My Struggle

"Intense and vital . . . Where many contemporary writers would reflexively turn to irony, Knausgaard is intense and utterly honest, unafraid to voice universal anxieties . . . The need for totality . . . brings superb, lingering, celestial passages . . . He wants us to inhabit he ordinariness of life, which is sometimes visionary, sometimes banal, and sometimes momentous, but all of it perforce ordinary because it happens in the course of a life, and happens, in different forms, to everyone . . ." --James Wood, The New Yorker

"Steadily absorbing, lit up by pages of startling insight and harrowing honesty, My Struggle introduces into world literature a singular character and immerses us in his fascinating Underground Man consciousness." --Phillip Lopate

"A rope round the neck, a knife in the heart. The book is full of magic. The world simply opens up . . . Knausgaard will have the same status as Henrik Ibsen and Knut Hamsun." --Kristeligt Dagblad (Denmark)

"Ruthless beauty." --Aftenposten (Norway)

"This first installment of an epic quest should restore jaded readers to life." --The Independent

"Between Proust and the woods . . . Like granite, precise and forceful. More real than reality." --La Repubblica (Italy)

"Breathtakingly good." --The New York Times Book Review

"[Knausgaard's] preternatural facility for description . . . speaks not only to the sheer pleasure his fiction affords, but to the philosophical stakes of that pleasure." --Mark Sussman, Los Angeles Review of Books