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Min kamp #4

My Struggle: Book Four

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At eighteen years, old Karl Ove moves to a tiny fisherman's village in the far north of the arctic circle to work as a school teacher. No interest in the job itself, his intention is to save up enough money to travel while finding the space and time to start his writing career. Initially everything looks fine. He writes his first few short stories, finds himself accepted by the hospitable locals, and receives flattering attention from several beautiful local girls. But as the darkness of the long arctic nights start to consume the landscape, Karl Ove's life takes a darker turn. His writing repeats itself, his drinking escalates to some disturbing blackouts, his attempts at losing his virginity end in humiliation and shame, and to his distress, he also develops romantic feelings towards one of his students. Along the way, there are flashbacks to his high school years and the roots of his current problems. Ever present is the long shadow cast by his father, whose own sharply increasing alcohol consumption serves as an ominous backdrop to the author's lifestlye.

485 pages, Hardcover

First published February 24, 2010

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About the author

Karl Ove Knausgård

81 books7,105 followers
Nominated to the 2004 Nordic Council’s Literature Prize & awarded the 2004 Norwegian Critics’ Prize.

Karl Ove Knausgård (b. 1968) made his literary debut in 1998 with the widely acclaimed novel Out of the World, which was a great critical and commercial success and won him, as the first debut novel ever, The Norwegian Critics' Prize. He then went on to write six autobiographical novels, titled My Struggle (Min Kamp), which have become a publication phenomenon in his native Norway as well as the world over.

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Profile Image for Kevin Kelsey.
438 reviews2,375 followers
October 19, 2017
Posted at Heradas Review

“...he would have to work out the social game for himself. He would have to learn he would get nowhere by whining or telling tales.”

Karl Ove isn’t talking about himself in this quote, but he might as well be. Eighteen year old Karl Ove spends most of the book whining about his inability to lose his virginity, and attempting to write short fiction (telling tales). You might think I’m joking, but I think the moral of this story is that people should masturbate more often, and especially in their early teenage years. Let me backtrack a bit…

Like book 3, book 4 doesn’t jump around as much as 1 and 2. It stays mostly focused on his life from age sixteen to eighteen, with an occasional leap forward to 2009; Karl Ove in his early forties writing the book you’re reading; his wife and children asleep in the next room. I have to mention that I’m a sucker for these sections where he reminds the reader of his present tense writing of the novel. I don’t know why, but I love it.

Karl Ove as a literary character, is a one of the most unusual protagonists I’ve come across, because he isn’t a protagonist at all. This is unheard of in memoirs. Usually when we tell stories about ourselves, we’re the hero, or at the very least we present ourselves and the situations we get into in the best possible light; painting others as the bully, or the one who deserved what they got, etc. Karl Ove is not like this whatsoever. He lays out every dirty detail, and is extremely hard on himself. He writes himself as the antagonist in his own life story. He also writes about his boner a lot. Like, a lot a lot. I started counting when I noticed the pattern, and eventually lost track at fifteen or so times around the middle of the book.

The main story in this volume involves Karl Ove as a young man who is lost, and his struggle to find the kind of world he fits into. His emotionally, verbally, and physically abusive father has left his mother, started drinking, and seems to be a completely different person than he was when Karl Ove was a boy. He’s starting to see that his father was never happy, and needed something different from life than what he was getting. Also, it’s appearing that he was always a very emotional person, like Karl Ove has always been, crying often, and begging forgiveness of his sons now that they’re grown. Karl Ove is still terrified of him, and doesn’t understand how to reconcile this new person that has replaced his father, with the father that raised him.

At eighteen Karl Ove leaves home for the first time and takes a job as a school teacher in a small fishing community in northern Norway; rural in a different way than he’s familiar with. He’s grossly under qualified for the position, knows it, but wants to be alienated from the familiar. He wants to step a toe outside of his comfort zone. He’s using this experience to save money, and isolate himself so that he can focus on writing more exclusively.

He is absolutely obsessed with losing his virginity, and extremely insecure about his pattern of ejaculating before the act has even begun. In an effort to ease his nerves socially, he begins to drink heavily, which helps him to remain calm while courting the women in this new town he finds himself dislocated in. Drinking also gets him into several situations where he makes a total fool of himself. Even while intoxicated, every time he finds a woman willing to sleep with him, he gets stuck in his own head, and it happens again. This is a great source of embarrassment for him, and he takes it very hard.

We already know from the previous installments of his story, that he sees himself as being too feminine or “feminized” as he calls it. At eighteen, he’s scrawny and lanky, and in this fishing community he’s surrounded by what he considers men’s men: manual laborers, fishermen, tough skinned, strong and silent. He constantly compares himself to those around him, and finds himself lacking in almost every way. To make matters worse, his upstairs neighbors are constantly going at it. All of this and more adds to the feedback loop and reinforces his feelings of inadequacy and shame, which in turn reinforces his inability to do the deed.

In addition to all of this, he’s teaching kids barely younger than himself, and having some trouble not being attracted to the girls in his class, especially the ones who have developed crushes on him. Some of them as young as 13. Oh, Karl Ove. Buddy. Come on, man. You can’t do that! About halfway through the book he has a realization that maybe the reason he Is having so much trouble maintaining control of his ejaculations, and controlling is attraction to his students, and his horniness level in general, is that he has never masturbated. Ever. He sees it as something childish that he should’ve done when he was younger, but now feels it’s too late to begin. He knows that if he were to *ahem* practice on himself a little bit, that he would develop the ability to control himself a little better when he’s with a woman, but he still won’t do it! Good lord eighteen year old Karl Ove! Jerk it already!

So, that brings us full circle to my point from the beginning: masturbation, it’s something everyone should do, especially when you’re young and just starting to develop into the adult you’ll become. Most of Karl Ove’s troubles in this edition would’ve been completely avoided if he had just jerked it a little. So, like I said earlier, if there is a moral here, I think it’s a simple one: masturbate.
Profile Image for Michael Finocchiaro.
Author 3 books6,174 followers
December 11, 2019
My Struggle 4 was an outstanding read. We follow KOK during his teenage years following gymnas (presumably highschool in Norway) when he lives on his own for the first time. I loved how he described this feeling, which I feel like I shared the first time I had my own place (albeit under very different circumstances):
"But here! I thought, lifting a slice of bread to my mouth while looking out the window. The reflection of the mountains across the fjord was broken kaleidoscopically by the ripples in the later below. Here no one knew who I was, here were no fixed ties, no fixed problems, here I could do as I liked. Hide away for a year and write, create something in secret. Or I could just take it easy and save up some money. It didn't really matter. What mattered was that I was here." (p. 23)
That is sort of the leitmotif for this novel, freedom.

This is also a novel about KOK's struggle to connect his racing mind to his keyboard: "That’s when something seemed to flash through me, an arc of happiness and energy; now I couldn’t write fast enough, the text lagged slightly behind the narrative, it was a wonderful feeling, shiny and glittering." (p. 29). I do love his analogies and metaphors so much.

During his periods between teaching and drinking. he reads quite a lot. I enjoyed his experience with Ulysses: "But one thing did emerge from these pages with greater force than anything else, and that was the description of a book, Ulysses, which in its singularity sounded absolutely fantastic. Before me I saw an enormous tower, glinting with moisture as it were, surrounded by mist and a pallid light from the overcast sun. It was regarded as the major work of modernism, by which I imagined low-slung racing cars, pilots with leather helmets and jackets, zeppelins floating above skyscrapers in glittering but dark metropolises, computers, electronic music. Names such as Hermann Broch, Robert Musil, Arnold Schönberg. Elements of earlier, long-gone cultures were assimilated into this world, in my mind’s eye, such as Broch’s Virgil and Joyce’s Ulysses." (p. 33)

I found it intoxicating to read about his feelings in having his first job and his first taste of freedom, ironically as it were, as an idea from his father:
"The idea he had sown, to work as a teacher in northern Norway, had grown and grown afterward. In fact, there were only advantages: (1) I would be far away, far from everyone and everything I knew, and totally free. (2) I would be earning my own money doing a respectable job. (3) I would be able to write." (p. 55)

Of course, we always have a healthy dose of KOK realism:
"I got up and went into the staff room, picked up the coffee thermos, and shook it. It was empty, I filled the pot with water, poured it into the machine, popped a filter paper into the funnel, measured five spoonfuls, and started the whole shebang, lots of spluttering and gurgling, the slow rise of black liquid in the pot, and the bright red eye." (p. 56) I love that image of the bright red eye.

I think that the generation that KOK and I share (we are more or less the same age), was very influenced by the increasing accessibility of music. I was just as obsessed with browsing record stores (Waterloo Records in Austin, Tower Records in Boston (R.I.P.), Amoeba Records in San Francisco, Rasputin Records in Berkeley, A&M Comics in Miami...) and can totally relate to his discourse here: "The music was linked with almost everything I had done, none of the records came without a memory. Everything that had happened in the past five years rose like steam from a cup when I played a record, not in the form of thoughts or reasoning, but as moods, openings, space. Some general, others specific. If my memories were stacked in a heap on the back of my life’s trailer, music was the rope that held them together and kept it, my life, in position." (p. 60)

Who of us never did this when we turned up the stereo full blast: "then I had to dance, at that moment, even if I was alone. And, toward the end, on top of all this, like a bloody fighter plane above a tiny dancing village, comes Adrian Belew’s overriding guitar, and oh, oh God, I am dancing and happiness fills me to my fingertips and I only wish it could last, that the solo would go on and on, the plane would never land, the sun would never go down, life would never end." (p. 60). This search for eternal youth is ever-present during the entire 6 volumes but particularly passionately described here.

KOK then makes an enormous parenthesis as he goes back and describes the last few years of gymnas not covered in Vol 3 including the hilarious Lisbeth episode:
"A bewildered flicker appeared in her eyes. But she said nothing apart from yes. I took her hand again, squeezed it hard, and we walked quickly over the last two hundred meters. Hugged her again outside the unmanned reception area, almost suffocating with desire. Down the corridor to the room I shared with three others. Key out, into the lock with trembling hand, a twist, handle down, door open, and in we went. “You back already, Karl Ove?” Jøgge said with a laugh. “Have you brought a visitor with you?” Bjørn said. “How nice!” Harald said. “Would you like a beer, Lisbeth?” (p. 126) With friends like these, as the old saying goes...

