Skip to main content
Trade Books For Courses Tradebooks for Courses

My Struggle: Book 4

Karl Ove Knausgaard; Translated from the Norwegian by Don Bartlett

Farrar, Straus and Giroux

opens in a new window
opens in a new window My Struggle: Book 4 Download image

ISBN10: 0374534179
ISBN13: 9780374534172

Trade Paperback

512 Pages

$23.00

Request Desk Copy
Request Exam Copy

TRADE BOOKS FOR COURSES NEWSLETTER

Sign up to receive information about new books, author events, and special offers.

Sign up now

My Struggle: Book 4 finds an eighteen-year-old Karl Ove Knausgaard 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, and 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 4, Karl Ove must weigh the realities of his new life as a writer against everything he had believed it would be.

Reviews

Praise for My Struggle: Book 4

"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 it is 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

"The narrator may be intellectually earnest, an aesthete who meditates on the sublime, but he is also a hapless fool, prone to Chaplinesque pratfalls. In exposing himself as a bundle of contradictions, Knausgaard also allows us to see ourselves."—The Guardian

"My Struggle—which is heroically well-translated by Don Bartlett—is surely the grand monument to our selfie-absorbed times. In its ambition, narcissism and exhausting exhaustiveness, the book feels like the culmination of our current obsession with the memoir . . . paradoxically enough, his honest, obsessive self-absorption makes his life feel universal. As I was reading, every single subject that came up in my daily living—parents, politics, education, Italian food, trees, even David Byrne—reminded me of something in Knausgaard. His work makes you realize that each and every one of our lives contains rich enough material for a long, daunting book called My Struggle."—NPR

Reviews from Goodreads

BOOK EXCERPTS

Read an Excerpt


 


Slowly my two suitcases glided around on the carousel in the arrivals hall. They were old, from the end of the 1960s, I had found them among Mom’s things in the barn when we were about to move, the day before...

About the author

Karl Ove Knausgaard; Translated from the Norwegian by Don Bartlett

Karl Ove Knausgaard was born in Norway in 1968. My Struggle has won countless international literary awards and has been translated into more than fifteen languages.

Don Bartlett
has translated dozens of books of various genres, including several novels and short story collections by Jo Nesbø and It's Fine by Me by Per Petterson. He lives in Norfolk, England.

Asbjørn Jensen