At the Close of Karl Ove Knausgaard’s ‘My Struggle,’ a Magician Loses His Touch

Well, you can always look forward to the German translation of the novel, whose title will read "Mein Kampf" . . . well done.

Only a white European (or American) man would think that his own (unremarkable, although introspective) life deserved commemoration through a massive tome dedicated to himself, in not one but 6 volumes. My struggle is in giving credence to the fact that we're still elevating these tiresome old voices. Writers are important and hold a mirror up to society, but sometimes it's just self-indulgent navel gazing. I can't imagine a female writer today who would be so assured that she should also produce a similar celebration of me, me, me.

His prose is so straightforwardly and banally personal that it evokes the strange fascination we have to stare at our own navels. Thankfully, at some point along the way, we decide to look somewhere else.

What happens to us in our personal lives can be fodder for writing memoirs, but do we throw our family members and friends under the bus? David Sedaris (see essays in The New Yorker) appears more muted since one of his sisters committed suicide. I recently came upon Woody Allen's "Hannah and her Sisters" and Googled the actors. It seems Mia Farrow's mother found the script was based too closely on their personal lives and this in turn becomes a plot line in the film. Who among us could not do a stand up routine on ridiculous things that have happened in the bedroom, but wisely we keep it to ourselves. For Louis CK the line between private and public became blurred and precipitated his downfall.

Thanks for the heads-up.

The little I've read of his work is because it was so ego-centric and boring that I couldn't find anything beyond 'him' to relate to. Maybe your readers should try Leena Krohn if you want a superb Finnish writer who will transport you to another world of magic and intelligence.

You know something? I don't think I'll be getting into these books anytime soon. As a young person, I would listen to Bach's "Well Tempered Clavier." I played it on the piano. I read books about it. Where I ran into an interesting thought. The writer concedes--YES. Of course. J. S. Bach was a human being. With passions and emotions like anyone else. And these are reflected in the music. BUT. . . . . .. they are, to us, like the buildings of that legendary city submerged under the sea. Dimly we discern their shapes, glimmering through fathoms of water. They remain mysterious, inaccessible. We can never reach them. I don't understand people who write "novels" about their day-to-day life. Oh yes! we all live day to day. STUFF! like breakers crashing in on us. WE find it absorbing--yes! Others don't. And I am reminded of American poet, Robert Lowell. Who started out with such formal mastery--such cold, incisive imagery-- --all ending in a deluge of purely personal stuff. Angering, giving pain to people still living, who picked up "Day To Day"--that last book of poems. And a long four hundred page excursus on Adolf Hitler? ARE YOU KIDDING ME? Your STRUGGLE, Mr. Knausggard? Gosh! you could have done better than that. We write to make SENSE of things, don't we. Sort them into patterns. Wring ART out of them. NOT-- --just to catalogue the things themselves. Day after day. Page after page. Book after book.

The review has sold me on perhaps reading the first three books by Knausgaard, I am intrigued. My real takeaway, as a relatively new NYT subscriber, is I love the writing of Dwight Garner, and now I have to go read some more of his work.

And there are the inevitable questions you ask yourself at the end: why bother? Why should I be interested in this character? Why should I listen to him when what he says is hardly new or universal? And it's no fun.

I read the first book. I want to read the others but got so caught up in my own writing and reading books like "The Whale" by Mark Beauregard and re-reading "The Grave Digger's Daughter" by Joyce Carol Oates and "Independence Day" by Richard Ford (like Knausgaard these profound, generous and friendly novelists help me write, too) that I have just not gotten around to finishing the model-handsome hunk's other tomes. I don't think I will attempt this last one, however. Something about parsing Hitler goes against my (Jewish) grain. Nevertheless, Knausgaard's first book definitely got me scribbling. Let's face it: he gives license to freedom. Maybe that's all we need to know.

It is hard to imagine someone being so out of touch that he thought the topics in the book won’t bother his family. I stopped reading “Autumn” when I got to the section on women’s genitalia, which was addressed to his daughter and started with diaper changes and ended with ruminating on the taste of female organs. Just not what I was looking for.