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A review by mrctakavarasha
The End by Karl Ove Knausgård
5.0
"To grow older is not to understand more but to realise that there is more to understand."
- Karl Ove Knausgård, My Struggle 6 (The End)
4,015 pages later and I have no idea how to articulate this experience. Funnily enough, reading My Struggle took 40 days (the pandemic has, if nothing else, afforded me more time to read), which seems appropriate since the series felt at times like a spiritual battle.
I certainly wouldn't recommend this final volume to anyone, nor would I really need to; by Volume 6 you'll have either completely bought into the project or long since abandoned it. Like many people I found the 400-page discourse to be a bit contrived and drawn-out, but it did feel appropriate, I suppose; in a roundabout way, Hitler has had a looming presence on the series by virtue of its name. This middle section also references gestalt psychology, the idea that an organized whole that is perceived as more than the sum of its parts. Again this is appropriate since I always considered My Struggle as a whole and never the individual volumes.
Ultimately, I don’t know how to progress after such a visceral reading experience. I’m not sure I’ll ever read anything in the same way again; I’m not even sure of what I just read, how much was fact, how much fiction. At the end of the day, though, I don’t really care; I’m just glad to have been along for the ride.
- Karl Ove Knausgård, My Struggle 6 (The End)
4,015 pages later and I have no idea how to articulate this experience. Funnily enough, reading My Struggle took 40 days (the pandemic has, if nothing else, afforded me more time to read), which seems appropriate since the series felt at times like a spiritual battle.
I certainly wouldn't recommend this final volume to anyone, nor would I really need to; by Volume 6 you'll have either completely bought into the project or long since abandoned it. Like many people I found the 400-page discourse to be a bit contrived and drawn-out, but it did feel appropriate, I suppose; in a roundabout way, Hitler has had a looming presence on the series by virtue of its name. This middle section also references gestalt psychology, the idea that an organized whole that is perceived as more than the sum of its parts. Again this is appropriate since I always considered My Struggle as a whole and never the individual volumes.
Ultimately, I don’t know how to progress after such a visceral reading experience. I’m not sure I’ll ever read anything in the same way again; I’m not even sure of what I just read, how much was fact, how much fiction. At the end of the day, though, I don’t really care; I’m just glad to have been along for the ride.