BOOKS: REVIEW
Autumn
by Karl Ove Knausgaard, translated from the Norwegian by Ingvild Burkey Penguin Press, $27
PENGUIN PRESS;
THE SIMULTANEOUS expression of the gigantic and the minuscule, the dull and the piercing, is the achievement of Karl Ove Knausgaard’s My Struggle, an autobiography so ambitious that it spans some 3,600 pages, meted out in six volumes. The books became an international literary sensation for the cool rigor with which the Norwegian writer probes the intimate contents of his life—interlaced, as a life inevitably is, with the intimate content of the lives of family and friends, not all of whom are happy with the attention. A dashingly morose, angular, floppy-haired soul, he has, in the years since the first volume was published in 2009, submitted to countless interviews and readings, flaying himself aloud each time he squares the pleasure of writing with the pain of having written.