A review by brannonkrkhuang
My Struggle, Book 3 by Karl Ove Knausgård

1.0

The main takeaway from this book is that I hate a man named Karl Ove's father. Don't get me wrong, I also hate Karl Ove, but for other reasons, and not quite as much as I hate his father. On one hand, these "Struggle" books are incredible. I always get sucked into the book and can't break loose till all the pages have been turned. On the other hand, Karl Ove is very "honest" within these pages, but he sometimes fails to follow up his honesty with any condemnations of his past actions, so when he starts describing the way he and the other 13-year-old boys literally assaulted the 13-year-old girls from school with nonconsensual skirt-and-shirt-lifting and groping, and he expresses no remorse, but just seems to offer that information up like it was just the way things were and the girls secretly liked it, without considering how it might have been from their perspective, I feel an immense sense of disgust and distrust toward him. Certainly I can respect his honesty in telling the truth, in telling what happened without trying to gloss over it or make himself look better, but I can't respect him, because how do you own up to that and not say, “oh god, I was terrible. It was a terrible thing to do.” It seems like he doesn’t think that way, which is a massive red flag.