It takes time to become a writer. Until they manage to begin making money from their work, and often even afterward, writers often take jobs that seem almost random. They probably are random, at least partly. Teaching, selling records and tapes, working as an aide in a hospital, and even doing manual labor on an oil drilling platform are par for the course. And exactly the course for Karl Ove Knausgård, who was born December 6, 1968 in Oslo, Norway.
Knausgård published his first novel, Out of the World, in 1998 and immediately won the Norwegian Critics Prize for Literature. It was the first time a first novel had won that award. He followed Out of the World with A Time for Everything, which won even more awards and was described by the New York Review of Books as “a strange, uneven, and marvelous book.”
He doesn’t work quickly — A Time for Everything was published six years after Out of the World. His next work took another seven years to finish, although to be fair it’s a six-volume, 3,500-page series of autobiographical novels called (in Norwegian) Min Kamp. That’s the same as the Norwegian title of Mein Kampf by Adolf Hitler. The title caused a bit of a stir but the title is the only similarity. Knausgård’s Min Kamp is a series of autobiographical novels that were so popular in Norway that the author became a household name. Nearly one in ten Norwegians bought a copy.
Min Kamp has been translated into several languages, including English. The English-language titles are A Death in the Family, A Man in Love, Boyhood Island, Dancing in the Dark, Some Rain Must Fall, and The End. Knausgård’s books seem to inspire admiring criticism that includes a note of discord, like “strange, uneven, and marvelous;” the review of the first book in his series included “There is something ceaselessly compelling about Knausgård’s book: even when I was bored, I was interested.”
Series of volumes seem to be a compelling format for Knausgård. Between 2015 and 2016 he published Autumn, Winter, Spring, and Summer, another autobiographical set. He also writes about art and artists, particularly about Edvard Munch, a fellow Norwegian. Then in 2020 he published The Morning Star, which was recognized as one of the internationally notable books of that year. It, too, has bedome part of a series that now includes The Wolves of Eternity, The Third Realm, The Night School, and Arendal, which was published in Norwegian just over a month ago.
Knausgård has been called “one of the finest writers alive” by the New York Times, and “a writer of supreme interest” by the Los Angeles Times. He now divides his time between London and Sweden, and has expressed some discomfort about the acclaim he’s garnered. He’s said he feels he made a “Faustian bargain” and his success cost him his close relationships with friends and family.
There are probably two good starting points for reading Knausgård’s novels — either his first autobiographical series beginning with A Death in the Family, or else his newest (non-autobiographical) books beginning with The Morning Star. He’s an author definitely worth engaging with.
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