Verteltijd en vertelde tijd is vaak even lang, hele passages borrelen zo verder en dat maakt het zo bijzonder. Het realistische wordt iets mysterieus. Beheerst, ingetogen, pointillistisch soms. Een goudeerlijk karakter.
De stijl is nuchter en toch heeft het iets moois, van het leven zelf.
Eenvoudig en toch nucleair.
Lelijke cover, past niet bij het boek.
Mooie uitwijdingen, gevat in het jasje van een dagelijks leven van dag tot dag. Met lange flashbacks, maar een heerlijk leesbare structuur.
4 1/3 ster voor mij, voor anderen misschien meer. ( )

In many ways this autobiographical novel is a struggle to read, in that the detail exhausted me at times. 'I sprinkled the Klorin over the floor, using half of the bootle, and then I scrubbed it with the broom before hosing it all down the drain. Then I emptied the rest of the green soap all over it, and scrubbed again, this tim ewith a cloth. After hosing it down again i reckoned that would have to do and went back up to the kitchen.' In the second half there is so much cleaning, in minute by minute detail, I was there working alongside Knausgaard and could feel the effort. In the first half he is a teenager and the stories are about school and drinking and girls and football. In the second half he is about to become a father himself just as his own father dies of alcohol abuse. He and his brother go to the family house to sort out the arrangements for the funeral and find a house almost destroyed by an alcoholic. The book is about his complicated relationship with his father. ( )

I obtained a free copy of Karl Ove Knausgaard's "My Struggle, Book Three" and since I really enjoyed it, I went out and immediately bought a copy of My Struggle, Book One. Book Three focused on Karl as a young child and his main struggle was with his father. To put it mildly, his father was a first class jerk, and as a consequence Karl grew to hate him. Book One has two parts, the first one focusing on Karl as a teenager. And as to be expected, he has the same struggle dealing with his oppressive father. But the second part deals with Karl coming to grips with the death of his father. Surprisingly, his fathers' death hits him very hard and learning why this is so is what makes this novel so fascinating. The inner battle Karl has with himself is absolutely brilliant ! ( )

La vida es una guela, dijo la mujer que no sabía pronunciar la "r". ( )

A mini-review in four words:
Heteronormative masculinity in crisis.

Reading notes (sans spoilers):

Part 1

"the concealment of our dead"; our "system that keeps death out of sight" — a face in the sea — "As your perspective of the world increases not only is the pain it inflicts on you less but also its meaning" — male domesticity; a hatred of fish; a mother's presence — evening news broadcast; shame — the passing of time — late self-portrait by Rembrandt in the National Gallery, London; eyes; mise-en-abyme — Proust; the past and the more pressing present; a boat in a lock — invasion and intimacy — "The only thing I have learned from life is to endure it, never to question it, and to burn up the longing generated by this in writing" — drunken summer skulls — unrolled r's and the trauma of language — taking up smoking on the cusp of sixteen "because it gave me somewhere to be" — estrangement from one's father: "I didn't want to hurt him, I didn't want him to think this was a failure, that he had a failed relationship with his son, so I sat wondering what I could say. But I couldn't come up with anything." — New Year's Eve, 1984-85; "I'm Garfield!"; crooked dicks — "Our relationships were located somewhere between the world of the child and that of the adult and the boundaries between the two were fluid" — semen; guitars; volume — the character of rooms — grandma's garden and grandad's figures — a noticeable linguistic change — all for the sake of beer — New Year's Eve fireworks — "So it's 1985" — white snow; black water — "Who cares about politics when there are flames licking at your insides? Who cares about politics if you are burning with desire for life?" — "I was a dream, the dream was me" — barging in on a private moment — "it wasn't often we had quality films here, normally everything was American" — first (unrequited) love — a separation; the snow melts, signaling spring — "I was, in other words, for depth and against superficiality, for good and against evil, for the soft and against the hard" — strange relations

Part 2

Stockholm; writing; the germ of My Struggle — "You know too little and it doesn't exist. You know too much and it doesn't exist. Writing is drawing the essence of what we know out of the shadows. That is what writing is about." — "Chaos is a kind of gravity, and the rhythm you can sense in history, of the rise and fall of civilizations, is perhaps caused by this" — insomniac dreams; water; "nostalgia is not only shameless, it is also treacherous" — John Constable's paintings — "the deceived figure in Caravaggio's Card Players" — a scream — The America of the Soul — "the mind has the capacity to deal with the most alien of thoughts" — "I wanted to open the world by writing, for myself, at the same time this is also what made me fail" — art, angels, and the loss of the unfathomable element — a death in the family — "All I could think was that I couldn't think about what I should be thinking about" — airport coffee and cigarettes; the judgment of the dead — "the way we think is ... as closely associated with the specific surroundings of which we form part as the people with whom we speak and the books we read" — panic attack; meta-thoughts; thought-shadows: "I think that I think that I think" — "I was wide open, but not to the outside world, I could hardly see it anymore, but to the inside world" — Thomas Bernhard — John Sturges's photographs; first-book covers — social and cultural shifts in the role of the father — memories of childhood winters and funerals — at the undertaker's: "[t]he box of Kleenex was a sign that here weeping and death had undergone inflation" — domestic chaos — "Life's a pitch, as the old woman said. She couldn't pronounce her 'b's.'" — summer rain; bottles — "Everything is open, everything is empty, the world is dead" — a question about timing and sequence — feeding a seagull — Bergen; brotherhood; Tadzio — "Blanchot's description of Orpheus's gaze, the night of the night, the negation of the negation" — interviewing Olav Hauge and Kjartan Fløgstad — sleepwalking— "The world was the same, yet it wasn't, for its meaning had been displaced, and was still being displaced, approaching closer and closer to meaninglessness" — gutted fish — "for a long time I also believed I was good at reading others, but I was not, wherever I turned I only saw myself" — "what you see every day is what you never see" — much-needed laughter and storytelling: "[t]his was a magic potion we were drinking" — shame: the morning after — Giotto and individuals' "aura of vulnerability" — buying coffins like buying wines — Ruisdaelian birds; a body — "In death he was everything, of course, but death was also everything" — the singular smell of houses — unraveling — reading manuscript proofs; suits; dedications — recollections of a last conversation — "In my dreams he was sometimes dead, sometimes alive, sometimes in the present, sometimes in the past" — a goodbye ( )