• My Struggle: Book Four
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Archipelago Books

My Struggle: Book Four

My Struggle: Book Four

by Karl Ove Knausgaard, translated from the Norwegian by Don Bartlett

$27.00
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Format

Book Four finds an eighteen-year-old Karl Ove in a tiny fishing village in Northern Norway, where he has been hired as a schoolteacher and is living on his own for the first time. When the ferocious winter takes hold, Karl Ove—in the company of the Håfjord locals, a warm and earthy group who have spent their lives working, drinking, joking together in close quarters—confronts private demons, reels from humiliations, and is elated by small victories. We are immersed, along with Karl Ove, in this world—sometimes claustrophobic, sometimes serenely beautiful—where memories and physical obsessions burn throughout the endless Arctic winter. In Book Four, Karl Ove must weigh the realities of his new life as a writer against everything he had believed it would be.

Additional Book Information

Series: Archipelago Books
ISBN: 9780914671176
Pages: 350
Publication Date:

Praise

With each volume of My Struggle that is published in English, Knausgaard emerges more clearly, in all his human ambiguity. Volume Four presents a portrait of the artist as a young man, marinated in alcohol and sexual failure. It is awkward, painful, occasionally shocking and often very funny, particularly if you have ever been (or known) a teenage boy.
—Hari Kunzru

Knausgaard's command of the traditional novelistic procedure is the reason these books are the opposite of dull, though on the face of it they should be. Knausgaard is always spinning a tale, always drawing the reader along with some romantic entanglement, sexual disaster, or emotional crisis. He feeds in atmosphere in just the right amounts; his pacing is flawless. How wonderful to read an experimental novel that fires every nerve ending while summoning in the reader the sheer sense of how amazing it is to be alive, on this planet and no other.
—Jeffrey Eugenides, The New York Times Book Review

My Struggle: Book Four is an elegiac kind of comic novel, and it is pure Karl Ove Knausgaard. This is to say, it comprises intimate descriptions of daily life, descriptions that build to something improbably greater than the sum of their parts.
—Dwight Garner, The New York Times

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