Karl Ove Knausgaard, Trans. by Don Bartlett & Martin Aitken
MixedFinancial TimesAs The End begins, we rejoin Knausgaard...What follows, over 1,150 densely packed pages, is the story of the My Struggle books and the thinking behind them, right up to the moment when the narrative finally catches up with itself ... There are light moments — at one point the confessional genre is taken to what must be its logical conclusion with the revelation of Knausgaard’s PIN number, 2536 — but in general the mood is darker ... The drama of The End is driven by the earlier novels’ effects on the real world, and there is a queasy feeling of retreading the footsteps of old interviews ... the questions about literary ethics return and the book can feel at times like a particularly cruel form of double jeopardy ... And it is at this point that we begin to understand what a 450-page essay about Hitler is doing in the middle of the book ... For me, the essay feels too schematic, too weighed down ... It is hard not to be impressed by the fluency and erudition on display as Knausgaard charts his course through history, philosophy, literature and the visual arts. But the yearning for authenticity, which builds slowly through the series, threatens to overwhelm its conclusion.
