Flash book review: My Struggle: A Death in the Family by Karl Ove Knausgaard

A Death in the Family by Karl Ove Knausgård
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

of course now i will never be the same again, for at least a day, or a week or maybe a month or two. that’s how forceful and impressive my struggle is. that’s how it feels in the moment of its consumption. i/you feel changed by it, like your perception infrastructure has been invaded, infested, swarmed, reassembled by the tongue of this book; by its relentless and obsessive ordering and relaying of what reality is, what reality can be, perhaps how it ought to be.
i was reminded of W.G. Sebald’s The Rings of Saturn, the way places and memories and histories intermingle and mesh seamlessly (seemingly) from one to the other. I see a lot of people recoiling from the level of detail and everyday banality Knausgaard, Karl Ove chooses to divulge, but for me it only adds to the package, to the brutal honesty and total thoroughness of description that drips off every page here from familial relations, the shape of the sky, the meaning of art, teenage lust, shame and rejection, success, modernity, football, the mystical, religion, music, death…as a scrutinising map of adult minds living in the 20th and 21st centuries.
on top of that, it’s frequently funny in that dry and direct way characteristic of the Scandinavians.
it’s just really very brilliant.

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