Karl Ove Knausgaard (Author) Karl Ove Knausgaard ''s My Struggle cycle has been heralded as a masterpiece all over the world. From A Death in the Family to The End , the novels move through childhood into adulthood and, together, form an enthralling portrait of human life. Knausgaard has been awarded the Norwegian Critics Prize for Literature, the Brage Prize and the Jerusalem Prize. His work, which also includes Out of the World , A Time for Everything and the Seasons Quartet, is published in thirty-five languages. Martin Aitken (Translator) Martin Aitken ''s translations of Scandinavian literature number some 30 books. He was shortlisted for the International DUBLIN Literary Award in 2017, was a finalist at the US National Book Awards in 2018 and received the PEN America Translation Prize in 2019. He lives in Denmark.
**A Guardian , The Times , Daily Telegraph, Financial Times and The Week Book of the Year 2018** The extraordinary final volume of Karl Ove Knausgaard''s monumental My Struggle series, ''perhaps the most significant literary enterprise of our times'' ( Guardian ) The End is the sixth and final book in the monumental My Struggle cycle. Here, Karl Ove Knausgaard examines life, death, love and literature with unsparing rigour and begins to count the cost of his project. This last volume reflects on the fallout from the earlier books, with Knausgaard facing the pressures of literary acclaim and its often shattering repercussions. The End is at once a meditation on writing and its relationship with reality, and an account of a writer''s relationship with himself - his ambitions, his doubts and frailties. My Struggle depicts life in all its shades, from moments of great drama to seemingly trivial everyday details. It is a project freighted with risk, where the bounds between private and public worlds are tested, not without penalty for the author himself and those around him. The End is the capstone on an unparalleled achievement.
Spring is a deeply moving novel about family, our everyday lives, our joys and our struggles, beautifully illustrated by Anna Bjerger.
I have just finished writing this book for you. What happened that summer nearly three years ago, and its repercussions, are long since over. Sometimes it hurts to live, but there is always something to live for.
Spring follows a father and his newborn daughter through one day in April, from sunrise to sunset. It is a day filled with the small joys of family life, but also its deep struggles. With this striking novel in the Seasons quartet, Karl Ove Knausgaard reflects uncompromisingly on life's darkest moments and what can sustain us through them.
Utterly gripping and brilliantly rendered in Knausgaard's famously pensive and honest style, Spring is the account of a shocking and heartbreaking familial trauma and the emotional epicentre of this singular literary series.
The second volume in his autobiographical quartet based on the seasons, Winter is an achingly beautiful collection of daily meditations and letters addressed directly to Knaugsaard's unborn daughter It is strange that you exist, but you don't know anything about what the world looks like. It's strange that there is a first time to see the sky, a first time to see the sun, a first time to feel the air against one's skin. It's strange that there is a first time to see a face, a tree, a lamp, pyjamas, a shoe. In my life that almost never happens anymore. But soon it will. In just a few months, I will see you for the first time.
In Winter, we rejoin the great Karl Ove Knausgaard as the birth of his daughter draws near. In preparation for her arrival, he takes stock of the world, seeing it anew. While new life is on the horizon, the earth is also in hibernation, waiting for the warmer weather to return. In his inimitably sensitive style, he writes about everything from the moon, winter boots and messiness, to owls and birthdays. Taking nothing for granted, he fills these everyday familiar objects and ideas with new meaning.
Startling, compassionate, and exquisitely beautiful, Knausgaard's writing is like nothing else. Somehow, he shows the world as it really is, at once mundane and sublime.
Karl Ove Knausgaard (Author) Karl Ove Knausgaard's My Struggle cycle has been heralded as a masterpiece all over the world. From A Death in the Family to The End, the novels move through childhood into adulthood and, together, form an enthralling portrait of human life. Knausgaard has been awarded the Norwegian Critics Prize for Literature, the Brage Prize and the Jerusalem Prize. His work, which also includes Out of the World, A Time for Everything and the Seasons Quartet, is published in thirty-five languages.Martin Aitken (Translator) Martin Aitken has lived in Denmark for nearly 30 years. He is the acclaimed translator of numerous novels, including work by Peter Hoeg, Jussi Adler-Olsen and Pia Juul, and has translated many short stories and poems. In 2012 he was awarded the American-Scandinavian Foundation's Nadia Christensen Translation Prize.
A family of four - mother, father and two boys - move to Sorland, to a new house on a new estate. It is the early 1970s, the children are small, the parents young and the future open. But at some point that future happens to them; at some point the future closes. The third book of the My Struggle cycle is set in a world where children and adults live parallel lives, ones that never meet. With insight and honesty, Karl Ove Knausgaard writes of a child''s growing self-awareness, of how events of the past impact on the present, and of the desire for other ways of living and other worlds within what we know.
At twenty, Karl Ove moves to Bergen. As the youngest student to be admitted to the prestigious Writing Academy, he arrives full of excitement and writerly aspirations. Soon though, he is stripped of youthful illusions. His writing is revealed to be puerile and cliched, and his social efforts are a dismal failure. Awkward in company and hopeless with women, he drowns his shame in drink and rock music. Then, little by little, things take a brighter turn. He falls in love, gives up writing in favour of the steady rewards of literary criticism, and the beginnings of an adult life take shape. That is, until his self-destructive binges and the irresistible lure of the writer''s struggle pull him back. In this fifth instalment of the My Struggle cycle, Karl Ove discloses his personal and often deeply shameful battles with introversion, alcohol abuse, infidelity and artistic ambition. Knausgaard writes with unflinching honesty to deliver the full drama of everyday life, in a breathless novel poised between a desperate yearning to be good, and the terrible power of transgression.
18 years old and fresh out of high school, Karl Ove Knausgaard moves to a tiny fisherman''s village far north of the polar circle to work as a school teacher. He has no interest in the job itself - or in any other job for that matter. His intention is to save up enough money to travel while finding the space and time to start his writing career. Initially everything looks fine: He writes his first few short stories, finds himself accepted by the hospitable locals and receives flattering attention from several beautiful local girls. But then, as the darkness of the long polar nights start to cover the beautiful landscape, Karl Ove''s life also takes a darker turn. The stories he writes tend to repeat themselves, his drinking escalates and causes some disturbing blackouts, his repeated attempts at losing his virginity end in humiliation and shame, and to his own distress he also develops romantic feelings towards one of his 13-year-old students. Along the way, there are flashbacks to his high school years and the roots of his current problems. And then there is the shadow of his father, whose sharply increasing alcohol consumption serves as an ominous backdrop to Karl Ove''s own lifestyle. The fourth part of a sensational literary cycle that has been hailed as ''perhaps the most important literary enterprise of our times'' ( Guardian )
Summer is the fourth volume of the Seasons quartet, a collection of short prose and diaries written by a father for his youngest daughter, with stunning artwork by Anselm Kiefer.
Your voice woke me up around eight this morning, it sounded unusually close, since, as I discovered upon opening my eyes, you were lying in our bed. You smiled at me and began talking. I made coffee and had a smoke in the office before I ate breakfast with you, and when your mother got up, I came in here to write a new piece.
In Summer, Karl Ove Knausgaard writes about long days full of sunlight, eating ice cream with his children, lawn sprinklers and ladybirds. He experiments with the beginnings of a novel and keeps a diary in which the small events of his family's life are recorded. Against a canvas of memories, longings, and experiences of art and literature, he searches for the meaning of moments as they pass us by.