There are other hilarious moments, such as his first attempts at self-description and his friend Bassen's reaction:
"In one of the first lessons we’d sat next to each other, and after the homeroom teacher had handed out slips of paper for us to write down three personal qualities we had, Bassen had looked at my answer. Somber, torpid, and serious, I had written. “Are you a complete idiot?” he had said. “You should add lacking in self-knowledge! I’ve never seen anything like it. Somber and torpid, you’ve got to be kidding! Who’s put these ideas in your head?” “So what did you write?” He showed me. Down to earth, honest, horny as hell. “Throw that away. You can’t write that!” Bassen said. I did as I was told. Then on a new piece I wrote, Intelligent, shy, but not really. “That’s better,” he said. “Jesus! Somber and torpid!”
Another reviewer on GR suggested a drinking game with shots for each use of the word "fantastic":
"When we were together I always left early so that he wouldn’t discover how boring I really was. There was a kind of fever in me, two conflicting emotions, such as on the spring morning when we ditched school and went by moped back to his place and listened to records on the lawn. It was fantastic, yet I had to cut it short, something told me I wasn’t worthy or couldn’t fulfill his expectations. So I lay on his lawn with my eyes closed, like a cat on hot bricks, listening to Talk Talk, whom we had discovered at the same time. “It’s your life,” they sang, and everything should have been great, it was spring, I was sixteen years old, had ditched school for the first time, and was lying on the grass with my new friend. But it wasn’t great, it was unbearable." (p. 133) Perhaps a Norweigian speaker can comment on whether it is always the same word used or if a variety of Norweigian words are all translated as "fantastic"?

Then starts his long and unrequited love for Hanne. Some more great description as he takes a bus to northern Norway to his father's house:
"Now she was going to change schools and start at Vågsbygd Gymnas, where she lived. At least that would release me from the torment of seeing her every day! The bus indicated it was going to Kjevik, and at that moment a plane flying low thundered over us, touched down, and screamed along the runway at a speed that made it seem as if we were standing still. Flashing lights, roaring engine. We were living in the future." (p. 138). Again, the optimism is quite contagious in this section.

I love the symbolism of the two brothers (or perhaps KOK and his mother, it is perhaps ambiguous) as the three of them are in her living room:"
We went into the living room. I sat down in the wicker chair, Yngve sat beside Mom on the sofa. Outside, two bats flitted to and fro, disappearing completely in the darkness of the mountains across the river, then reappearing against the lighter sky. Yngve poured coffee from the thermos" (p. 146) This particular conversation becomes one of many honest disclosures: "Then it was as though a dam had burst. Everything suddenly flowed into the same channel, into the same valley, which was soon full of something that excluded everything else." (p. 147)

And again another wonderful description of a bus ride: "Oh, the muted lights in buses at night and the muted sounds. The few passengers, all in their own worlds. The countryside gliding past in the darkness. The drone of the engine. Sitting there and thinking about the best that you know, that which is dearest to your heart, wanting only to be there, out of this world, in transit from one place to another, isn’t it only then you are really present in this world?"
When he is back in school, he always fears being along and friendless (while always as an adult seeking solitude for his writing) relating this interesting and sadly funny anecdote:
"My fear of being seen as friendless was not without some justification. One day there was a new note on the notice board. A student who had recently moved to the town and didn’t know anyone at the school wanted someone to be friends with, if anyone was interested they could meet him by the flagpole at twelve the next day. The area around the flagpole at twelve the next day was packed with pupils. Everyone wanted to observe this friendless creature, who naturally enough didn’t show up. Had it been a hoax? Or had this friendless creature got cold feet when he saw the crowd? I suffered with him, whoever he was." (p. 166)

In another moment of comedy, KOK gets a mail from Lisbeth:
"I pushed the letter aside. My chest was riven with despair. I could have slept with her. She had been willing! She wrote that she was in love with me, that she loved me, of course she would have said yes. She knew where we were heading and what I was thinking, of that I was sure. Bloody Jøgge! Those fucking dickheads!" (p. 186)

I loved this paragraph about this passionate search for love in the adolescent KOK, being able to relate to it:
"Outside it was dark, autumn was wrapping its hand around the world, and I loved it. The darkness, the rain, the sudden cracks in the past that opened when the smell of damp grass and soil rose up at me from a ditch somewhere or when car headlights illuminated a house, all somehow caught and enhanced by the music in the Walkman I always carried with me. I listened to This Mortal Coil and thought about when we used to play in the dark in Tybakken, a feeling of happiness grew in me, but not a happiness of the bright, weightless, carefree kind, this happiness was rooted in something else, and when it met the melancholic beauty of the music and the world that was dying around me, it was like sorrow, beautiful sorrow, romantic sorrow, beauty and pain in one impossible mix, and from there sprang a wild longing to live more. To leave this, to find life where it was really lived, in the streets of cities, beneath skyscrapers, at glittering parties with beautiful people in unfamiliar apartments. To find the one great love and all the restlessness that involved, and then the acceptance, the relief, the ecstasy." (p. 195)

This section is a fascinating preview to what he will go far more into depth on in Vol 6:
"I realized that I hadn’t understood a thing. This was deep, and it was painful. The opening, with the föhn wind, was fantastic. Did evil come from outside? Like a wind dragging people along with it? Or did it come from inside? I gazed at the square outside the church, where there were already yellow and orange leaves on the ground. In the street behind, people were walking under umbrellas. Could I become evil? Find myself borne along by a wind of inhumanity and torture someone? Or was I evil?"(p. 203).

And immediately after musing about torture, he thinks about religion:
"Oh, how stupid it was that they went around believing in a god and a heaven. It was so conceited! So unbelievably conceited! Why would God have selected them, people who were so preoccupied with ensuring everyone did the right thing all the time? Those petty-minded fools, why would God bother about them of all people? I almost laughed out loud in the library, but managed at the last moment to stifle it to a giggle. Looking around me, I saw that no one had noticed. Then, to disguise the fact that I had been looking around, I gazed out through the window again, with my head slightly tilted, so that it resembled an active decision, as if I was searching for something." (p. 204). I don't know about you, but this has certainly happened to me before!

Further on, there is some more fantastic (shot!) description:
"The countryside was like a tub filled to the brim with darkness. The next morning the bottom slowly became visible as the light was poured in and seemingly diluted the darkness. It was impossible, I reflected, to witness this without feeling it involved movement. Wasn’t Lihesten, that immense vertical wall of rock, creeping closer with the daylight? Wasn’t the gray fjord rising from the depths of darkness in which it had been hidden all night? The tall birches on the other side of the meadowland, where the fence to the neighboring property was, weren’t they advancing meter by meter? The birches: five or six riders who had kept watch on the house all through the night and now had to pull hard on the reins to curb the restless horses beneath them. During the morning the mist thickened again. Everything was gray, even the winter-green spruces growing on the ridge beyond the lake were gray, and everything was saturated with dampness. The fine drizzle in the air, the droplets collecting under the branches and falling to the ground with tiny, almost imperceptible, thuds, the moisture in the soil of the meadow that had once been a marsh, the squelch it gave when you stepped on it, your shoes sinking in, the mud oozing over them." (pp. 231-232)

This was a page-turner despite there being relatively little action as it were. The writing of KOK is simple in an Elena Ferrante kind of way and yet deep and analytical like Proust or even Joyce. Wonderful, amazing literature!

Fino's KOK Reviews
Book 1
Book 2
Book 3
Profile Image for Manny.
Author 42 books15.9k followers
October 26, 2014
[from Min kamp 3]

Knausgård is such a crafty bastard. I can't find the heart to parody him again after the episode where his colleague adds an extra paragraph to the story his eighteen year old self is in the middle of writing:
I det samme jeg la øyene på papiret som stod i skrivmaskinen, så jeg at noen hade skrevet på det. Jeg blev helt kald. Den første halve siden var min, og så kom det fem linjer som ikke var mine. Jeg leste dem.

"Gabriel stakk fingrerne langt inne i den våte fitte. Å herregud, stønna Lisa. Gabriel dro fingrene ut og lukta på dem. Fitte, tenkte han. Lisa sprella under han. Gabriel drakk en drøy slurk av vodkaen. Så gliste han og dro ned glidelåsen og stakk den harde kuken in i den rynkete fitta hennes. Hun skrek av fryd. Gabriel, du er gutten sin!"

Rystet i mitt innerste, ja, nesten på gråten, satt jeg og stirret på de fem linjerne. Det var en treffende parodi på måten jeg skrev på.
I'm guessing that this is going to cause Don Bartlett some headaches when he translates it, since part of the humor resides in the contrast between the different Norwegian dialects used, but here's the best I can do right now:
The moment I saw the paper that was sitting in the typewriter, I knew someone had written on it. I felt cold with horror. The first half was mine, then there were five lines that were not mine. I read them.

"Gabriel slid his fingers all the way into her wet cunt. Oh god, moaned Lisa. Gabriel pulled his fingers out and sniffed them. Cunt, he thought. Lisa wriggled under him. Gabriel knocked back a good mouthful of the vodka. Then he smiled and pulled down his zip and shoved his hard cock into her wrinkled cunt. She screamed with pleasure. Gabriel, you're my man!"

Shaken to the core, almost in tears, I sat and stared at the five lines. It was a horribly accurate parody of my writing style.
A little later, after drinking a bottle of red wine, he vomits all over his notes; although this is in a way the book in miniature (bad sex, alcohol, bodily fluids, literary ambitions and humiliation), he's successfully dissuaded me from assisting his heartless friend Tor Einar any further. The two parodies I've already written will have to be enough.

But writing a serious review is almost as unattractive, since he's ready to meet me there too. Uncle Kjartan's interminable monologues on Heidegger seem embarrassingly close to the things I've been saying this week about Min kamp 4; Kjartan's relatives try their best to create a Heidegger-free zone, and Not has been making similar suggestions about a moratorium on Knausgård criticism. I just have to admit I've been boxed in. Evidently, Knausgård feels he can take himself to pieces more brutally than any of us onlookers, and will in due course spend a thousand pages doing exactly that in the last volume. I can see he's getting nicely warmed up.

Okay, Karl Ove, you win. Carry on telling me about what an appalling person you are while taking my time and money, and don't even let me get a word in edgeways. You really are a slick con artist.

[to Min kamp 5]
Profile Image for Adam Dalva.
Author 8 books2,077 followers
June 4, 2019
An incredible, almost entirely self-sufficient segment of My Struggle. It follows a very similar structure to the great book 2 (embedded 200 page flashback in a brief hiatus of direct narrative), but what 4 relatively lacks in emotional depth, it makes up for with verve and excitement. The subject is clearly, for lack of a better word, lust: it tracks ages 16-18 through a frustratingly wonderful narrative of drinking and sexual failure. Knausgaard works as a high school teacher, unable to to do anything with his students, all of whom are essentially his age.

K.O.K. was smart to lead things off by citing other great teenage novels (Catcher in the Rye, for example), and the angst and stupidity and monomania of the age are brilliantly rendered. The small town up north where the action takes place is as evocative as anything I've read - and it makes the scandal of the book feels genuine and earned.

He told me in our interview that the plot of his first novel, not yet translated, is very close to this, which might account for how contained it feels. Oddly, it would be a good place to start, for people who are wondering if they'd like him.
Profile Image for Lee Klein .
890 reviews1,015 followers
May 19, 2017
One day in the distant future, whenever we think about Karl Ove Knausgaard’s six-volume My Struggle series, memories of an era between 2012 through 2017 will come rushing back.

