RaveThe New InquiryIt’s harder to bind the content of Book Two to any given theme, though it is subtitled A Man in Love and spans roughly the period of six years during which Karl Ove meets his second wife, a poet named Linda, relocates to Stockholm, has two children, writes his second novel (A Time For Everything), and retreats to the smaller city of Malmö ... Here, swathed in rumination, speculation, and conversation, much of which is with Karl Ove’s intellectual friend Geir, these minor incidents add up to something unlike a book and more like a hypnotically sustained feeling: a sprawling sleepwalk that takes us deeper the more it creeps into the borders of Karl Ove’s consciousness ... Knausgård doesn’t, as the cliché goes, wring meaning out of everyday life, he frees everyday life from the responsibility of having to seem meaningful ... After a canon built on thinking and feeling, here is an authentic 21st century masterpiece dedicated to existing, existence being perhaps the briefest state of all and therefore the one hardest to be exhaustive about, even given six books to say, in essence, \'there I was.\'
Horacio Castellanos Moya, Trans. by Lee Klein
PositiveBookforum\"It is a nearly perfect ventriloquism. Moreover, by converting Bernhard into a genre that can be accented to malign any hometown and its population of fakes and ignoramuses, Moya elevates hate to an international language.\
