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Out of the World

Winner of the 1998 Norwegian Critics’ Prize - as the first debut ever

The year is 1996. 26 year-old Henrik Vankel is in the north of Norway, working as a substitute teacher, being happy. Until he realises he is in love. With one of his pupils. That he wants her. That this is all he wants.

Based on the relationship between Henrik and the young girl Miriam, Knausgård has written an obsessive love story – but that is only the beginning. Out of the World is also the story about a young man growing up in Norway in the 80s. Out of the World is an ambitious first novel, a terrible and wicked monument over the male sense of shame, as well as a grandiose literary celebration of arrogance and ruin.

A huge commercial success, Out of the World won Knausgård the Norwegian Critics’ Prize, and was the first literary debut ever to receive this award.

Praise for Out of the World:

"Obsessive, overwhelming and powerful... We have mentioned Mykle, hinted at Hamsun, we could mention Nabokov... I believe this novel will be read in the new millennium"
(Dagbladet)

“Overwhelming Norwegian first novel. Norwegian Karl Ove Knausgård’s nuanced, psychological realism ought to experience the same breakthrough in this country as Jan Kjærstad did in the 1990s. Out of the World is the first volume of a potent trilogy. It is not an everyday occurrence that a literary debutant present the public with a truly ambitious and sterling piece of work… I am honestly sorry to be forced to apply a notorious reviewers’ cliché, but trust me; it’s actually difficult to put the book down…For the great novel Out of the World belongs to the absolute top class of new Norwegian prose fiction”
(Kristeligt Dagblad, Denmark)

"Knausgård is an extraordinarily talented observer, with a sensitive and precise view of the world... Out of the World is a bold and relevant novel and a remarkable debut"
(Aftenposten)

"Karl Ove Knausgård enters the literary scene with a novel so sharp, beautiful and tragic that the reader falls silent. The novel’s psychological orientation creates associations to powerful studies of man’s irrational sides written by authors like Dostojevskij and Hamsun"
(Morgenbladet)

“Why on earth has [this book] not come out in Danish before? It is, after all, smashing!...I shake my head in pure admiration for Karl Ove Knausgård; it is unbelievable that Out of the World is his debut onto the literary scene… A new Nordic language- and storytelling-talent has arrived, and I’m looking forward to more; much more”
( www.bookworm.dk )

First published: 1998 by Tiden Norsk Forlag
Karl Ove Knausgård: Biography and bibliography

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