My Struggle: Book One (2012) involved a teenage search for alcohol on New Year’s Eve followed by the alcoholic death of the author’s father some ten years later. My Struggle: Book Two: A Man in Love (2013)—the best one by far for me; the volume responsible for the author’s reputation—covered falling in love, fatherhood, the conflict of having a family and trying to write. My Struggle: Book Three (2014), set entirely during his childhood under the shadow of an unpredictable, menacing father, presented regularly occurring instances of tears. Book Four, published in the U.S. in April 2015, replaces tears with nocturnal emission and premature ejaculation.

A six-volume memoir of a chronic masturbator would be problematic. Fortunately, KOK avoids critiques regarding autobiographical autoeroticism:

The fact was I had never masturbated. Had never beat off. Had never played with myself. I was eighteen years old now and it had never happened. Not once. I hadn’t even tried. My lack of experience of this meant that I both knew and didn’t know how to do it. And once I hadn’t done it as a twelve- or thirteen-year-old, time passed and it slowly became unthinkable, not in the sense of unheard of, more in the sense of beyond my horizons. The direct result of this was that I had heavy nocturnal emissions. I dreamed about women, and in my sleep not even touching was required, it was enough just to lay my eye on them, standing there, with their beautiful bodies, and I came. If I was close to them in my dreams, again I came. My whole body jerked and convulsed through the night, and my underpants were soaked with semen in the morning. (350)

If all goes well for the remainder of the year, 2015 will be forever linked in our minds with an 18-year-old’s underpants filling up with semen. This one’s narrative arc tracks an academic year as he teaches in a small fishing village in northern Norway, an isolated spot lorded over by fjords and permanent winter darkness. But progression can also be charted in terms of sticky underpants at first, followed by premature ejaculation during failed attempts at coitus, ending with a triumphant scene that made this reader literally LOL as he closed the book.

KOK at this age is sex obsessed, especially since he’s still a virgin. In a civilization lacking significant rights of passage, intercourse is the new bar/bat mitzvah, even in northern Norway in 1987. But there’s more to it than the will to copulate. It’s about exchanging the chrysalis of innocence for the wings of experience, attaining knowledge reserved for adults.

I looked upon [girls] as completely unapproachable creatures, indeed, as angels of a sort, I loved everything about them, from the veins in the skin over their wrists to the curves of their ears, and if I saw a breast under a T-shirt or a naked thigh under a summer dress, it was as though everything in my insides was let loose, as though everything began to swirl around and the immense desire that then arose was as light as light itself, as light as air, and in it there was a notion that everything was possible, not only here but everywhere and not only now but forever. At the same time as all this arose inside me, a consciousness shot up from below, like a waterspout, it was heavy and dark, there was abandon, resignation, impotence, the world closing in on me. There was the awkwardness, the silence, the scared eyes. There were the flushed cheeks and the great unease.

But there were other reasons too. There was something I couldn’t do and something I didn’t understand. There were secrets and there was darkness, there were shady dealings and there was laughter that jeered at everything. Oh, I sensed it, but I knew nothing about it. Nothing. (82)

It’s about love, too: erotic, spiritual, artistic. Young KOK loves women, books, music. But he doesn’t quite love himself. He believes girls detect his lack of confidence the way dogs smell fear. Nearly all members of the opposite sex are attracted to him, nevertheless, including many of his thirteen-year-old students.

My heart beat faster as I stopped beside her. Oh, it was ridiculous, but the awareness that she might be in love with me made it suddenly impossible to behave normally.

I leaned over and she seemed to shrink back. Her breathing changed. Her eyes were locked on to the book. I could smell the fragrance of her shampoo, I studiously avoided any form of contact, placed my finger on the first number she had written. She stroked her hair to the side, rested one elbow on the table. It was as if everything we did had become conscious: every detail became visible, it was no longer unthinking and natural but considered and artificial.
(397)

Interactions with students awkwardly and tenderly approach transgression. He admires the form of a student and feels an abyss open inside him. He may be a little in love with Andrea, a thirteen year old, but he knows no one knows. At an all-ages alcohol-soaked party in another town, he kisses a thirteen-year-old girl, regrets it in the morning, and fears repercussions that never come.

But Book Four seems mostly about emerging from childhood into the freedom (and, to a degree, responsibility) of adulthood. It’s about an 18-year-old boy with artistic tendencies as undefined as they are ambitious, in a black beret, white shirt, and black pants held up by a studded belt, emerging from the shadow of youth. The first 100+ pages relay KOK’s arrival in the north to teach, the start of classes, his acclimation to the isolation in which he writes his first stories. One early weekend night, he goes out with new friends and blacks out after drinking too much. An audaciously long stretch of backstory follows (200+ pages), set during the preceding year. KOK’s childhood was lorded over by his increasingly alcoholic father, but he lives with his mother in southern Norway as he finishes high school. He hosts a graduation-type party (cases of beer stacked in the kitchen) that wrecks his mother’s house. That summer he sells cassettes to tourists, drinks, and tries as hard as he can to have sex. He causally mentions being drunk in a car that goes off the road and flips over at 100 kph (62 mph). By the time we return to the bathroom in which the young teacher has just vomited bile, we feel that in no way should he be educating children. He’s an overgrown child himself, fresh off a summer of indulgence in drunkenness and the quest to shed his virginity.

I wanted to steal, drink, smoke hash, and experiment with other drugs – cocaine, amphetamines, mescaline – to get high and live the great rock-and-roll lifestyle, to feel to the last drop of my blood that I couldn’t give a flying fuck about anything. Oh, what appeal there was in that! But then there was all the rest of me inside that wanted to be a serious student, a decent son, a good person. If only I could blow that to smithereens! (320)

Imagine Kurt Cobain in the classroom in 1987. (KOK was born in December 1968; Cobain in February 1967).

KOK knows the order of the planets and has written reviews about bands like Tuxedomoon for hometown newspapers, but there’s not that much difference between students and teacher, we realize, and there’s an expectation therefore that something indecent will happen while the teacher is blacked out one night.

Young Karl Ove is a fan of author Jens Bjørneboe and his History of Bestiality trilogy, the first volume of which describes an alpine wind that drives residents mad, sometimes causing murders, and difficulties with hard cider that often result in fathers killing their entire families. All three volumes consistently emphasize that we live on a thin crust of land between raging magma below and idiotically ordered outerspace above, that it’s no wonder we behave like homicidal lunatics, but there’s also great natural beauty and pleasures galore on Earth. Somewhat like KOK’s father, Bjørneboe was an alcoholic who ultimately hanged himself instead of drinking himself to death. The father’s shadow gives all these volumes their heft, so when young Karl Ove enthuses about his early experience with drink, end-stage alcoholism always lurks off-stage.

Why didn’t they drink? Why didn’t everyone drink? Alcohol makes everything big, it is a wind blowing through your consciousness, it is crashing waves and swaying forests, and the light it transmits gilds everything you see, even the ugliest and most revolting person become attractive in some way, it is as if all objections and all judgments are cast aside in a wide sweep of the hand, in an act of supreme generosity, here everything, and I do mean everything, is beautiful. (426)

As with the first section of Book One (the teenage quest for alcohol on New Year’s Eve), Book Three (entirely embedded in early childhood), Book Four complicates for me the concept of relatability. Finding a novel “relatable” often seems like a weak critique but part of KOK’s allure is exactly this connection with readers. It’s not so simplistic as “I get what he’s saying, I once constantly thought about losing my virginity, too.” At its best, it’s more about evoking memories in a reader.

Proust is the patron saint of associative memory, the famous phenomenon in which a cookie dipped in tea revives a forgotten world. KOK and his My Struggle series will become associated with something similar: instead of some innocent trigger evoking memories, Knausgaard’s dramatization of his past evokes memories for readers. My Struggle is the madeleine.

His detailed quest for sex opens a world of memory, particularly embarrassing bits not so often aired these days. It takes considerable restraint not to list instances from my life that more or less match those in the novel. And I’m sure many women share memories of these mostly forgotten, awkwardly executed initial attempts at getting it on.

But there’s more to this than that: there’s the image of KOK listening to Led Zep, pacing his apartment with clenched fists, psyching himself up to write. There’s the excitement of his initial immersion in the act of writing. There’s the clueless/confident sense of the importance of what’s been written, a surge at first that hooks the nascent writer for life. And there’s the first experience with criticism, especially the negative sort from his older brother, which fuels his ambition to one day write something like My Struggle:

You don’t think anyone’s going to publish it do you? In all seriousness?

I’ll damn well show him. I’ll damn well show the whole fucking world who I am and what I am made of. I’ll crush every single one of them. I’ll render every single one of them speechless. I will. I will. I damn well will. I’ll be so big no one is even close. No one. No. One. Never. Not a chance. I will be the greatest ever. The fucking idiots. I’ll damn well crush every single one of them.

I had to be big. I had to be.

If not, I might as well end it all.
(413)

As KOK once again receives big attention we can expect to see increasingly intense dissent online. This installment supplies more than enough fodder for those who prefer hot-take ridicule and rage over the time-consuming busy work of reading. I generally look forward to superficial, dismissive, reductive critiques based on the author’s gender and race, tweets along the lines of “do we really need more narratives like this?” (White male tales of heterosexual adventures.)

Scott Esposito (editor of the Quarterly Conversation and point person for lit in translation) off-handedly tweeted a few weeks before I started reading that “Book Four is pretty much all about Karl Ove’s penis.” This was followed by the online equivalent of eye rolls and sighs: “please tell me you are joking.” Esposito responded that it’s all about “semen and alcohol,” and the response was “no please make it stop.” Esposito then said it makes sense since KOK is like 18 years old in Book Four, to which the response was “I don’t care just make it stop.”

As attention ramps up with this volume’s release followed by events in NYC and San Francisco in May, we can expect to see more of this sort of thing. Or maybe since KOK’s attempts are so consistently thwarted most will find him (sym)pathetic.

Fortunately for My Struggle fans, new volumes won’t stop coming until 2017.

(If interested, here are my reviews of Books One, Two, Three, and Five.)
Profile Image for Perry.
634 reviews609 followers
February 4, 2019
Press Release for Immediate Publication, May 29, 2017
From: CUPID (Committee for Understanding Priapism In Development)
Subject: 2017 CHUB Award Goes to Norwegian writer Karl Ove Knausgaard

CUPID, the international Committee for Understanding Priapism In Development, is much pleased to announced our 2017 CHUB Award winner, Karl Ove Knausgaard, for his contributions to a better public understanding of the Chronic Hell of Uncontrollable Bulges that all men suffer in their formative years ("CHUB").

