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guts_'s review against another edition
emotional
reflective
sad
slow-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
5.0
Book 4 of the My Struggle series is where Karl Ove Knausgard arguably struggles the most, apart from the death of his father in the first book. On his own for the first time, eighteen year old Karl Ove begins teaching in a small fishing village in northern Norway while trying to establish himself as a writer and of course, lose his virginity. We accompany him through his drunken triumphs where the world is beautiful and anything is possible, to his lowest, most shameful, and humiliating failures with women and letting down and being let down by friends and family. Keeping in line with the previous entries in the series, this is a portrait of the life of a deeply complicated yet ordinary and sincere man laid bare. Much like the small town of Hafjord where the sun disappears for months at a time and there is seemingly nothing to do but drink yourself into oblivion; there is not much happening in the My Struggle books, only life, sometimes raw and ugly, sometimes indescribably beautiful, tender, and human. If you stop and look for the beauty in everyday life, it will find you. Knausgard, like any great artist, reveals what is already there, offering you the chance to see with new eyes and it can change you if you let it.
"While I washed my hands I stared at my reflection in the mirror. The singular feeling that arose when you looked at your own eyes, which so purely and unambiguously expressed your inner state, of being both inside and outside, filled me to the hilt for a few intense seconds, but was forgotten the moment I left the room, in the same way that a towel on a hook or a bar of soap in the small hollow in the sink also were, all these trivialities that have no existence beyond the moment, but hang or lie undisturbed in dark, empty rooms until the door is opened the next time and another person grasps the soap, dries his hands on the towel, and examines his soul in the mirror."
"While I washed my hands I stared at my reflection in the mirror. The singular feeling that arose when you looked at your own eyes, which so purely and unambiguously expressed your inner state, of being both inside and outside, filled me to the hilt for a few intense seconds, but was forgotten the moment I left the room, in the same way that a towel on a hook or a bar of soap in the small hollow in the sink also were, all these trivialities that have no existence beyond the moment, but hang or lie undisturbed in dark, empty rooms until the door is opened the next time and another person grasps the soap, dries his hands on the towel, and examines his soul in the mirror."
aceface's review against another edition
challenging
funny
reflective
sad
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? It's complicated
- Loveable characters? It's complicated
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated
4.0
sleeepykitty's review against another edition
emotional
funny
hopeful
inspiring
lighthearted
mysterious
reflective
relaxing
slow-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? A mix
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? Yes
- Diverse cast of characters? No
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
3.75
septimusmith's review against another edition
challenging
dark
emotional
informative
inspiring
lighthearted
reflective
relaxing
sad
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? No
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
4.5
tom_in_london's review against another edition
5.0
Karl Ove Knausgård having reached the age of eighteen in this fourth volume of his life story, his homespun teenage philosophy expresses a rebellious frame of mind that pervades the whole book, his behaviour, and everything he was thinking at the time:
I had decided that ages ago that I would not continue my education after school, what we learned was just rubbish, basically what life was about was living, and living in the way you want, in other words, enjoying your life. Some enjoyed their lives best by working, others by not working. OK, I was aware that I would need money, which meant that I would also have to work, but not all the time and not on something that would deplete all my energy and eat into my soul, leaving me like one of the middle-aged halfwits who guarded their hedges and peered across at their neighbours to see if their status symbols were as a wonderful as their own.
So now that he has left school and is undecided about what to do (whilst he pursues his ambition to become a writer) he packs his books, his CDs, and typewriter and goes to teach for a year in the remote north of Norway, to a tiny village he calls Håjford (in reality Fjordgård). The book begins with his long journey, with many changes, to Håjford and his arrival there, at the end of everything, where the road ends and there is nothing beyond. The bus turns round and goes back, leaving him with his bag standing at the house where he will be lodging as a teacher.
In a quick walk round the village (with a population of hardly 200 people) that takes no more than ten minutes, he identifies the main features: a small fish processing factory, a mini-market, a church, and of course the school where he will be teaching. We are in the far north here, and there's nothing much going on. The young people have all left the village to work or study elsewhere, leaving only the fishermen, their families, and the younger children.
Karl Ove's engagement with these rough-hewn, sweary village kids with low expectations, in this remotest of settings, is the most fascinating part of the book. He settles down to a routine of writing, getting drunk, and resolving the various little dramas that develop with the children. His only adult friends are the other teachers, most of whom dislike him as a temporary interloper. Social life consists of drinking sessions with some of the locals, a few of the teachers, and some of the school kids.
