My Struggle, Book 1 Audible Audiobook – Unabridged

Karl Ove Knausgaard (Author), Edoardo Ballerini (Narrator), Don Bartlett - translator (Author),

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My Struggle: Book One introduces American listeners to the audacious, addictive, and profoundly surprising international literary sensation that is the provocative and brilliant six-volume autobiographical novel by Karl Ove Knausgaard. It has already been anointed a Proustian masterpiece and is the rare work of dazzling literary originality that is intensely, irresistibly readable. Unafraid of the big issues - death, love, art, fear - and yet committed to the intimate details of life as it is lived, My Struggle is an essential work of contemporary literature.

Listening Length

16 hours and 10 minutes
Author

Karl Ove Knausgaard, see all
Narrator

Edoardo Ballerini
Audible release date

Dec 24 2014
Language

English
Publisher

Recorded Books
ASIN

B072329LTZ
Version

Unabridged
Program Type

Audiobook
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Product details

Listening Length	16 hours and 10 minutes
Author	Karl Ove Knausgaard, Don Bartlett - translator
Narrator	Edoardo Ballerini
Audible.ca Release Date	December 24 2014
Publisher	Recorded Books
Program Type	Audiobook
Version	Unabridged
Language	English
ASIN	B072329LTZ
Best Sellers Rank	#31,673 in Audible Books & Originals (See Top 100 in Audible Books & Originals) #94 in Biographical Fiction (Audible Books & Originals) #462 in Biographical Fiction (Books) #1,493 in Literary Fiction (Audible Books & Originals)

Customer reviews

4.1 out of 5

2,756 global ratings

5 star		51%
4 star		27%
3 star		11%
2 star		5%
1 star		5%

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Top reviews from Canada

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A. Reader

Unlike anything I've read before

Reviewed in Canada 🇨🇦 on September 27, 2014

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So much has been written about this novel, but I was unprepared for its impact. Knausgaard owes a debt to Proust and Henry James, among others. He also has followed (or begun) the trend that many younger North American novelists follow where they, or someone very like them with their names and in their circumstances are the protagonists in their own work, and the supporting cast & setting are equally similar. But he doesn't engage in quite the same type of over sharing as some of the others do. His sentences are complex, but rigorously and beautifully wrought. I found his descriptions of the world around him crystalline both because of and in spite if the various emotional filters he would apply. Rather than finding these passages tedious, I found it a joy to parse the sentences, to stop and read aloud the cinematic description of life as it passed him in front of the convenience store, or the achingly beautiful images of the sea and the harbour.
While Knausgaard's life is nothing like mine, his childhood and adolescent selves are universal - in the western world at any rate. And the uneasiness, agony of his relationship with his father, the awkwardness with his grandmother, are songs we all know, with infinite variety.

One person found this helpful

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Jill Brooks

as one might expect in a good mystery story

Reviewed in Canada 🇨🇦 on November 17, 2015

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This is a very compelling book. I found that the speed of my reading accelerated as I read, as one might expect in a good mystery story. I had to stop periodically and put it down and take a breath! His memory for the smallest moments of his early life is astonishing, as he draws the reader
in. I look forward to reading more of his work.

One person found this helpful

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gailwinds

Excellent writer and I am looking forward to book 2

Reviewed in Canada 🇨🇦 on November 14, 2014

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This book is spell-binding-which is a mystery as it is about everyday life-it is instilled with an energy and insight into life that is fearless. His honesty is refreshing but I do understand why his family has taken exception to some of his writing -but then, all families with writers face the same problem in one way or another. Excellent writer and I am looking forward to book 2.

3 people found this helpful

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John Dunphy

It's a pretty good read

Reviewed in Canada 🇨🇦 on July 18, 2018

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It's a pretty good read,but I don't think I'm going to rush out and buy the other 5 volumes any time soon.

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Roberta

Fascinating!

Reviewed in Canada 🇨🇦 on April 12, 2017

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A little long-winded but I couldn't put it down. A fascinating story.

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AMR

A refreshing and honest read!

Reviewed in Canada 🇨🇦 on October 30, 2013

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I was completely consumed by the words this author so honesty shared with his readers. The interior anxiety and self-doubt of his youth was presented without self-pity and were painted with complete sincerity and introspection. His relationship to his father was so tragic and straightforward that I found it difficult not to tear up. I could not put this book down; so brutally honest.

11 people found this helpful

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Kristina M Getz

Amazing

Reviewed in Canada 🇨🇦 on November 4, 2019

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Knausgaard is addictive. Highly recommend.

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Andrée Lepage

This, I think is more a book for men ...