We selected Karl Ove for the first five volumes of his upstanding "My Struggle," recently published in English, and primarily for his semi-autobiographical novel, My Struggle, Book 4: Dancing in the Dark, in which he brilliantly portrays the tormented mind of the male in his late teens. In the novel, Mr. Knausgaard describes his hardest year, as a nineteen-year-old teacher on the northern coast of Norway, with a mind chronically cluttered with carnal cacoethes, so much that he could hardly stop his virginity from being taken by a wanton woman a year his senior.

CUPID believes such truthful depictions of the male developing into manhood are much needed for western and westernized females to gain a more complete understanding of the male as he grows under an ominous terror brought on by the petrifying conflict between his moral compass and chivalric aspirations on the one hand and, in the other, the arising involuntary demonic thoughts and the uncontrollable reaction of his bodily functions.

"Dancing in the Dark" is a rigid reminder that, as Sir William Osler, father of modern medicine, so veriloquently stated, "The natural man has only two primal passions -- to get and beget."


Portions of Interviews with CUPID President Johnson N. Palmer, Fusée de Poche, Louisiana, May 25, 2017:

I too grew up as a young male. It was quite hard. Mr. Knut gave such fitting descriptions of the pain endured by the young man in the vulgar visions spewing randomly into his head which lewdly unloose an altogether irrepressible granitic growth.

You might not think it, but my mind was not at all complicated back then. It was all quite simple. My mind was not, as some of you gals might believe, a pornographic potpourri.

Heck, the most provocative photos in my room were a poster of Farrah Fawcett, in an unbelievably hot pose in a burnt-orange bikini burnt into my mind, and of the model Cheryl Tiegs in a see through fishnet bathing suit. Boy howdy, that brings back some moving memories.

The forming male mind is more idolatrous of the female figure, a worship in which they are congenitally corneous and carnally-afflicted supplicants. One of our doctors on the CUPID premises says a young men we are overloaded with what they call androgen. I says, hey now boy, I ain't no androgynous, and he explained that weren't what he was talking about. From what I've been able to gather in my power position, the thrust of it is that this chemical plagues us as boys with bouts of what you might call a sort of depression of the mind and inflational, compromising poses. We become depressed because we are cheapened by our persistent, involuntary preoccupations with female machinations, each of us a walking contradiction with an itchy false sensor always going off with what it believes is female pheromones. You could say we was in a testosterone zone.

Oh sure. I think the teen male mind is completely misunderstood by womenfolk. Most of us is tongue-tied, terrified and timid in the presence of the female subspecies, when we are usually nothing but peach-fuzzed, pimple-faced punks repeatedly suffering persecution from our peers. I was often flummoxed by my buddies bragging with all-fired bravado after a girl walked by, and then I'd become a bashful boy with an inner barbarian when approached by a pretty girl.

We need more books like this here one written by Mr. Knuttsen [pointing] to help us here at CUPID counter the negative feministic reactions to young men in general at a time when these boys have increasing pressure to handle themselves amidst the plethora of porn available on the internets. Today's young man is dazed and dogged by thoughts he does and should deem demonic, he's likely just a gawky geek losing grip on reality by his salacious yearnings. We need more contributions to help young men as they face the insidious internets full of pornographic photos and what they call naked selfins bombarding their cellular phones.

Yes, sure. I'd tell the fellows and upstanding ladies out there to send in whatever you can afford because young men are out there in need of your aid and succor as they face the devilry in porn purveyors and selfie-sending harlots. Our address is CUPID, Box 96, Fusée de Poche, Louisiana 69699.
Thank you very much.
Profile Image for Melanie.
Author 7 books1,354 followers
March 22, 2016
"Book 4 is also the airiest book in the ­series. The pages are rarely dense with text. The essayistic passages that elevate the earlier volumes, bold in their old-­fashioned European profundity and full of keen, original, brilliantly associative thinking, are nowhere to be found. Everything here is dramatized, scene after scene, compellingly so but without the gravitas of the earlier books and suggestive of a lighter, more carefree period in Knausgaard’s life.

The reason these books feel so much like life is that there’s only one main character. For all of his gifts, Knausgaard ­never leaves an indelible impression of other people. I have only a limited sense of his ­father and mother despite having read hundreds of pages about them, and the figures Knausgaard meets in Hafjord, his teaching colleagues, the girls he falls for and his students, tend to merge. You never get inside these people. It’s impossible to be inside them without altering the focus of Knausgaard’s solipsism. This wouldn’t work with most writers. They wouldn’t be interesting enough, tormented enough, smart, ­noble, pitiless or self-critical enough. With Knausgaard the trade-off is more than worth it. His is such an interesting brain to inhabit that you never wish to relinquish the perspective any more than, in your own life, you wish to stop being yourself. One of the paradoxes of Knausgaard’s work is that in dwelling so intensely on his own memories he restores — and I would almost say blesses — the reader’s own."
Jeffrey Eugenides, The New York Times

Eugenides hits the nail right on the head here. As much as I will give 10 stars to the entire My Struggle series (and I have yet to read installments 5 and 6), this one felt much, much lighter than the previous three. There were a lot less flights of the mind between the past relived and the present moment of writing the book. There were a lot less of the existential digressions and philosophical asides that I loved so much in the first two books. There was a lot less free play and improvisation in the writing.

There was a lot of sexual yearning. A lot of booze. A lot of (very) young girls with perfect bums and breasts outlined underneath their shirts. A lot of self-awareness. A lot of hunger for life, for transcendence, for excitement, for heat in all its manifestations, for independence. The adolescent male in its primeval glory.

And yet. There is absolutely nothing like living inside Karl Ove Knausgaard's mind. If this volume is more airy than the previous ones, it is precisely because it portrays a shifty, self-conscious, arrogant and confused period of life. There is no room for much complexity here because the entire self is pointed and taut like an arrow, aimed at one thing and one thing only: sex. So it must be.

And this is where Knausgaard's genius lies. If you trust him, if you are willing to tread through the mundane as well as the sublime, you will be rewarded in ways that you will never suspect. You will experience what it's like to be in someone else's head, literally. Lives are messy, boring, mucky and repetitive. Lives are also unique, unpredictable, elegant and heartbreaking. As Oscar Wilde said, we are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars.
Profile Image for Geoff.
444 reviews1,490 followers
July 17, 2015
Book Four of My Struggle presents to us an eighteen-year-old Karl Ove Knausgaard, a Hamsun-esque anti-hero, a version perhaps (o dear reader, permit me my lazy analogies! I have so little in this life!) of the unnamed vagrant that staggers the streets of Kristiania in Hunger, with a similarly loosely-woven and easily-breached code of chivalry, regiment of a derangement of the senses, of shame, self-abnegation, self-flagellation, loosely (again) bound up with self-aggrandizement, self-confidence always on the brink of slipping into self-abuse and shadowy self-effacement, with a nice admixture of the violent despising and denial of hypocritical bourgeois ethics and decent musical taste ... ! … He moves to a tiny isolated fishing village in Northern Norway to work as a teacher for a year as an excuse to excuse himself from society and have space and silence to write, he mixes with the locals to varying degrees of success and humiliation, he drinks himself to blackness, he vomits copiously, he pursues the phantom Getting Laid to no end, he soils uncountable pairs of underwear with premature ejaculations, he feels his special brand of Nordic Promethean shame at this, he succeeds at writing he fails at writing, he observes the fjord and the surrounding mountains and the changing seasons with an intense sensitivity to the deeply felt yet vague affinity our inner natures find in the sublime, he is lonely, he is Other, he frets with fraternity among the people he encounters in this strange landscape, and when the polar night begins he becomes evermore apparition-like, the scarcity of light taking on all manner of inward refraction and correspondence in our young man... The structure of this book mirrors Book Two, where the greater part of the middle section is a remembrance, a lengthy digressionary intrusion into the narrative that is a leading-up to the resumption of the present tense hundreds of pages later, and there are also brief windows into later years, KOK composing the book we are reading, which casts a pleasant metafictive Brocken spectre over the whole endeavor, and there is a pathos, or maybe simply a readerly self-identification with the young Karl Ove of this book that allows a tenderness or empathetic sweetness to arise out of his travails, his insecurities, his little victories, his endurance, his growing up. Perhaps the strangest of the four books thus far (and this is a compliment) I truly enjoyed reading every page of it. We English Readers of Karl Ove Knausgaard now must wait until April of 2016 to resume our weird walk in his shoes… so be it! Time slips by in the most peculiar and unpredictable ways...
Profile Image for Matt.
752 reviews609 followers
May 24, 2016

[continued from here]

At 12%. I started this, the fourth part of Karl Ove Knausgård’s struggle, three days late. The only strict reading plan I had and it whooshed right past me. So far for making plans. Karl Ove has finished school. It’s the summer after he turned eighteen–1987–, and his plan is to go up North to a small town and become a substitute teacher for a year. This reminds me of another book I read last year by another Norwegian author, Agnar Mykle, whose book Lasso rundt fru Luna deals with a young man whose plan is was to go up North to a small town and become a substitute teacher. And, sure enough, Karl Ove–keeping up the image of a sly dog in my eyes–mentions Agnar’s Lasso right at the start of his book.
                                        ·•●•·
After 18% I realize I don’t like this fourth installment as much as the previous three. I should like it though! Why don’t I like it?! Is it me; not sleeping so well the last couple nights; being pissed off by the weather and work stuff, and generally feeling sort of miserable? Is it Karl Ove; loosing his talent to write a captivating story about nothing? Is it the language; the translation? — This book has new translator. I emailed the previous one (who will return with Vol.5), asked him why he skipped Vol.4 and he wrote back (after five minutes!); speaking of time constrains – his involment in other projects – deadlines and so on; all the usual stuff. Nice guy – it seems – I want him back! I want my old KOK back...
                                        ·•●•·
At 35% now and the narrative still doesn’t grab me like the previous books did. Not thinking it’s a translation issue. The words are alright. Some phrases have “ATTENTION! NORWEGIAN WORDPLAY” written all over them, and I have to look them up; try to make sense of them – or ask Manny. The Knausgårdian pull is definitely there, but it’s not as strong this time. For instance Karl Ove and his mother have a conversation about his new job as a newspaper critic over dinner. A lot of things get mentioned; the tomato sauce, the potato that almost rolled of the plate, the pots and pans. But where is the detail? What color did the pot have – which pattern did the table cloth have – what song was played on the radio? Those kind of things. @KOK – You’re not faltering, are you? There are also way too few other books mentioned so far. I hope this’ll change.
                                        ·•●•·
At 50% the book has gained some momentum, not least because of Bjørneboe and also Heidegger who were explicetely mentioned several times and at other times lurk in the back somehow.
What is annoying, though, is the way some words gets emphasized: Someone, probably from the German publisher, decided it was good idea to write those words not in the usual way, italic, but italic and bold . Very distracting.
[NB: If you see a space between the word “bold” and the full stop above – that wasn’t me! It’s yet another glitch in the GR software]
                                        ·•●•·
At 75%. Nearing the end of this novel. Is this really a novel, or is it a memoir after all? I looked up the small town in Northern Norway on Google Maps, where most of the story is set, and couldn’t find it. There is not village called Håfjord in all of Norway. I finally found an article from Dagbladet in which Knausgård admits he gave the place and the people in different names to protect them. But of course the newspaper found out about the real name: ████████; and it looks like this:

Can’t say I love this book. Can’t say I hate it either. Of the four books I read this is the weakest though, and I doubt this impression will change within the last quarter of the book.
                                        ·•●•·
At 100%. Four down, two to go. At age 18/19 Karl Ove seemed to have been some nasty piece of work with all his drinking and selfishness. Not so much of a whiny boy any more though (cf. Book #3). I believe if you don’t like Holden Caulfield from Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye you certainly won’t like the Karl Ove Knausgård in this book. On the other hand, if you do like Holden (like I do) you don’t necessarily also like Karl Ove. Hm. But this is not the reason why I down-starred this volume in relation to the other ones. Volume four seems kind of rushed to me. I’m missing the threads that hold the text together and I also don’t quite get the point of this book within the whole six-volume-novel. Somewhere near the end his first novel, Ute av verden, gets mentioned. I would really like to read this one some time. Perhaps it’ll shed some light on the story here. Unfortunately there’s neither a German nor an English version of Ute av verden available.
So, bye-bye, Karl Ove Knausgård – for now; see you again in Book #5 which I’m going to start reading at the end of May – at least that’s my plan.

