It's a lucky reader who gets buried alive in the literary avalanche of Karl Ove Knausgaard's My Struggle--a freewheeling, funny, smart, provocative chunk of narrative that just keeps on coming, a flashback-laced plunge into one man's life.
At the book's center is Knausgaard himself, telling his own story in a montage of memories, first as a 16-year-old with illegally obtained beer on New Year's Eve, then, in Part Two, as an adult accompanying his brother to remove a houseful of his father's bottles and alcoholic debris to prepare for his father's funeral.
Bravely dog-paddling into this river of language, the reader encounters dozens of characters from Knausgaard's life: his bungling, domineering father, his aloof but devoted brother, his elusive mother, both of his wives, his best friends, his first crushes, his uncles and aunts and cousins and--most of all--his incontinent, repetitive, alcoholic Grandma, once torn between her love for two brothers, now consumed by her clinging son. Looping backward and forward in time, through the angst of adolescence, the exhaustion of childrearing, the flickering changes in his parents as they grow apart and decide upon a divorce, Knausgaard records hyperrealistic impressions with scalpel precision.
That My Struggle is so often warm and funny belies all the stereotypes of bleak, humorless Scandinavian writing. Knausgaard builds emotional momentum out of the ordinary, making a profoundly moving climactic sequence out of cleaning an obscenely dirty house, or out of a mother and her two sons drinking in the evening, reliving their memories. --Nick DiMartino, Nick's Picks, University Book Store, Seattle