Knausgaard spares us too much overt reflection in order to maximise the power of every jaunt, scrape, crush, cult and (quite often) spell of terror and bout of weeping. For these early years are overshadowed by a fairy-tale father ... Via his visceral, immersive art, Knausgaard makes the heart visible as he conjures 'the intensity that only exists in childhood'. With skin-tingling immediacy, Boyhood Island transmits 'the excitement that exists in the unseen and the hidden'.
His account of his life up to the age of 13 or so (soccer, candy craving, playing with matches, grades, swimming, skiing, girl craving) is accomplished and often intense, but you miss the adult complexity and the toggling back and forth in time of the first two books ... For all this Oedipal drama, Book Three of My Struggle isn’t grueling. There are expert, almost Mark Twain-like observations about being a boy, and for every scene in which he cowers from his father, there’s one in which he does something like stick his erect little penis into a discarded Heineken bottle, only to have it stung by an angry beetle ... If this volume lacks some of the heat and intellectual force of the first two books, it feels like an essential building block. This writer is constructing a towering edifice, in what feels like real time. Few artistic projects of our era feel more worth attending to.
Boyhood Island, the latest volume to come out in English, makes clear that, with a father like Knausgaard's, anyone might struggle to turn their frown upside down ... This isn't the revelation past volumes were, partly because the injustices of boyhood are better documented than those of fatherhood, but mainly because Knausgaard fixes the point of view to his child self; gone is the fluid structure that drifted between the remembered moment and the moment of remembering. Outside the domestic psychodrama the action is much as you'd expect.
For those already immersed in Karl Ove’s meticulously rendered life story, Boyhood Island is a departure in structure and purpose. For those yet to read him, it may be a question of wondering what all the fuss is about. It is testament to the power and immediacy of Knausgaard’s writing, however, that both camps are ultimately rewarded with a subtle, burning sense of the lost years of childhood ... Without the breakouts and disjointed chronology, the encyclopaedic exploration of a boy’s humdrum life can seem somewhat wearying and meandering ... Read in context of the sequence as a whole, Boyhood Island lacks the sheer transformative power of the previous volumes, but delivers a vital piece of Karl Ove’s struggle: a struggle to know himself as well as he did as a child.
This glow fades slightly in the third volume of Min kamp, a book in which the real-time nature of Knausgaard’s project demonstrates its own knock-on effect. Composed in the eye of the publicity hurricane that followed the first two volumes, this is a notably safer novel. The slackening in the drama is palpable ... What’s missing is the fervent and searching examination that the Knausgaard of the first two volumes brings to his project’s legitimacy.
As a narrative this is the most straightforwardly autobiographical of the translated volumes. There is none of the switching back and forth through time and the digressions of Volume 2. It is also chronologically the first, covering his life up to the age of 13, and perhaps the best place to start reading him ... Knausgaard’s prose renders it all with his characteristic flatness and sparkle, a kind of hyperreality ... Knausgaard’s daily hatred and fear of his angry father are painfully clear here. Yet his father remains an enigma ... Indeed, while Knausgaard probes his own childhood personality at length — precocious, sensitive, anxious — he believes the same unknowability holds even for pictures of his young self ... This interplay constantly disrupts the novelistic surface of Knausgaard’s prose. It has the effect too of spurring the reader to think autobiographically: trying to recover the past while realising that its essence is out of reach.
Boyhood Island is a classic coming-of-age story — a Norwegian Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha — albeit of a particularly unformed and sprawling kind, set on the island of Tromoya in southern Norway in the 1970s and 1980s ... It is a novel about worlds opening — books, music, girls, pornography — and about realising that you are a misfit ... Knausgaard has taken the decision to exile his grown-up voice from the story, which is a great mistake. After some interesting early observations on memory, the narrative concerns itself entirely with the accumulation of mundane detail, taken to avant-garde lengths ... Only towards the end does the crucial Knausgaard voice re-emerge: rueful, mock-heroic, a hero out of Dostoevsky or Knut Hamsun, condemned to a footling modern life.
Knausgaard employs his own literary artfulness to release a presentation of his young evolving self — in roughly chronological order, but expanding or foreshortening according to thematic demands — with an immediacy as astonishing as that of its two predecessors ... Karl Ove is eager for acceptance, even popularity and admiration, and the ebb and flow of his standing with the community’s children and of his own apprehension of this constitutes one of the novel’s most original features. The emerging pattern will, we feel, pertain even in an adulthood spent by choice in dissimilar milieus.
Knausgaard returns to childhood, offering what is in some ways a traditional bildungsroman about his grammar school years on the Norwegian island of Tromoya ... The power of My Struggle lies in this tension, between who Knausgaard is and who he has ever been. As such, Boyhood is important, because it fills in key aspects of his history. It is, however, less reflective than Books 1 and 2, which makes it less effective on its own terms.
The adult Karl Ove may be a different person to Per Ove and Geir Ove, but over the course of this volume he vanishes entirely into his former selves. Even when the child Karl Ove is at his most absurd – timing a 15-minute first kiss with a stopwatch – there is no authorial wink to the reader. Knausgaard gives himself over entirely to the earnestness of childhood. Irony, after all, breeds distance, and Knausgaard’s objective is proximity ... Throughout Boyhood Island, backdrops are described at length, mined neither for poetry nor symbol ... There is a mesmeric quality to this, and an immersion through detail that resembles virtual reality.
