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A review by brandonpytel
My Struggle: Book 6 by Karl Ove Knausgård
5.0
Knausgaard’s final installment is more meta than any of his previous books. Starting with the fallout of the publication of book 1 and then book 2, we learn of KOK’s inner turmoil, regret and doubt when it comes to constructing the path through his memory and through what actually happened.
His longest book, the entire middle third of the book is dedicated to the name and the number, an in depth analysis of a poem (the slowest part of the whole series), musings about names and objects, a brief history of Hitler and the rise of Naziism, and the failure of Hitler as an artist, the weakness of his soul and how language can dictate some of the most evil events in human history.
More than ever, this book explores all previous book’s publications, what he thought went well and didn’t, and gives us more of KOK’s struggle: his all-out effort to provide everything – mundane, or not – to the reader, in an artistic attempt to tell the truth and exercise a certain reality of his interior and exterior worlds.
The final 150 pages is a testament to this experiment, showcasing the vulnerable Linda at her lowest point, as the project seems to destroy KOK as he tries to finish it and accomplish what he set out to do: in this way, he encounters the danger of his experiment, its difficulty and his inability to forgive himself for what he put his family through. It’s a struggle to put things on the page, to write, to tell the world a story so intimate and close, but though his experiment may have failed in his eyes, KOK’s meditation on life, its meaning, the memories and the relationships that shape us, puts a final mark of punctuation on a 3600 project that I hope to come back to another time in my life.
His longest book, the entire middle third of the book is dedicated to the name and the number, an in depth analysis of a poem (the slowest part of the whole series), musings about names and objects, a brief history of Hitler and the rise of Naziism, and the failure of Hitler as an artist, the weakness of his soul and how language can dictate some of the most evil events in human history.
More than ever, this book explores all previous book’s publications, what he thought went well and didn’t, and gives us more of KOK’s struggle: his all-out effort to provide everything – mundane, or not – to the reader, in an artistic attempt to tell the truth and exercise a certain reality of his interior and exterior worlds.
The final 150 pages is a testament to this experiment, showcasing the vulnerable Linda at her lowest point, as the project seems to destroy KOK as he tries to finish it and accomplish what he set out to do: in this way, he encounters the danger of his experiment, its difficulty and his inability to forgive himself for what he put his family through. It’s a struggle to put things on the page, to write, to tell the world a story so intimate and close, but though his experiment may have failed in his eyes, KOK’s meditation on life, its meaning, the memories and the relationships that shape us, puts a final mark of punctuation on a 3600 project that I hope to come back to another time in my life.