Those of us who have fallen under Knausgaard’s spell and have signed on for the project are now rewarded with Book 4, the fleetest, funniest and, in keeping with its adolescent protagonist, most sophomoric of the volumes translated into English thus far ... There are no chapter breaks to mark these time shifts, in keeping with the novel’s replication of the flow of memory. There is, however, a plot. Book 4 is a quest novel ... His misfires become a comic motif in the novel, though the laughs are never cheap because each instance is suffused with an intensity of feeling and a disarming, highly sympathetic honesty ... Book 4 is also the airiest book in the series. The pages are rarely dense with text. The essayistic passages that elevate the earlier volumes, bold in their old-fashioned European profundity and full of keen, original, brilliantly associative thinking, are nowhere to be found. Everything here is dramatized, scene after scene, compellingly so but without the gravitas of the earlier books and suggestive of a lighter, more carefree period in Knausgaard’s life.
'Karl Ove’s Complaint', the volume might have been called, because of its excruciating detail about premature ejaculation and nocturnal emissions ... Running alongside the author narrative (will his writing come to anything?) is the sex narrative: will he get laid? ... If there is courage in his candour, it is there in the structure of the book, too ... A 240-page flashback! When he is accepted on a writing course in Bergen at the end of this volume, Knausgaard will doubtless be taught that no book should ever be split down the middle like that. But rules are there to be broken, and his veering off course doesn’t ruin the momentum ... The narrator may be intellectually earnest, an aesthete who meditates on the sublime, but he is also a hapless fool, prone to Chaplinesque pratfalls. In exposing himself as a bundle of contradictions, Knausgaard also allows us to see ourselves. And for the most part, however unattractive his teenage self looks in this volume, it works wonderfully well.
This fourth volume, Dancing in the Dark, depicts him as a teenager and is the least flattering self-portrait to date. Although he presents himself as singular, much of what makes him objectionable stems from normal adolescent arrogance and confusion ... The sense you have, as you read, that you are being admitted to his life and mind depends on your taking him at his word. You have to believe in the authenticity of his account, and in that respect his frank exposure of his selfishness, arrogance and other personal defects enhances his credibility.
Through Dancing in the Dark, mysticism interrupts minutiae ... Drink-by-drink, grope-by-grope inventories of bashes and binges, along with the fumbling encounters with village girls that conclude them, suddenly give way to electrifying insight into the beauty of each moment ... At the end of this bittersweet stint in the far north, translated again with both dynamism and delicacy by Don Bartlett, the last track invoked happens to be that talisman of the late John Peel: 'Teenage Kicks' by The Undertones. For all its manic over-dub of detail, Dancing in the Dark delivers a knockout kick.
Taken on its own, Dancing in the Dark...is a fairly straightforward Bildungsroman. As the novel opens, Knausgaard is on the cusp of manhood ... Some of the badness of the prose may be down to the translation. Though Don Bartlett’s renderings of Knausgaard’s Norwegian feel technically accurate, they do on occasion seem to miss the mark tonally ... At other times the badness of Dancing in the Dark is Knausgaard’s own. He’s fond of using clunky onomatopoeic outbursts to convey intensity ... An encyclopedic catalogue of inconsequential moments that often feels far greater than the sum of its parts ... The attraction of the writing is that it generates a kind of artificial authenticity, an authenticity founded not necessarily on accuracy but on the appearance of it.
The most interesting aspect of this volume involves Knausgaard 's journey as a writer ... Knaugaard opens himself up to us fully and we get to know the person he is, his habits, lust, and passions. As is his practice, he describes in very poetic terms his weaknesses, particularly his initial inability to get an ejaculation. However, the book ends with an encounter where finally he achieves success in that area! ... This book can be enjoyed for its style, the author's knack for describing nature's beauty, winter storms, and the coping mechanism of a teenager faced with loneliness, the early challenges Knausgaard faced as a writer, failures in his personal relationships, and the taunts he endured from fellow workers.
Book Three, Boyhood Island, departed from his original freeform mix of perspectives and presented the action more or less exclusively through the eyes of the prepubescent Knausgaard. Admirers who saw that as a misstep may be disappointed to find that Dancing in the Dark persists with Knausgaard’s younger self, this time as he turns 18. Of utmost importance is his desire to have sex and the fear that he won't be up to it ... Knausgaard’s undersung gift for pratfall-based comedy is this book’s main attraction ... Not the place to start if you want to know what the fuss is about.
Dancing in the Dark — like most of Knausgaard’s novels — has the feel of very moving exercises in nostalgia. Knausgaard and his fans would have us believe he is following the arc and detail of his own life. But of course, in this case (like Proust, but not quite as beautifully) the fictional character Knausgaard has invented is himself ... The central conflict in Dancing in the Dark is: will the young Knausgaard ever solve his problem of premature ejaculation? ... Our over-estimation of this very entertaining Norwegian writer has less to say about him than it does about ourselves.
Of the four books in this series published in English thus far, this one is the most rhetorically conventional: Knausgaard employs humor, irony and melodrama in ways that he studiously avoided in previous episodes. But he’s done so not to pander but to criticize, echoing the mindset of a sex-obsessed and callow young man still in his teens and unshaped as a person and as a writer. And when the story arrives at its climax (and you can likely guess what that involves), Knausgaard uses the plainspokenness that defined his previous books to powerfully evoke the depth of his obliviousness, the hollowness of his triumph ... An entertaining portrait of the artist as a young lout.
A large chunk of the book is devoted to the year or so leading up to Karl Ove’s decision to take the job, as he begrudgingly finishes high school ... The internal battle between his carnal urges and his ambitions and morals is an ongoing theme. Unapologetically crude, this entry is the funniest and least self-conscious in the series to date ... Unfortunately, the casual breeziness of the prose can make it hard to keep track of Karl Ove’s countless love interests and acquaintances, as many are only briefly mentioned. The book is strongest when Karl Ove is figuring out who he is as a writer, and when he begins to take his craft seriously, hinting at the success that will come in the author’s own life.