During this period of isolation, Karl Ove (still a virgin) is also on the lookout for a sexual partner but there's nobody in the village to fit the bill. Nothing to do but fantasise about the girls at the school, some of whom consider him a "rock star"and hang around him when he's at home. During various drunken forays by car to the nearest larger town (still no more than a village) he tries to get involved with various women and discovers that he suffers from premature ejaculation; many such episodes are described in detail. This may not be to everyone's taste and I wonder what female readers may think of it.
Meanwhile he's writing, writing, writing, partly building on his earlier success as a reviewer of music CDs (featured in the previous volume) and partly trying to develop a style based on some of the writers he's interested in, many of them Norwegian, and on Hemingway (he shortens his sentences in a search for that same simplicity and directness).
After this fascinating first section of the book, there's a long, long excursus into a later part of his life where we're back in southern Norway again and we return to the problem of his domineering father, the breakup with his loving mother, who has problems of her own, and more or less continuous drinking; he loves being drunk and is only happy when he has achieved complete oblivion. This long middle section of the book becomes very repetitive as people come and go, one drinking session follows another, and the strangely peaceful interlude in Håjford is forgotten about.
But then at the end we find ourselves back in Håjford as Karl Ove prepares to finish his year of teaching and return to urban life in the cities of the South (Bergen, Kristiansand) where his long-term friends and family are. But this remotest of faraway places remains unforgettable in the reader's mind.
I had decided that ages ago that I would not continue my education after school, what we learned was just rubbish, basically what life was about was living, and living in the way you want, in other words, enjoying your life. Some enjoyed their lives best by working, others by not working. OK, I was aware that I would need money, which meant that I would also have to work, but not all the time and not on something that would deplete all my energy and eat into my soul, leaving me like one of the middle-aged halfwits who guarded their hedges and peered across at their neighbours to see if their status symbols were as a wonderful as their own.
So now that he has left school and is undecided about what to do (whilst he pursues his ambition to become a writer) he packs his books, his CDs, and typewriter and goes to teach for a year in the remote north of Norway, to a tiny village he calls Håjford (in reality Fjordgård). The book begins with his long journey, with many changes, to Håjford and his arrival there, at the end of everything, where the road ends and there is nothing beyond. The bus turns round and goes back, leaving him with his bag standing at the house where he will be lodging as a teacher.
In a quick walk round the village (with a population of hardly 200 people) that takes no more than ten minutes, he identifies the main features: a small fish processing factory, a mini-market, a church, and of course the school where he will be teaching. We are in the far north here, and there's nothing much going on. The young people have all left the village to work or study elsewhere, leaving only the fishermen, their families, and the younger children.
Karl Ove's engagement with these rough-hewn, sweary village kids with low expectations, in this remotest of settings, is the most fascinating part of the book. He settles down to a routine of writing, getting drunk, and resolving the various little dramas that develop with the children. His only adult friends are the other teachers, most of whom dislike him as a temporary interloper. Social life consists of drinking sessions with some of the locals, a few of the teachers, and some of the school kids.
During this period of isolation, Karl Ove (still a virgin) is also on the lookout for a sexual partner but there's nobody in the village to fit the bill. Nothing to do but fantasise about the girls at the school, some of whom consider him a "rock star"and hang around him when he's at home. During various drunken forays by car to the nearest larger town (still no more than a village) he tries to get involved with various women and discovers that he suffers from premature ejaculation; many such episodes are described in detail. This may not be to everyone's taste and I wonder what female readers may think of it.
Meanwhile he's writing, writing, writing, partly building on his earlier success as a reviewer of music CDs (featured in the previous volume) and partly trying to develop a style based on some of the writers he's interested in, many of them Norwegian, and on Hemingway (he shortens his sentences in a search for that same simplicity and directness).
After this fascinating first section of the book, there's a long, long excursus into a later part of his life where we're back in southern Norway again and we return to the problem of his domineering father, the breakup with his loving mother, who has problems of her own, and more or less continuous drinking; he loves being drunk and is only happy when he has achieved complete oblivion. This long middle section of the book becomes very repetitive as people come and go, one drinking session follows another, and the strangely peaceful interlude in Håjford is forgotten about.
