![]() ![]() That’s not to say the storytelling is aimless or can’t be emotionally piercing: The book concludes with a long section of Karl Ove and his brother, Yngve, clearing out their alcoholic father’s rural home while minding their grandmother, who appears to be succumbing to alcoholism herself. ![]() He means to strip experiences and emotional responses to their bare essences, and over time, the book evokes a feeling of fully inhabiting a character that typical rhetorical somersaulting often doesn’t. Sense a pattern? Knausgaard is emotionally clumsy to be sure, but remarkably, almost miraculously, his novel never comes off as a plea for sympathy, as so many memoirs (or memoir-novels) are. One extended sequence follows his ham-handed interview as a teenager of a well-known Norwegian author another covers his ham-handed attempt to play in a rock band another tracks his ham-handed efforts to get to a New Year’s Eve party. ![]() Though the book, a bestseller in his homeland, is composed of six volumes, its focus is on the author’s quotidian, banal, sometimes-frivolous experiences. “Epic,” though, may not be quite the right word to apply to what Knausgaard ( Out of This World, 2005 A Time for Everything, 2009), has accomplished. A Norwegian novelist plumbs his interior life, particularly his troubled relationship with his late father, in this curiously affecting opening to a multipart epic. ![]()
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