Reviewed in Canada 🇨🇦 on May 28, 2017

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This, I think is more a book for men, not the very old lady I am!
Although well written and rather absorbing at time, it failed to interest me.

2 people found this helpful

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Top reviews from other countries

Boring

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on April 28, 2020

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I’ve never read a duller book. The will to live left my body. That’s hours of my life I’ll never get back. I’m afraid the author has delivered a high brow kiss and tell based on a mundane life lived in middle class desperation. Life is boring enough without having to read some poor unfortunate Norwegian Proust/Joyce second rate knock off. I know he is the darling of the culture vulture/chattering classes but the truth is he's got nought on. I know the middle classes love to think that their lives are heroic because they are in their own minds stoical in the face of meaninglessness. The truth is they're just boring. Spare a thought for the author though. Imagine the hours spent recording these dull musings about his dull life. That's got to be doubly dull. Then the hours his middle class audience spent reading his dull musings and identifying with him. Beckett couldn't write this and keep a straight face and he was the master of dull.

21 people found this helpful

Chrissy Frost

Bizzarely Boring yet Completely Compelling

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on November 12, 2019

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I have just taken delivery of Volume 3 of 'My Struggle' and intend to read all 6 volumes. Karl Ove Knausgaard is the master of the mundane, who can take several paragraphs describing how he prepared a simple meal... and many, many pages describing his teenage attempt to attend a New Year's Eve Party with beer! There are times when you will be a little bored... yet you will want to persist. I encourage you to stick with this unique memoir as it will draw you in and ultimately captivate you. Deserving of all its accolades, this long memoir follows Knausgaard from boyhood within a dysfunctional family... to his two unhappy marriages... the arc of his writing career.. and his painfully honest reflections on the sheer, unrelenting boredom of caring for very young children. It will surprise you with its honesty and provoke you with its commentary on family life, the pursuit of success, the difficulties inherent in marriage and friendships. I am just on Volume 3 now, so still looking forward to the rest of the story.

8 people found this helpful

snibbo

Not for the fainthearted

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on February 8, 2022

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If you want nine pages describing what's in a Norwegian guy's fridge, and the historic origin of each food item, and which figures from history favoured the said edible: then this is the book for you.

Have a Scandic crime thriller on the go at the same time so you can come up for air occasionally.

If someone tells you that an unmade bed is "art" and you agree, then this book should be the next one your read. Honestly.

One person found this helpful

William Jordan

very unusual and highly memorable

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on September 17, 2014

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it is very unusual for me to finish reading a book of 430 pages and not be quite sure what I think about it.

This is certainly different and is like a very long drawn out diary mixed together from different periods of the author's life. The two parts, between them, cover events early in the life of Karl Ove, including his attempt to get to a New Year's party and get drunk as a teenager, his first encounters with girls, and in the second part, his life as a writer in Sweden with his heavily pregnant wife and his intention to write a new kind of book, and then most memorably the death of his father, returning to his grandparents' home with his brother Yngve, and putting it to rights after his alcoholic father has filled it with bottles, clothes filled with excerement and urine and so forth, and living for a few days with his grandmother whose mind has started to 'unravel' in family terminology. But at each step along the line, there are lengthy digressions, as in Part Two an account of Karl Ove's relations with his brother, and of a couple of interviews he conducted (one with his brother) as a teenager….

Much of this is very memorable, somehow. So I suspect I will be making my way forward to volume 2, despite the sense that I can't make head or tail of it.

This US hardback edition is an attractive physical object, by the way, and the layout makes it easy to read the long paragraphs of free association.

3 people found this helpful

Derk

The radiance of unbearable banality

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on February 23, 2015

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When the author is describing at one point in this book what it feels like to be drunk he talks of how it makes the unbearable banality of his world seem radiant. That is what he achieves in the book as a whole. It is a book like no other I have read - often dealing in great detail with the mundane everyday world but dealing with aspects of it - the moments of youthful embarrassment and gaucheness, of drunkenness and awkwardness with girlfriends - which are rarely dealt with outside comic novels. And alongside this Knausgaard deals with the huge questions of love and sex and family and, above all, death (which frames this part of the novel). It seems at first to be a very loose almost stream-of-consciousness structure, with constant digressions and journeys back and forward in time. But at the heart of it is the narrator's love-hate relationship with his father. It is interesting that this modern day author starts his long Proust-like series of novels with an exploration of the narrator's relationship with his father, just as Proust did with his relationship with his mother. It has all the makings of being a unique journey and I look forward to experiencing more of both the unbearable banality and the radiance along the way.

15 people found this helpful

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My Struggle, Book 1 Audible Audiobook – Unabridged

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