My Struggle - vol. 6

Nominated for the Critics' Prize 2011

Throughout the series of novels titled My Struggle Karl Ove Knausgård mercilessly explores his own life, his ambitions and failures, his insecurity and doubts, his relationships to friends and lovers, wife and children, mother and father. It is a work where life is described in all its nuances, from the earthshattering moments when everything changes to the most commonplace details of everyday life. It is also a risky project where the limits between the private and the public are transgressed again and again, not without costs for the writer himself and for the people he describes. The sixth and final volume deals with the realization of the work, with the publication of the previous volumes and the circumstances around the publication, with literature itself and its relationship to reality.

Praise for My Struggle - vol. 6:

“In the future, 17^th November 2011 will be associated with a seminal event in the history of Norwegian literature. That was the day the sixth and final volume of Karl Ove Knausgård’s My Struggle was published ... There will be a before and an after My Struggle. Knausgård will have the same status as Henrik Ibsen and Knut Hamsun. It’s quite a mystery how Norway can continue producing world class writers.”
(Kristeligt Dagblad, Denmark)

”[Taken as a whole, My Struggle] stands out as more important and more relevant than what any other living writer on our latitudes has produced during, say, the last three decades, and probably even longer ... It’s quite clear that the project is arrowshaped – that the previous parts form the shaft and the final sixth part the arrowhead of the devastating shot Knausgård takes at our civilisation ... My Struggle puts most fiction that has been produced lately to shame. When I look up from page 1116 in My Struggle 6 and look out over the Swedish literary landscape I see a herd of farm cows all chewing the cud with their eyes at times on the clouds, at times on the insurmountable fence.”
(Dagens Nyheter, Sweden)

"The greatest and most convincing strength of this overwhelming novel is the total ruthlessness the narrating protagonist shows in his search for his inner core in just that concentrated situation when he sits in front of his computer, deaf and blind to everything else, even the people he loves the most. It is as if the rhythm and the flow of his style creates the story before it even knows where it’s heading ... Together with the first book’s depiction of the death of his father, the ninth and final part is the work’s strongest part ... I can’t think of any other literary work for many years that has fascinated me more than Knausgård’s 3600-page long epic. I have seen my self in everything, I have protected myself against everything. Greater events than this are rare in my life as a reader."
(Expressen, Sweden)

The huge finale to Karl Ove Knausgård’s My Struggle is alternately whimpering, superb and on the verge of contradicting the entire work. If it wasn’t it would really have been lying … [then he] changes track completely and puts the confessional novel on hold while producing a 400 page long at the same time brilliant and fluttering essay about identity, upbringing and above all a barely 90 year old work also titled My Struggle.”
5/6 (Jyllands-Posten, Denmark)

“I can’t remember when I last read anything that feels as important and moving as this. Not every thought is unobjectionable, and I can very well understand the furious uncle Gunnar. But to me as a reader, the novel still appears as an incredibly generous project, an honest attempt to explore something of universal significance. And no one – ultimately not even the frightening father – is subjected to as ruthless an examination as Knausgård subjects himself to”
(Hufvudstadsbladet, Finland)

“A powerful cycle: Knausgård’s work ends on the same high level as it started. My Struggle is the greatest, best and in literary terms most groundbreaking novel that has been published  in Norway for a very long time … Knausgård shows the ability to penetrate some of the most sensitive issues of our times, and create great art in the process … In my eyes it’s difficult to think of literature that reaches further out into the great, wide open than Karl Ove Knausgård’s work”
(Klassekampen)

“Where do you start a review of a book which with its 1120 pages is so dizzyingly ambitious, so grand in its thinking, so thematically and intellectually rich and yet so problematic as My Struggle 6 is? … It’s highly fascinating to read about the conception and reception of a work in the work itself in this way … In a text that to such great extent is about emotions, it might be a paradox that it mainly speaks to the intellect. But anybody who accepts that good literature can be both difficult and occasionally boring, has an in every way overwhelming and literally unique experience in store”
(Dagens Næringsliv)

“Knausgård’s sixth book in the My Struggle series is incredibly good; rich, extensive, profound, moving and provoking … Book Six is monumental. It is an esthetic pleasure and it reaches incredibly wide … [The final part is] incredibly powerful. It’s warm and very, very human”
6/6 (Fædrelandsvennen)

“The final volume of My Struggle is just as powerful as the series needed it to be … [it’s] not a text you 'read' in a traditional sense, but rather a 'place' you inhabit, a stream you have sunk yourself into, only to be pulled here and there by the author’s associations … It’s the fundamental insecurity which is the most important quality of the My Struggle books, and this is what embraces us in the book’s final and best part, where the text seems to flow into reality, and the family which has been there all the time.”
(Dagbladet)

“Book 6 is the one which has gripped me most powerfully, quite simply shaken me to the core”
6/6 (Agderposten)

“How do you finish such an impossible work? … a particoloured, but at times shining literary experiment from the turning of the 20^th into the 21^st century, with a self-evident place in the European history of literature of our times”
(Dagsavisen)

“For posterity My Struggle will stand out as a trailblazing literary project which expanded the literary field … throughout the work there are threads of something existential, which is not only an expression of a truer gaze on man, but which also carves out a space of reflection larger than in other contemporary Norwegian fiction … will probably stand out as a landmark in the history of Norwegian literature, maybe even in the history of European literature ... My Struggle1-6 is a literary display of strength of an utterly rare kind. It’s shining and reprehensible, transgressive and intimate, revealing and discrete, thoughtful and naïve, heartless and beautiful, straightforward and experimental. My Struggle is about the normal, in a both normal and abnormal form. A generation, a family, a human  being in the struggle”
(Vårt Land)

“A graceful monster, a wheelbarrow load of a book, a cobweb of paradoxes … Is it good? Yes, to the core. Is it significant? Absolutely. Is it problematic? Yes, that too … it’s agonising and  beautiful and not least revelatory. A work like this has never before been written in Norwegian and it will be a long time before we see anything similar again … This is literature with everything. These books can be discussed, but they can also be discussed with”
(NRK)

“Several people, who probably have neither read the books nor anything by Knausgård at all, have claimed that this literary project is a kind of orgy of self-absorption and self-worship. Like anyone who talks without knowing what he is talking about, they are mistaken … My Struggle will stand out in Norwegian literature”
(Adresseavisen)

“The style is typical for Knausgård, elegant in the way it changes between the tiniest details and great thoughts”
(Bergens Tidende)

First published: 2011, Forlaget Oktober
Karl Ove Knausgård: Biography and bibliography

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