[to be continued here]


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Profile Image for Έλσα.
617 reviews129 followers
October 15, 2020
"Χορεύοντας στο σκοτάδι "

Άκρως αποκαλυπτικός ο τέταρτος τόμος της σειράς.
Εδώ ο συγγραφέας αποκαλύπτει πιο προσωπικές του στιγμές κυρίως σεξουαλικού περιεχομένου.

Περιγράφει την αποκατάσταση της σχέσης του με τον πατέρα του. Βέβαια, θα μπορούσαμε να πούμε πως η απόσταση κ οι συνθήκες ζωής που τους είχαν μακριά τον ένα από τον άλλο καθόρισαν την αλλαγή αυτής της σχέσης.

Μετεφηβική ηλικία του Καρλ Ούβε γεμάτη πάθος, έρωτες, απογοητεύσεις, ξενύχτια κ πολύ ποτό. Μια κληρονομική συνήθεια που τον οδήγησε πολλές φορές σε δύσκολη θέση.

Σε αυτή τη φάση της ζωής του ενώ διδάσκει σε ένα σχολείο αποφασίζει να ασχοληθεί πιο ενεργά με τη συγγραφή χωρίς επιτυχία.

Η αλήθεια είναι πως ενώ αναλύει πολλές στιγμές της ζωής του με πάμπολλες λεπτομέρειες η γραφή του σε ταξιδεύει δημιουργώντας την αίσθηση κινηματογραφικών εικόνων.

Το θετικό είναι πως θα ξεκινήσω κ τον 5ο τόμο κ πως δεν έχω κουραστεί από τον όγκο κ τη συνεχόμενη ανάγνωσή τους.
Profile Image for Darwin8u.
1,783 reviews8,960 followers
December 22, 2015
My Struggle, Book 4, AKA:

description

Dancing in the Dark
or
Drunk with Ideas of a Young Girl
or
Premature Explication
or
Drunk, Cold and Unsatisfied in the North

description

"But there was something about the darkness. There was something about this small, enclosed place. There was something about seeing the same faces every day. My class. My colleagues. The assistant at the shop. The occasional mother, the occasional father. Now and then the young fishermen. But always the same people, always the same atmosphere. The snow, the darkness, the harsh light inside the school."

Book four of Knausgård's literary six-pack centers on Karl Ove teaching at a small, remote school in Håfjord Norway. This isn't a simple narrative, so it jumps back to periods with both his mother, his brother, and his family. It also allows Karl Ove time to wallow in the premature ejaculations of his youth. At once, this is a novel about a young man working out who he is as an artist, a man, and a member of his family. He has gained some independence, but doesn't always use this independence wisely. He has started to publish musical reviews his last year in gymnasium and takes a job in Håfjord to save up money so he can later tour Europe. He struggles with girls. Like most men of 18, Karl Ove is super-focused on getting in the pants of the opposite sex, but circumstance, his own lack of control, and sometimes his own unwillingness to compromise makes this journey a long one for him.

description

Not my favorite book of the series, so far, but still an interesting one. This novel is both a Bildungsroman and a Künstlerroman of sorts. I would probably point to this novel as being primarily a coming of age novel (so Bildungsroman) and it sounds like the next book will focus more on his attempts at publishing his first novel (so Künstlerroman?), but since Knausgård jumps around and the boundaries between the books in this work are often arbitrary, I'm not too concerned with labeling. I enjoy how Karl Ove focuses on the darkness and claustrophobia of the place:

"I had always liked darkness. When I was small I was afraid of it if I was alone, but when I was with other I loved it and the change to the world it brought. Running around in the forest or between houses was different in the darkness, the world was enchanted, and we, we were breathless adventurers with blinking eyes and pounding hearts.

When I was older there was little I liked better than to stay up at night, the silence and the darkness had an allure, they carreid the promise of something immense. And autumn was my favorite season, wandering along the road by the river in the dark and the rain, not much could beat that.

But this darkness was different. This darkness rendered everything lifeless. It was static, it was the same whether you were awake or asleep, and it became harder and harder to motivate yourself to get up in the morning."


So, I'm now 4/6 done and all I can do now is wait until they publish the next two English translations.

description
Profile Image for Alan.
706 reviews290 followers
May 15, 2024
He really is a magician. Social cringe and faux pas is my kryptonite. I turn off lots of TV shows and films if I find it unbearable. Knausgaard has managed to leave me needing more. He does little else but meander through his first teaching job, get drunk, and attempt to have sex. Somehow you want to keep reading about this. Don’t ask me how.

I really appreciate his honesty, even if the events are not strictly speaking “real” or “factual”. I see little positive social clout arising from Karl Ove sharing that he has never masturbated, or that he ejaculates criminally early in any sexual encounter for a few years (these two are linked, I believe, but you do you young Karl Ove). Lots of head in the hands moments, thinking about the absolute babbling fool that he must have been the previous night, having had bottles and bottles of wine to drink. But it’s all okay, right? Writers drink. Alone. And sad. And damn if he isn’t a writer.
Profile Image for Vaso.
1,646 reviews221 followers
July 21, 2023
Ο Κάρλ Ούβε, στην ηλικία των 18, πηγαίνει να διδάξει ως αναπληρωτής καθηγητής γυμνασίου σε ένα μικρό χωριό της Βόρειας Νορβηγίας. Είναι η πρώτη φορά που μένει εντελώς μόνος του μακριά από όλους. Θέλει να αφοσιωθεί στη συγγραφή γιατί έχει αποφασίσει ότι αυτό είναι που θέλει να κάνει. Μας περιγράφει την άφιξή του, την καθημερινότητά του στο ψαροχώρι αυτό, τους μαθητές και τον τρόπο διδασκαλίας του. Κάποια στιγμή αναπόφευκτα, επιστρέφει στην περίοδο του διαζυγίου των γονιών του, τις αλλαγές που αυτό έφερε στις ζωές όλων τους. Ο Κάρλ Ούβε αισθάνεται ανακουφισμένος - απλά επισκέπτεται τον πατέρα του, δεν ζει μαζί του. Κι ενώ βλέπει την κατάχρηση του ποτού που εκείνος κάνει, έχοντας προχωρήσει τη ζωή του, αυτό δεν τον εμποδίζει να κάνει το ίδιο. Βρίσκει κι ο ίδιος διέξοδο στο ποτό και προσπαθεί να αποκτήσει εμπειρίες.
Μέσω της γραφής του που είναι γνώριμη πλέον, απογυμνώνεται μπροστά μας, χωρίς να στρογγυλέψει τις γωνίες των συμβάντων στη ζωή του.


3,5 αστέρια
Profile Image for David Carrasco.
Author 1 book98 followers
June 25, 2025
Llevo ya cuatro libros con Karl Ove Knausgård y, francamente, creo que podría ser uno de esos amigos que te obligan a llamar, aunque no te apetezca. Porque sí, Bailando en la oscuridad, la cuarta entrega de la serie Mi lucha es como un cóctel extraño: amargo y dulce, pesado y ligero, pero siempre, siempre, imposible de dejar. Y sí, por supuesto, te hace sentir incómodo, porque, ¿qué otra cosa puede ofrecer Knausgård más que esta invasión de lo cotidiano que no da tregua, ni siquiera a la propia existencia?

La trama sigue siendo, como en las anteriores entregas, una colección de momentos mundanos que a nadie le interesarían si no fuera por la habilidad de Karl Ove para convertir la vida en un acto monumental de introspección. Si en Un hombre enamorado parecía que habíamos llegado al límite de lo desgarrador en su relación con Linda, aquí la cosa se pone aún más turbia y claustrofóbica. A su matrimonio problemático y a las eternas conversaciones sobre la paternidad se suman ahora las sombras del pasado, el peso de sus recuerdos de adolescencia y esa desesperación de no encontrar nunca suficiente luz en medio de la oscuridad. Sí, oscuridad literal: Karl Ove pasa buena parte de la novela inmerso en la total penumbra de una latitud tan al norte que no ve la luz del sol en varios meses.

Porque esta entrega se centra en el año en que Karl Ove, con apenas dieciocho años, decide alejarse de todo —especialmente de su padre— y acepta un trabajo como profesor en un pequeño pueblo remoto del norte de Noruega. No va a la universidad ni se lanza a una aventura más convencional. No. Su único propósito es aislarse, escribir, y, en su mente, empezar a convertirse en el escritor que siempre ha querido ser.

Este es el Karl Ove que comienza a mirarse al espejo de su soledad, como quien se enfrenta a una versión cruda de sí mismo. Aislado en ese pequeño pueblo noruego, la independencia que busca no es solo física, sino emocional: un espacio en el que finalmente puede respirar sin el peso de lo que ha sido. La sensación de libertad al vivir por primera vez en solitario es palpable, un pequeño destello de claridad en su tumultuosa existencia. Este es un momento crucial, donde se enfrenta a sí mismo y se da cuenta de que la independencia no es solo un hecho físico, sino una liberación emocional que le permite redefinir su lugar en el mundo.
“¡Pero aquí!, pensé, y me llevé la rebanada de pan a la boca mientras miraba por la ventana. El reflejo de las montañas del otro lado se veía fraccionado como en un caleidoscopio por los pequeños movimientos del agua abajo. Allí nadie sabía quién era yo. Allí no había ninguna atadura, ningún molde prefijado, allí podría hacer lo que me diera la gana. Estar escondido durante un año y escribir, construir algo en secreto. O sólo tomarme las cosas con calma y ahorrar dinero. Eso no era muy importante. Lo más importante era que ya estaba allí.”
Pero lo que encuentra en este lugar perdido en medio de la nieve no es precisamente la soledad productiva que imaginaba. La vida como profesor resulta ser un desafío enorme para un joven inexperto que, además de enfrentarse a la disciplina de niños de todas las edades, lidia con su propia inseguridad, sus frustraciones y una vida personal que empieza a desmoronarse. Sus problemas con el alcohol —un eco lejano pero persistente del creciente problema de su padre— y su incapacidad para relacionarse plenamente con los demás se convierten en una lucha diaria que lo consume.

