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Loading... Min kamp 3 (original 2009; edition 2012)by Karl Ove Knausgård, Rebecca Alsberg
Work InformationMy Struggle: Book 3 by Karl Ove Knausgård (2009)
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Sign up for LibraryThing to find out whether you'll like this book. No current Talk conversations about this book. My Struggle is a great title for this novel. Because while the main character Karl Ove is without a doubt, a big Momma's Boy, and an even bigger cry baby. He is just a little kid, and thanks to the brilliant writing of Karl Ove Knausgaard we get behind him right away. We all like to think of kids as sweet innocent little things; but let's face it, they can be really cruel to each other. If someone shows weakness, the other kids are usually ready, willing, and able to pounce on it. And pounce on it they do. But the biggest struggle little Karl Ove has to deal with is by far, his heartless domineering father. The most harrowing moments of the novel almost all involve the cruel punishments bestowed upon Karl Ove by his father. The novel deserves all the praise and accolades it has received and while Karl Ove's childhood is a struggle; there are also lots of happy moments that any typical Norwegian kid growing up in the 70ies would have experienced. A wonderful novel ! ( ) I had hoped to get in ahead of the backlash with a backlash to the backlash kind of thing, where I defend KOK against people who are tired of hearing about him. Well, too bad. Not only are the reviews of this volume uniformly positive (hence, no backlash yet), but I found it overwhelmingly boring. So, I am doubly stymied. At the start of the book, KOK calls his childhood a ghetto-like state of incompleteness. He suggests that childhood is meaningfullish, but not really meaningful, because (yawn) memory distorts the past and anyway, the child is a developing self, not a self intact (well said). This is followed by 400 pages of anecdotes about being a pre-pubescent and pubescent boy who suffers greatly at home (his father, whom we already know to be a monster, is a monster here too) and at school (where his sufferings seem to be more of the 'everyone feels like they were unpopular in middle school' kind). He plays with his anus. He plays with his penis. He reads books. Dad gets angry. Repeat. Only around page 250 do we get a glimpse of the narrator rather than the character. He laments the absence of his mother from his memories and, by extension, from this book. I lament it too. This lasts for a page and a half before we're back to reportage. The key to this volume comes around a hundred pages later. A teacher neglects to read KOK's essay aloud, because you have to give the other young children time to exhibit. He decides to get his revenge. "Next time I would write as badly as I could." That is precisely what we have here. A book written about an 8-13 year old, in the head of an 8-13 year old, with the syntactical, linguistic and philosophical sophistication of an 8-13 year old. I know KOK's better than that; I know he's choosing to do this. He is choosing to write as badly as he can. It's pretty bad. And then at the very end there's *one* moment of adult level art. After a hundred pages of young men playing with their willies and looking at porn (not judging, just describing), [spoiler alert], young KOK comes across a picture of a naked woman--a holocaust victim. Suddenly sex is thrown into question. Then he sees a teacher ogling a 13 year old girl just as young KOK, too, is ogling her. Again, sex is thrown into question. It's a reminder of what he can do when he's not busy pretending to be very young. Loved this, Knausgaard's early years up to about 13 and probably a good place to start the series for newcomers. It lacks some of the more philosophical introspection that is peppered throughout the preceding volumes owing to being from his perspective as a child, but it's extremely readable and for me at least, very relatable at points to my own childhood (although I was nowhere near as successful with girls as him sadly). Still nothing much happens but I found it every bit as compelling as the previous novels, albeit lacking anything matching the sustained brilliance of the 2nd half of the first novel. I love how important the layout of the house is to the young Karl Ove, especially in relation to avoiding his tyrannical father e.g. knowing that if he leaves a room within a certain time from hearing a door close downstairs he can remain unseen. I can remember all that kind of stuff vividly from my own youth; being able to differentiate parent's from the heaviness of their steps - even if they were in a good or bad mood. There's stuff like that throughout, I was completely transported back. This is the first of the series I've experienced as an audiobook and it's fantastic, the narrator Edoardo Ballerini enlivens the text and works perfectly with the heightened language Knausgaard uses. Looking forward to listening to the rest of the series. In my view, this is the best and most compelling of the series so far. Karl Ove pushes relentlessly into a detailed account of childhood memories of a small community in the rural coastal region of southwest Norway. There are many bucolic scenes of the rugged shoreline and the idyllic forests which surround him and his family. He occasionally indulges in spirited pranks and acts of rebellion against the tight reins of social conformity. At the same time, his repressive and controlling father looms over him and sours his familial relationships. The young Karl Ove turns into an intelligent, articulate, extremely sensitive boy who creates some of his own problems with a number of poor decisions -- for which he often (but not always) suffers the consequences. Some readers will no doubt be repelled by Karl Ove's character as it emerges here. Yes, there are clear signs of an incipient narcissism and a manipulative tendency which seeks to control those who surround him. (Young Knausgaard sure does cry a lot.) But this is an unsentimental, un-magical view of the way that many of us experience the formative years of life. It's not Wordsworthian. Most people do not have an Atticus Finch as our father. If the child is father to the man, it is important to avoid the temptation to romanticize childhood, necessary to avoid the impulse to soften the contours of the real pain and anguish that are experienced. And it should not surprise us that children who are abused psychologically often emerge scarred for the rest of their lives. I commend the author's honesty in presenting an encompassing view of the torments, tragedies, and turmoils of an unhappy boyhood.
This is not boring in the way bad narrative is boring; it is boring in the way life is boring, and somehow, almost perversely, that is a surprising thing to see on the page. My Struggle (a slippery, self-ironising title) is composed of small incidents, some described at great length – 50 pages at a children's party, more about a teenage plan to hide some cans of beer one New Year's Eve. There are sections about more traumatic or intimate events – the harrowing job of cleaning up after his father's death, a drunken episode of self-cutting after a sexual rejection at a young writers' residential course – but Knausgaard appears to have shaped his narrative according to the "sly and artful" dictates of his memory. One has the sense that many significant things have been omitted, while seemingly insignificant things are being given undue or unlikely weight. In the first two volumes the narrative hops about between times and places, incorporating digressions about art and writing and the nature of remembering. The third is a more conventionally linear childhood memoir. What there isn't is a plot. The various events are allowed to take their own shape, without being forced into a conventional mould. . . . The experience of reading My Struggle is that of the world seeming to step forward from the world. It is not the world mirrored or photocopied; its relationship to reality is less direct, less innocent. The book is the record of someone trying and failing (failing better, as Beckett has it) to make an accurate representation of himself; the gap between the world and that representation, between the world and itself, is the space where all sorts of questions about truth and personal identity arise. Is contained inAwardsDistinctionsNotable Lists
"A family of four--mother, father and two boys--move to the South Coast of Norway to a new house on a newly developed site. It is the early 1970s and the family's trajectory, upwardly mobile: the future seems limitless. In painstaking, sometimes self-lacerating detail, Knausgaard paints a world familiar to anyone who can recall the intensity and novelty of childhood experience, one in which children and adults lead parallel lives that never meet. Perhaps the most Proustian in the series, Book Three gives us Knausgaard's vivid, technicolor recollections of childhood, his emerging self-understanding, and the multilayered nature of time's passing, memory, and existence."--Amazon.com No library descriptions found. |
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Google Books — Loading... GenresMelvil Decimal System (DDC)839.823Literature German literature and literatures of related languages Other Germanic literatures Danish and Norwegian literatures Norwegian literature Norwegian Bokmål fictionLC ClassificationRatingAverage:
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