MixedLos Angeles Review of BooksBy scrubbing her world of specificity, Cusk has indeed made it more abstract, more painterly, and also less interesting. Something seems to have gone out of the worlds of her work such that they often appear slight and shallow ... [In one section] the narrative movement slows enough for Cusk to present her reader with something else at which she excels: characterization through conversation ... [Yet] even in the excellent third section of the book, the narrative voice fidgets back and forth between an anonymous third person and a no-less-anonymous first-person plural, without ever settling into a rhythm, without coalescing into a voice.
Karl Ove Knausgaard, trans. by Don Bartlett
RaveThe New York Times Book ReviewWhile \'A Man in Love\' tells of the rapture and intoxication of love, it also turns a cold and at times clinical eye on romantic ecstasy and the marital equation, relating in painstaking — at points agonizing — detail the fading of the first flush of love, the cooling and contracting of feeling ... This wealth of hyper-realistic detail places us in the midst of a life, and gives relief to its moments of passion and despair, insight and confusion, anger and love. Not only this, however, it also presents to the reader the real struggle: how to take all this shifting, teeming minutiae and in it find, and give, meaning ... A subtle structure can be mistaken for none at all, a search for lost time taken for random reminiscence, and this subtlety of structure is something Knausgaard’s work shares with Proust’s ... Knausgaard has a tremendous essayistic talent, and Book 2, like Book 1, is rich in reflections on everything from the sociology of death to the psychopathology of everyday life.