En un giro que parece un espejo de su presente, la novela nos lleva también a los dos últimos años que pasó en el instituto, desde los dieciséis hasta los dieciocho. Conocemos su primer trabajo escribiendo críticas musicales en un periódico local o su relación con Hanne. Vemos cómo sus padres se divorcian, su padre se vuelve a casar, y su trato con él se vuelve aún más tirante. El alcohol, que ya empezaba a devorar al padre, se convierte en una sombra que persigue al hijo. Y en medio de todo esto, Karl Ove empieza a experimentar las primeras borracheras monumentales, esas que no solo te dejan un malestar físico, sino un agujero emocional difícil de llenar.

La música se convierte en el puente entre Karl Ove y su entorno, una forma de expresar lo que no puede verbalizar. En este pueblo remoto, rodeado de gentes que no comprenden sus demonios, la música da voz a sus emociones reprimidas, a esa distancia que, a veces, parece insuperable. La música sigue siendo un hilo conductor a lo largo de Mi lucha, pero aquí adquiere un simbolismo más complejo. Es más que un simple refugio emocional; se convierte en el medio que conecta al joven Karl Ove con su propia identidad, recordándole lo que fue y lo que aún podría llegar a ser.
“La música estaba íntimamente relacionada con casi todo lo que yo había hecho, ningún disco quedaba libre de recuerdos. Todo lo que había sucedido durante los últimos cinco años subía humeando como el vapor de una taza cuando lo escuchaba, no en forma de pensamientos o razonamientos, sino como ambientes, aperturas, espacios. Algunos generales, otros “específicos”. Si mis recuerdos estaban amontonados detrás del remolque de mi vida, la música eran las cuerdas que todo lo ataban, manteniéndolo en su sitio.”
Pero si algo caracteriza este libro es la manera brutalmente honesta con la que Knausgård aborda sus problemas sexuales. No hay eufemismos ni rodeos: lo cuenta todo, desde su frustración hasta sus intentos fallidos, de sus fracasos a los problemas que le supone su rol de profesor ante alumnas que, básicamente, tienen su misma edad, pero a las que no puede ni siquiera mirar; todo con una crudeza que solo puede describirse como conmovedora. Y aunque esta confesión puede incomodar a más de un lector, también es imposible no reconocer la valentía que implica exponer las vulnerabilidades de esa etapa en la que la masculinidad todavía se define más por lo que se pretende que por lo que realmente se es.

Y el amor, como siempre, le resulta esquivo. Esa desconexión con el mundo que lo rodea, más allá de la falta de reciprocidad en el amor, le deja una cicatriz profunda. El amor no correspondido sigue siendo uno de los temas más dolorosos en la vida de Karl Ove. En este volumen, nos enfrentamos a su incapacidad para conectar plenamente con Hanne, lo que nos muestra, una vez más, su lucha interna entre el deseo de ser comprendido y la realidad de su soledad emocional.
“Ah, ésta es la canción del joven que amaba a la joven. ¿Tiene derecho a usar una palabra como «amar»? Él no sabe nada de la vida, no sabe nada de ella, no sabe nada de sí mismo. Lo único que sabe es que jamás ha sentido algo con tanta fuerza y tanta claridad. Todo duele, pero no hay nada tan bueno como eso. Ah, ésta es la canción sobre tener dieciséis años y estar sentado en un autobús pensando en ella, la única, sin saber que esos sentimientos se irán atenuando poco a poco, apagando, que la vida, que ahora es tan grande y formidable, será inexorablemente cada vez más pequeña, hasta hacerse de una magnitud manejable, algo que no duele tanto, pero que tampoco es tan bueno.”
A lo largo de este año como profesor, asistimos a una evolución silenciosa pero importante en Karl Ove. Sus interacciones con los niños y las familias del pueblo lo enfrentan a una realidad que no puede controlar ni ignorar. Y aunque su objetivo inicial de aislarse para escribir parece desdibujarse en el caos del día a día, es precisamente en esa convivencia forzada con los demás donde empieza a formarse el hombre que será más adelante.

El paisaje noruego, esa nieve interminable, el frío y la noche invernal, esos árboles rotos por el frío, no son solo escenarios de su aislamiento; son un reflejo de su alma. Como en los volúmenes anteriores, Knausgård utiliza la naturaleza como una metáfora de su propio caos interior. Los paisajes no solo enmarcan la historia, sino que la iluminan, revelando un Karl Ove atrapado en un mar de contradicciones. Los árboles, la luz que se filtra a través de las hojas, todo está cargado de simbolismo, como si la naturaleza misma se estuviera haciendo eco de sus pensamientos más profundos.

El ritmo sigue el mismo patrón que en las anteriores entregas de la serie: a ratos parece que todo se va a desplomar, pero Knausgård siempre encuentra un momento para hacerte caer de nuevo en su juego, en esa red de reflexiones interminables. Es como si nos invitara a caminar por un túnel sin fin, donde la salida parece siempre lejana, pero la oscuridad misma te envuelve de tal manera que de repente te das cuenta de que ya no puedes salir.

Por supuesto, la figura de su padre sigue siendo central. Aunque la distancia física parece ofrecerle un respiro, la influencia de ese hombre sigue moldeando sus pensamientos, sus decisiones y, en gran medida, su incapacidad para encontrar paz. No hay redención, ni en este libro ni en toda la saga, pero tampoco parece buscarla. Knausgård simplemente expone, observa y comparte, como si nos dijera: “Esto es lo que hay. Haz con ello lo que quieras”. Karl Ove, al descubrir los diarios de su padre fallecido, se enfrenta a una verdad incómoda sobre la autodestrucción heredada:
”Puedo entender que anotara a las personas con las que se había relacionado y charlado en el transcurso del día, que registrara todas las peleas y reconciliaciones, pero no entiendo por qué anotaba lo mucho que bebía. Es como si llevara la cuenta de su perdición.”
Esta revelación se convierte en un reflejo de su propia lucha contra las sombras del pasado y la forma en que esas mismas sombras persiguen su existencia.

Al final, Bailando en la oscuridad no es un libro que cierre ciclos ni ofrezca respuestas. Es, como toda la serie, un espejo cruel que refleja nuestras propias contradicciones y miedos. Tal vez no es el mejor libro de la saga, pero tiene una fuerza única: la de recordarnos que crecer no es un proceso limpio ni sencillo, sino una batalla constante entre lo que soñamos y lo que vivimos.

Cada entrega de Mi lucha tiene su propio latido, su propio sabor, pero todas comparten esa capacidad única de atraparme y no soltarme. Esta cuarta parte, con su crudeza, su honestidad y sus matices, se merece estar a la altura de las anteriores. Otro 5/5 para Knausgård.

Porque, como siempre con él, te quedas con la sensación de que la vida sigue, por más que no sepas por qué ni para qué.

Reseña de Mi Lucha 1 - La muerte del padre
Reseña de Mi Lucha 2 - Un hombre enamorado
Reseña de Mi Lucha 3 - La isla de la infancia
Reseña de Mi Lucha 4 - Bailando en la oscuridad
Profile Image for Matthew Ted.
961 reviews1,005 followers
March 28, 2024
36th book of 2024.

4.5. We move on with Knausgaard, over halfway now. This was far better than the underwhelming volume 3 about his childhood. He is now (mostly) 18 years old, working as a teacher in Northern Norway and believes he is slightly in love with one of his 13-year-old students. He is also desperately trying to get laid. As ever, the most evocative parts of the book involve his father and the growing alcoholism (thanks to Knausgaard's structural choices, we've already seen it kill his father in vol. 1), the distant but clearly strong relationship with his brother (as a brother, some of the ruminations on brotherhood speak to me) and slowly but surely, he is beginning to realise he wants to be a writer and if he never makes it, he sees no alternative but to kill himself.

Knausgaard, like Hemingway, makes writing seem easy; it feels as if the words have just fallen out of him and arranged themselves as they are. I have no doubt that these novels are incredibly refined and drafted. Of course they are. His shifting from the colloquial to the philosophical is heightened in this volume. I must say the final line was so unromantic, I was shocked, almost laughed. The next volume recounts his time at writing school and he has already said one of the teachers is some "obscure Vestland writer": Jon Fosse. That hasn't aged well.

More than before, I sensed Knausgaard's own fear of death in this volume. In some ways I think all novels are about the fear of time passing/death. I wonder if that will continue to deepen as I read the final two volumes. It feels strange to be closing in so quickly on the end.

A sense of jubilation filled me, for the silence was as vast as an ocean, while there was also something painful about it, as there is in all joy. The silence high up in the mountains, surrounded on all sides by beauty, allowed me to see myself or become aware of myself, not in relation to my psyche or my morality, this had nothing to do with personal qualities, this was all about being here, this body which was ascending, I was here now, I was experiencing this and then I would die.
Profile Image for Marc.
3,387 reviews1,830 followers
April 2, 2023
Re-editing of my review of 5 years ago)
I wrestled through the first three parts of the ‘My Struggle’ series by Knausgard with a lot of difficulty, asking myself every time where he was heading for. Especially the first and the second installment were such a mixture of introspection and description, constantly jumping through time and space, and associating trivial scenes with almost brilliant reflections, that I did not know what to think of this writer. The third part was a chronologically told story from his childhood to his teenage years. The common theme obviously is the autobiographical focus: it seemed as if the mature Knausgard through his writing was searching for his soul and, in particular, analyzing how that soul had become what it is today.

And that is what also stands out in this fourth part. Knausgard focuses on the one year when he was 18 years old (1987-1988), working as a teacher in a small secondary school in northern Norway (apparently, due to the shortage of teachers that is possible at this early age). In the Dutch edition that I read, this part was given the title 'Night', and that certainly refers to the fact that almost all year round that northern region is shrouded in darkness. But the metaphor of course also refers to the young man who is searching his way in the dark forest of life: groping, falling and standing up again. In this book 'Night' sometimes is to be taken literally: Knausgard regularly has blackouts as a result of excessive drinking (a legacy from his father); but it also refers to his dealings with other people, and especially with women or let's say girls (because in the small village and in the school almost all women are younger than him). Knausgard describes painstakingly his obsession with losing his virginity and how difficult that is.

