Knausgaard's trademark themes is his disdain for the sheeplike souls who do exactly what everyone else is doing. When I've said that I hadn't read a word, they would look genuinely startled and tell me, 'You have to.' Over the past couple of years, I haven't been able to go to a social gathering without someone asking what I thought of his work. These days, it's Karl Ove Knausgaard, the 46-year-old Norwegian whose six-volume, 3,600-page autobiographical novel, My Struggle, has become a literary sensation. It seems like there's always some writer you're supposed to be reading.

Your purchase helps support NPR programming. My picture of my father on that evening in 1976 is, in other words, twofold: on the one hand I see him as I saw him at that time, through the eyes of an eight-year-old: unpredictable and frightening on the other hand, I see him as a peer through whose life time is blowing and unremittingly sweeping large chunks of meaning along with it.Close overlay Buy Featured Book Title My Struggle Author Karl Ove Knausgaard and Don Bartlett Knowledge is distance, knowledge is stasis and the enemy of meaning.

Meaning requires content, content requires time, time requires resistance. It no longer meets any obstacles, everything is set, time races through our lives, the days pass by in a flash and before we know that is happening we are fort, fifty, sixty. That is when time begins to pick up speed. Then one day we reach the point where all the necessary distances have been set, all the necessary systems have been put in place. We read, we learn, we experience, we make adjustments. Throughout our childhood and teenage years, we strive to attain the correct distance to objects and phenomena. When it has been fixed we call it knowledge. At length we bring it within the scope of our senses and we stabilize it with fixer. Things that are too large, such as cloud formations, river deltas, constellations, we reduce. Things that are too small to see with the naked eye, such as molecules and atoms, we magnify. Understanding the world requires you to take a certain distance from it.

“As your perspective of the world increases not only is the pain it inflicts on you less but also its meaning.

My struggle karl ove knausgaard goodreads