"Intense and vital . . . Where many contemporary writers would reflexively turn to irony, Knausgaard is intense and utterly honest, unafraid to voice universal anxieties . . . The need for totality . . . brings superb, lingering, celestial passages . . . He wants us to inhabit he ordinariness of life, which is sometimes visionary, sometimes banal, and sometimes momentous, but all of it perforce ordinary because it happens in the course of a life, and happens, in different forms, to everyone . . ." –James Wood, The New Yorker
"Steadily absorbing, lit up by pages of startling insight and harrowing honesty,
My Struggle introduces into world literature a singular character and immerses us in his fascinating Underground Man consciousness." –
Phillip Lopate "A rope round the neck, a knife in the heart. The book is full of magic. The world simply opens up . . . Knausgaard will have the same status as Henrik Ibsen and Knut Hamsun." –
Kristeligt Dagblad (Denmark) "Ruthless beauty." –
Aftenposten (Norway) "This first installment of an epic quest should restore jaded readers to life." –
The Independent "Between Proust and the woods . . . Like granite, precise and forceful. More real than reality." –
La Repubblica (Italy) "Breathtakingly good." –
The New York Times Book Review "[Knausgaard's] preternatural facility for description . . . speaks not only to the sheer pleasure his fiction affords, but to the philosophical stakes of that pleasure." –
Mark Sussman, Los Angeles Review of Books