Scan barcode
A review by bittersweet_symphony
My Struggle, Book Four by Karl Ove Knausgård
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.