Karl Ove Knausgaard, Trans. by Don Bartlett & Martin Aitken
RaveWorld Literature TodayThe book’s confrontation with taboo subjects exerts an extraordinary pull on the reader, who is unable to look away and must see how far he will go. Nevertheless, what is perhaps most radical about reading the novel is the feeling of intimacy it creates. Through repetition, everyday domestic banalities become familiar and comforting ... What helps give the unwieldy 1,164-page tome some pacing and lightness is the narrator’s charisma and self-deprecating sense of humor. Knausgaard’s virtuoso exposition of awkward everyday social interactions is unmatched in contemporary literature.
Helen DeWitt
PositivePolitics/Letters... what it lacks in girth it makes up for in inventiveness ... as in so many of DeWitt’s narratives, at some point things cross an invisible line and the reasonable blurs into the absurd, producing a Lynchian mix of the banal with the surreal ... DeWitt’s stories have the texture of fairy tales...But her fairy tales have a brothers Grimm-like underbelly to them.