Again very trivial, banal scenes alternate with sometimes beautiful observations of the environment, and continuous introspection and self-reflection. But somehow digesting this was less of a struggle: this book was remarkably easy to read (there’s only one longer passage from an earlier time period) and the ingredients even begin to become familiar. In between, we also get a look at Knausgard's first writing attempts and his relative success with it. That does not mean that this now is a top book, but it remains intriguing and certainly invites you to take on the next part, with – in Dutch – the promising title ‘Writer’. (rating 2.5 stars)

(In the meanwhile I read the whole series, and eventually it became clear what a formidable self-reflexive exploit this whole cycle is. Not every part is toplevel, but Knausgards excruciating way of looking at reality - especially his own behavior - truly is mesmerizing. See my other reviews, or my global review: My Struggle I-VI)
Profile Image for Hendrik.
430 reviews105 followers
May 3, 2022
Ein Portrait des Künstlers als junger Mann. Karl Ove Knausgård erzählt, in einem weiteren Kapitel seines autobiografischen Projekts, davon wie er wurde was er ist. Zwischen Alkoholabstürzen und sexueller Frustration versucht sein jüngeres Ich seinen Weg zu finden. Das Ende der Schulzeit, der erste richtige Job und der Wunsch Schriftsteller zu werden – Stationen im Leben eines Mannes, die für sich genommen nichts Außergewöhnliches sind. Es sind Erfahrungen, die so ähnlich wohl von vielen geteilt werden. Vermutlich macht genau diese Erhebung des Normalen zum Besonderen den eigentlichen Reiz von Knausgårds Prosa aus. Sein introspektiver Blick, dem wirklich kein Detail zu entgehen scheint, führt einem beim Lesen unweigerlich die eigene Vergangenheit vor Augen. Sämtliche Unsicherheiten und Peinlichkeiten der Adoleszenz, aber weckt auch Erinnerungen an eine Zeit, in der alle Möglichkeiten noch offen standen.
Profile Image for Mike W.
171 reviews22 followers
February 6, 2017
My initial reaction is to rate it 3 stars but I'm having a hard time actually rationalizing that score. The series as a whole is actually quite difficult to explain to the uninitiated, it usually elicits an increasingly blank stare as I drone on about its merits. But those I've convinced to begin it have all been caught up in its energy.

I would guess that for many, especially women, this fourth book is the least favorite in the series. It mainly consists of the sexual angsts and alcoholic binges of a 17-19 year old Karl Ove. Yet, I read on with much of the same zest I did for the others even if it lacked the same hypnotic magic of 1-3. I'm still trying to figure out why. My working theory is that KO and I are nearly the same age and so his descriptions and cultural references bring me back to that same time period and perhaps I can relate more than I otherwise would? And while I hope that I wasn't the walking hormone he seems to have been, I (and probably most boys/men of that age) likely was.

I suppose book 4 had two interesting effects on me. First to make me intermittently nostalgic for those days when I'd first left home and the world was mine to conquer and second to give me an immense appreciation for being now well beyond that stage of life. True to form, KO was so blunt about his fears and shortcomings (no pun intended but I guess that's a spoiler), that I had to read on just to see how things turned out with each new romantic pursuit, and the dramatic irony (he builds a strong case for failures) produced as a result created a schadenfreude that was difficult to resist.
Profile Image for Katia N.
688 reviews1,040 followers
November 26, 2018
Total slog this one. Something of limited interest at the first 20 pages and the last 40. Everything in between is the repetition of the previous 3 books in different order. I loved the first two, especially the second one. But I would not survive another one like Book 4. If he is not upping his game in the book 5, I would probably need to put his aside. But I hope it is not the case.
Profile Image for Jonfaith.
2,100 reviews1,703 followers
October 2, 2018
If my memories were stacked in a heap on the back of my life’s trailer, music was the rope that held them together and kept it, my life, in position.

Just as Brother Townes said, all you keep is the getting there. Heidegger was less than bemused by this preoccupation with the getting-there. Van Zandt is referenced per the musical orientation of the citation. I find myself disagreeing with Knausgård but recognize I am pondering his teenage self filtered nearly thirty years into the future. This thrown-ness brings us to Heidegger and my own angst, especially towards Karl Ove's Marxist uncle.

There's a lesson in Book Four: 18 year-olds shouldn't be allowed to teach junior high.

Joel told me some time ago that in this age of myriad platform and endless self-promotion, only humiliation could retain the poetic gesture. Karl Ove is an acolyte.

Winter in Northern Norway is much like the fate of the Night's Watch on Westeros. Celibacy isn't a requirement in Norway, only endless streams of vodka and white wine. Four was a much more engaging read than Three. The ceaseless crying of the earlier time is replaced by blackouts and premature ejaculation.
Profile Image for Ratko.
338 reviews90 followers
January 29, 2022
У четвртом делу "Моје борбе" пратимо младог Карл Увеа, који са тек свршеном гимназијом одлази да буде наставник у школи на далеком северу Норвешке.
Пратимо прве пијанке, прве симпатије, несигурности, прва сексуална искуства, проблеме несхваћености... укратко, све оно што одувек одређује све адолесценте у било ком делу света.
Осим што је, као и до сада, Кнаусгор веома детаљан у описивању свега што га окружује, свих детаља прозаичне стварности, промичу повремено и догађаји који суштински формирају његову личност. Однос са рођацима, однос са оцем и мајком (увек тај отац као сенка која се надвија над њим), њихов развод, утицај старијег брата итд.
Веома ми прија Кнаусгорово писање и навијам да Бука преведе и његове неаутофикцијске романе.
Profile Image for Trish.
1,413 reviews2,702 followers
June 2, 2015
In this installment of his six-volume fiction, Knausgaard is eighteen years old. He relates his first year teaching lower secondary school in Håfjord, a small town by the sea in far north Norway. This is his first full-time paid employment outside of a month’s summertime stint at a nursing home. The excitement of being on his own to earn money, to write, to be all he can be is palpable in the beginning. Only a few short months into the teaching gig he calls his mother: he wants to quit. Ah, callow youth!

It turns out what he really wants to do, what absorbs his attention, is shag girls. "I would have given anything to sleep with a girl. Any girl actually…But it wasn’t something you were given, it was something you took. Exactly how, I didn’t know…" A great deal of the time and energy of his sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth years revolved around this quest. The wider world was there: the colleague he lived with continually asked him to go on tramps in the countryside but he refused: "not my thing." When at Christmas that year he returns to Lavik in southern Norway he notices trees: "I’d had no idea that I had missed trees until I was sitting there and saw them."

Outside of shagging girls what Karl Ove wanted to do is write. And not just write: “I will be the bloody greatest ever…I had to be big. I had to.” Actually, it is this certainty in his own talents that makes Karl Ove interesting to listen to for five hundred-odd pages in this installment. It has been said that a novel is just words on paper until it is read; that is, the reader brings imagination, understanding, and empathy to a novel to make it cohere or not. This installment of Knausgaard’s six-part novel, subtitled Dancing in the Dark, is a particularly good example of the need for reader insight. Karl Ove is a special kind of boy, but he can fail. That we don’t want him to fail is only partly his doing.

This section of the linked novels is also more claustrophobic than earlier installments of Knausgaard’s story. We have less of the older authorial voice, and any distance history might provide. All thought and action takes place entirely within Karl Ove’s own head, and outside of a section in which he moves back to his final year in high school and occasional comments by the then 40-year-old author, we have only the binocular vision of his two eyes and his underdeveloped prefrontal cortex to guide us through six months living in the perpetual dark of the an Arctic winter.

The dark plays a large role in developing this teenager into a man. He has to fight against the dark within and without, and doesn’t always manage it. We readers give him ample room for mistakes in this environment, seeing as how we can hardly imagine ourselves pulling it off. The endless cycles of weekend drinking are both horrible and understandable; we just wish our bright young narrator were not so susceptible to alcohol’s siren song.

Knausgaard finishes Min Kamp Volume #4 on a high note and with a flourish worthy of his hormonal anguish. He has us laughing that he finally scaled the hills and valleys of his testosterone-soaked internal landscape. While the story of his eighteenth year has insufficient perspective in itself to have much meaning, the rest of the volumes and readers themselves provide context and meaning. We learn fractionally more about the elusive Yngve, who has small speaking parts in this novel, and marginally more about his father’s decline. We feel Karl Ove’s desperation and confusion when he realizes the place his mother rented is only home when his mother and brother are there: "...home is no longer a place. It was mum and Yngve. They were my home."

This novel is the written equivalent of Karl Ove staring into the bathroom mirror while washing his hands, looking and being looked at, inside and outside at the same time, purely and unambiguously expressing his inner state. It is forgotten the instant the pen is put down or the book closed until someone else opens the book, picks up the soap, stares at their reflection, and examines their soul.
Profile Image for Justin Evans.
1,645 reviews1,068 followers
May 26, 2015
I kept a very close eye on myself as I read this, and worked out why I keep reading: it's just readable. KOK writes ideal airplane literature for those of us who think we're too good for airplane literature. You don't have to keep track of anything, the pages turn, not because you have to keep going, but because it's all so digestible that there's no reason to stop turning them. He captures exactly what it's like to be an 18 year old boy (unpleasant), and throws in a few slightly intellectual paragraphs to salve your conscience while you're otherwise reading about booze and fucking.

I recently read somewhere this definition of literature as opposed to non-literary language: in literature, sentences always mean at least two things (it's a common one, I know; I think I read it in Sartre). That is not true of My Struggle, in which the words very much mean only and always what they appear to mean--again, this makes it an easy read, your brain will not be taxed at all. It's also interesting to think of KOK trying to make literature out of the non-literary, an old avant-garde approach to writing (though the old avant-gardists would, ahem, not appreciate KOK's spin on it). Is that what's going on here? Is this in any way incompatible with my "it's just airplane literature" enjoyment? I don't think so.

In any case, KOK knows this. Karl Ove discusses with his mother her brother's poetry.

"Why," asks Karl Ove, "can't he just write it as it is, straight?"
"Some do," she said. "But there are things you can't say straight."
"Such as?"

Her answer is, roughly, Heidegger's concept of Sorge, which isn't entirely convincing as an answer, but does make me really like his mother.

Later, he describes his teenage nostalgia for childhood, "when the trees were trees, not 'trees', cars not 'cars', when Dad was Dad, not 'Dad.'"

So, despite myself, I managed to intellectualize this non-intellectual book. It reflects on its own non-intellectuality, it's own lack of irony, in such a way that the reader can indulge in the boy as unliterary, unintelligent, unironical--while also being aware that this is just nostalgia. The impressive thing about book four is how it is successful as nostalgic pablum, while inserting *just* enough of the ironic acid to keep my brain engaged.

