My Struggle / A Death in the Family

“Today is the 27th of February 2008. The time is 23:43. I, who am writing this, Karl Ove Knausgård, was born in December 1968, and am thus at the time of writing 39 years old. I have three children; Vanja, Heidi and John, and am married for the second time, to Linda Boström Knausgård. All four are asleep in the rooms around me, in a flat in Malmö, Sweden, where we have lived for 18 months. With the exception of some of the parents of the children in Vanja and Heidi’s nursery, we don’t know anyone here. That is not a loss, at least not to me; social life gives me nothing anyway.”

The greatest enigma in his life is his own father. Now he himself is a father, and all he wants to achieve in that role is that his own children do not fear him. Almost ten years have passed since Karl Ove Knausgård’s father drank himself to death, and Karl Ove is struggling to write his third novel. He wants it to be a great masterpiece, but he is constantly haunted by self-doubt, and spends days making up unflattering epitaphs about himself.

The six novels of the ‘My Struggle’ cycle can be read independently or as one hugely ambitious project. This breathtaking cycle has been the greatest literary sensation in Norway in decades, and the total print run has passed 400.000.

Breaking his own life story down to its elementary particles, Karl Ove Knausgård embarks on a Proustian exploration of his past, creating a universal story of the struggles – great and small – that we all face in our lives. In addition to amazing reviews and several awards and nominations, this fascinating literary experiment has generated an enormous interest among journalists, critics and readers, resulting in hundreds of articles, commentaries, essays, blog posts and discussions.