But then at the end we find ourselves back in Håjford as Karl Ove prepares to finish his year of teaching and return to urban life in the cities of the South (Bergen, Kristiansand) where his long-term friends and family are. But this remotest of faraway places remains unforgettable in the reader's mind.
kirsten0929's review against another edition
5.0
I'm in so deep now, I have no idea what I would have thought of it had I read it as a stand alone - I would have liked him personally a little less maybe - but really I think these books have to be judged as a whole. I'm not sure what makes the minutiae of his life so compelling. The brutal honesty, his interpretations of what he's detailing, for sure. The insightfulness, the turning inward. His writing style. Whatever it is, I'm all in. Ready for book five.
vkadic's review
reflective
slow-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? No
- Loveable characters? It's complicated
- Diverse cast of characters? No
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
3.25
I think out of the four books I read so far this is the weakest for me. It is the most focused one with very little jumping around time periods and just describing the author's teenage years, mostly the one year he was a teacher at 18. I really like the way the author writes, how honest he is in describing himself, his thoughts, experiences, relationships with others. And also he does a very good job in actually putting you in the head of a teenager although he is writing this as an adult. I think we had lead pretty different lives, and had a lot of different teenager experiences but still he manages to remind me of that feeling of being a teenager, the way you think about yourself, the importance you put on other people's perception of you, the things you find important... All in all it was an okayish book, not my favourite, the ending I cannot even describe, I was very surprised anyone would choose to end a book like that.
leic01's review against another edition
emotional
funny
informative
reflective
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? A mix
- Strong character development? It's complicated
- Loveable characters? No
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
3.5
bittersweet_symphony's review against another edition
4.0
It's an unabashed pleasure to spend a few hundred more pages in the experience of Karl Ove. He's beyond a Scandinavian treasure.
Book four is largely about his pursuit to lose his virginity as a late teen, one spontaneous (and sometimes terrifying) erection after another. He's an incredibly sympathetic and authentic writer, not shying away from the embarrassing, sometimes self-aggrandizing, and often controversial impulses which pulse through him during his brief tenure in Northern Norway as an 18-year-old teacher. With students only a few years his junior, you can imagine the sexual tension and gray areas in which this narrative resides. Oh look, another erection!
This volume is my least favorite of the Karl Ove Odyssey, and contains the same criticism I hold for all other books in the series: lack of exposition or retrospective analysis. I would love to hear more insights about his own experiences, how they fit into who he is later in life, and why he chose to include the particular events he does. How have these shaped his views of women, fatherhood, his career as a writer, gender, political orientation? What lessons has he learned since then? For me, those are the meatiest and most meaningful bits from first-person narratives (see A Prayer for Owen Meaney for a great example).
At the end of it, I want to know what it all means to him, what matters. For now, it's a mostly mundane series of events that happen to some guy I've never met. And yet, therein lies his brilliance. You want to keep reading, cheering for him, feeling what he so honestly articulates.
Despite my major criticism, I don't foresee any reason to avoid reading anything this giant writes.
Book four is largely about his pursuit to lose his virginity as a late teen, one spontaneous (and sometimes terrifying) erection after another. He's an incredibly sympathetic and authentic writer, not shying away from the embarrassing, sometimes self-aggrandizing, and often controversial impulses which pulse through him during his brief tenure in Northern Norway as an 18-year-old teacher. With students only a few years his junior, you can imagine the sexual tension and gray areas in which this narrative resides. Oh look, another erection!
This volume is my least favorite of the Karl Ove Odyssey, and contains the same criticism I hold for all other books in the series: lack of exposition or retrospective analysis. I would love to hear more insights about his own experiences, how they fit into who he is later in life, and why he chose to include the particular events he does. How have these shaped his views of women, fatherhood, his career as a writer, gender, political orientation? What lessons has he learned since then? For me, those are the meatiest and most meaningful bits from first-person narratives (see A Prayer for Owen Meaney for a great example).
At the end of it, I want to know what it all means to him, what matters. For now, it's a mostly mundane series of events that happen to some guy I've never met. And yet, therein lies his brilliance. You want to keep reading, cheering for him, feeling what he so honestly articulates.
Despite my major criticism, I don't foresee any reason to avoid reading anything this giant writes.
zhengsterz's review against another edition
dark
funny
reflective
fast-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? Yes
- Diverse cast of characters? No
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
4.0
Fourth book of Knausgard autobiographies. This one has plenty of references and callbacks to the earlier books. Main themes of this book is his starting a new life in a isolated fishing village as a teacher while writing part time at the age of 18 along with the coming of age problems, alcohol and budding sexuality. Again his frankness and shamelessness in putting himself on full display is no longer as astonishing at this point but does leave me shaking my head in some instances. The book seems to be alot more readable and the prose more enjoyable or this could just mean i am adapting to Knuasgard's style of writing. The ending of the book left me chuckling as he finally loses his virginity with a fat chick.