If only there'd been less stuff about the Tyrannical Family. I just do not care to hear about people's struggles with their family members. We all have them. They are not interesting. KOK as a teenager refusing to beat off might not be interesting to others, I admit.
Profile Image for Ellen.
1,575 reviews444 followers
June 27, 2015
This is volume 4 of Karl Ove Knauusgaard’s monumental work, My Struggle. I have loved all the books and read them almost as obsessively as they seem to have been written and this one is my favorite so far (although I was especially impressed by the first volume as well).
The long seemingly minute by minute accountings of Karl Ove’s life as an 18 year who has taken a job as a teacher in northern Norway. The book is the most comic of the books so far, punctuated by beautiful lyrical passages. The atmosphere of the very cold northern town is powerfully evoked-the long darkness of winter and the brightening of spring, the power of the appearance of the sun after a seemingly endless dark winter, how like a triumph over death it may be to survive winter and see the spring.
As with Knauusgard’s previous volumes, the book is filled with the minutiae of daily life which somehow add up to more than can be explained by looking at any particular scene or description. The book is funnier than the others, the story of an 18 year old boy obsessed with sex and his virginity. He is always falling in love, and always unable to consummate it, even when given the opportunity. There is a tender pretentiousness in his decision to be a writer-a choice partly driven by a genuine impulse and partly by an adolescent need to be extraordinary, to be special, to rebel against the perceived expectations of family and community and live on the dark side. Karl Ove is swept up in the romanticism of a dissolute life and when he’s not teaching or writing, he’s usually getting drunk. The author portrays this struggle as both funny and touching.
I love this work, often without understanding why. In this volume, for me, it was clearer how the ordinary sets off the extraordinary, how the mundane can be both comic and sweet.
Profile Image for Cody.
877 reviews258 followers
January 17, 2020
My friend M Sarki (read his work, and find him on here; he’s worth your time and an exceptional human to boot) summed up KOK’s writing far better than I in one of his reviews for this cycle. While I paraphrase, his attribution of ‘sophisticated simplicity’ is right on the money. No more so than here, Book Four.

I would add that Karl Ove writes with a lilt of smoothness rarer than hen’s teeth, something that is disguised by the sheer forward momentum of his storytelling. Further: he earns his renowned (maligned by some) revelations/admissions; without the preceding four-digit page count, some herein would just seem juvenile or solipsistic at best. But, almost a few thousand leaves in, he has become our Odysseus. Sure, his Heroic/Homeric epic may be a bit more carnal, but his Sirens are simply removed from the Classical myth tradition and given very real, very temptingly human form. And breasts. Lots of breasts. And “mons” (no less sensual word exists, and KOK knows and exploits this to skewer himself). And, fuck me, what should we regard as his cyclops other than that one-eyed nemesis between his legs so consistently thwarting him?

Which is all to say that I’m in love with Karl Ove. Deal with it. We’re here, there’s beer—get used to it.
Profile Image for Helle.
376 reviews445 followers
March 22, 2016
In this fourth instalment of his literary struggle, Karl Ove Knausgård continues his backward quest to describe and come to terms with his growing up. The book begins and ends with his going to northern Norway for a year as a substitute teacher, though he is only 18 and fresh out of high school. He paints a vivid portrait of life in small-town Norway in a village of only some 250 houses and so far north that the school he teaches at changes teachers almost every year because no new people move to the place. There is darkness for weeks on end during the winter and endless light during the summer. There is also quite a lot of drinking for what else is there to do up there?

The tone of his existential musings from the previous three instalments carry over in this one, too, but too many pages are dedicated to his lusting after girls and wondering when on earth someone will help him put an end to his painful state as a virgin. I realize this is what a lot of teenage boys feel, but that doesn’t necessarily make it interesting as literary material – certainly not when, as I often felt, it was described in real-time.

In the first three instalments I was often full of sympathy for the young Karl Ove, especially in volume three when he allows us to revisit his childhood and his tyrant of a father. His father looms large in this volume also and is well on his way to becoming the alcoholic we met in volume one. In this volume, however, Karl Ove was often extremely unlikeable and selfish, not just flawed as in the other volumes. I felt sorry for his mother sometimes, but I suppose I would feel sorry for my own mother, too, if I had the empathic hindsight to remember some of the things I put her through back then.

Knausgård’s story-telling abilities are still powerful, and we begin to see the single-minded writer he would become. He glosses over nothing but lays bare his immaturity and humiliations, his delusions of grandeur, his desire for sexual release and existential freedom. Karl Ove Knausgård is the Nordic anti-hero of his own time.
Profile Image for Ed.
Author 1 book440 followers
March 17, 2023
This is where I get off the train. A Death in the Family was something special: Knausgård's ability to extract poignancy and meaning from the minutiae of life felt compelling and innovative. But four books in, it feels repetitive. Maybe Knausgård's approach to storytelling has changed, or maybe I've become numb to it, but it feels as though the detail has become amplified, but the heart is gone.
Profile Image for Bruno.
254 reviews142 followers
March 7, 2016
Dancing with a boner

Dopo aver lasciato, alla fine del terzo volume, un Karl Ove tredicenne che dall'isola di Tromøy si trasferiva con la famiglia a Kristiansand, lo ritroviamo qui alle soglie dell'età adulta. Diciotto anni e con il gymnas, il liceo, ormai alle spalle, Karl Ove brama la vera vita che gli si spalanca davanti in un caleidoscopio di seducenti possibilità. Senza la benché minima voglia di continuare gli studi, Karl Ove fa domanda per ricoprire un ruolo annuale di insegnante in un paesino sperduto nella Norvegia settentrionale, il cui nome fittizio è Håfjord, assimilabile con ogni probabilità ad un borgo di pescatori della Sardegna, se questa si trovasse al nord del circolo polare. L'ambientazione e gli eventi qui narrati andranno poi a costituire la principale fonte di ispirazione per il primo romanzo di Knausgård, Ute av verden, con il quale vinse nel 1998 il prestigioso premio della critica norvegese.

Non riesco ancora a capire come sia possibile che ad un diciottenne, fresco di liceo e senza alcuna formazione o esperienza nel campo, venga permesso di insegnare a degli studenti che in alcuni casi sono quasi dei coetanei, ma va be', quelli so' scandinavi, sono di vedute aperte o forse capita solo nei paeselli in Culonia dove nessuno vuole andare e il tasso di suicidi supera di gran lunga quello delle nascite. Poi c'è questa abitudine, tipicamente scandinava a quanto pare*, per cui gli studenti vanno a trovare i propri insegnanti a casa, semplicemente perché si annoiano o perché vogliono curiosare. Se ai tempi della scuola i miei compagni mi avessero proposto di andare a trovare, che so, la professoressa di matematica, forse sarei scoppiato a piangere e mi sarei provocato volontariamente un salasso mortale con la punta del compasso.

In realtà questa fantomatica Håfjord sembra un piccolo paradiso: il mare, i fiordi, l'aurora boreale, le atmosfere ovattate, la neve! Il motivo principale, infatti, per cui Karl Ove si propone per questo incarico è proprio l'isolamento, che si è imposto forzatamente allo scopo di trovare il tempo per scrivere. Il suo obiettivo è quello di ritornare al sud, alla fine di quell'anno, con un romanzo o dei racconti in valigia. Le parti più interessanti del romanzo sono state per me esattamente quelle in cui descrive l'impegno creativo e gli sforzi con cui esplora e sperimenta alla ricerca di una propria voce.

Oh shit, this was no good either!
All the fires in the darkness, the tall mountain and the immense plain, it had been so fantastic!
On paper it was nothing.
I moved to the sofa and started writing my diary instead. 'Have to work on transferring the moods from inside to outside,' I wrote 'But how? Easier to describe people's actions, but that's not enough, I don't think. On the other hand, Hemingway did it.'


Dopo aver descritto la prima settimana di lavoro, l'impatto con gli studenti, i colleghi e la gente del posto, la gran parte del libro si concentra sugli anni del gymnas, il cui leitmotiv è l'alcol, fiumi e fiumi di alcol, un consumo sporadico di droghe e l'ossessione per le ragazze**. Il Karl Ove adolescente scopre ben presto che l'alcol è il modo perfetto per confrontarsi con la vita sociale, per rilassarsi e sentirsi abbastanza coraggiosi da provarci con qualche ragazza, ma non si accontenta dell'occasionale cocktail che ti rende un po' brillo ed euforico...no, qui si parla di almeno tre bottiglie di vino a sera, o una bottiglia intera di vodka. Ma che fegato avranno mai 'sti scandinavi? Da far concorrenza ai russi e agli scozzesi messi insieme. Una roba che se avessi seguito i ritmi di Knausgård, mi sarei presentato all'esame di maturità con il volto itterico e la cirrosi epatica...a me che brucia lo stomaco con un po' di peperonata!
Non fu mai tanto vero che talis pater, talis filius, e infatti questi sono gli anni in cui ha inizio il lento e inesorabile processo di decadimento dello stesso padre di Karl Ove che, dopo essersi risposato e trasferito al nord, scivola sempre di più nella spirale dell'alcolismo. Parte degli eventi che riguardano il padre sono ricostruiti tramite i diari che quest'ultimo aveva preso l'abitudine di compilare, osservazioni lapidarie e appunti apparentemente banali, dai quali Knausgård ricava un'immagine nuova del proprio padre, ormai quasi totalmente spogliato di quell'aria di rigidità e autorevolezza che aveva permeato tutta la sua infanzia.

Ormai dovrei essermi abituato alla schiettezza di Knausgård, ma a volte continua a lasciarmi davvero sorpreso. Il libro descrive minuziosamente i tentativi (mancati) di arrivare, come direbbero in un film americano, in quarta base - di fare sesso, insomma.
La perdita della verginità, la El Dorado di ogni adolescente.
Sicuramente esisterà qualche statistica più precisa, ma oserei ipotizzare che la quasi totalità degli adolescenti mente spudoratamente in fatto di sesso. E' una legge di sopravvivenza. In Dancing in the dark, invece, Karl Ove si mette completamente a nudo - che giochi di parole, eh! - rivelando, tra un'erezione al momento meno opportuno e un'eiaculazione precoce, tutte le imbarazzanti cilecche della sua adolescenza. Chapeau! Ci vuol un bel coraggio.

Ottimo volume, forse il più ironico e divertente finora.


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* Anche ne L'isola dell'infanzia Karl Ove va a trovare la propria insegnante insieme all'amico Geir, se non ricordo male.

**Ho scoperto che Knausgård è vittima della mia stessa malattia - l'innamoramento facile. E' un problema molto sottovalutato! Non è per niente semplice innamorarsi e avere il cuore spezzato tre e quattro volte al giorno.
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Nel caso ve lo foste persi, vi consiglio l'articolo di Knausgård uscito proprio qualche giorno fa sull'Internazionale - si chiama Viaggio al centro del cervello ed è il resoconto dell'esperienza fatta dallo scrittore in Albania, dove ha assistito ad alcune operazioni al cervello effettuate dal chirurgo Herny Marsh su pazienti coscienti. Da brividi! L'articolo era già uscito sul New York Times lo scorso dicembre. E' un bel po' lunghetto, ma ne vale veramente la pena.
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