The final installment in the long-awaited, internationally celebrated My Struggle series.The full scope and achievement of Karl Ove Knausgaard’s monumental work is evident in this final installment of his My Struggle series. Grappling directly with the consequences of Knausgaard’s transgressive blurring of public and private, Book 6 is a troubling and engrossing look into the mind of one of the most exciting artists of our time. Knausgaard includes a long essay on Hitler and Mein Kampf, particularly relevant (if not prescient) in our current global climate of ascending dictatorships.

Kari Mruz

Min kamp 6

"Fiction is fact selected, arranged, and charged with purpose." But also a response to my first real depressive stretch, an attempt to write my way out of it in a way. It also was an expression of a native impulse that fiction is best when it doesn't read like fiction at all (the archetype for a lot of this who's often unspoken or unacknowledged due to lack of literary prestige is Kerouac, not so much "On the Road" but the later ones like "The Subterraneans" and "Big Sur" -- also KOK says he wrote the 500+-page Book Five in five weeks, which suggests Kerouac's weekends of "athletic" writing fueled by coffee and speed). Later I read Moody's "Demonology" story about his sister's death and Lorrie Moore's famous story about blood in her daughter's diaper, both of which were touchstones for me of fiction that's not fiction, that goes against fiction in a way by emphasizing its reality but then by doing so elevates itself as a sort of supreme fiction. Since then the genre of "autofiction" has emerged, with primary recipients of attention being Ben Lerner ( Leaving the Atocha Station ;  10:04 ); Tao Lin ( Shoplifting from American Apparel ;  Taipei ), Sheila Heti ( How Should a Person Be? ;  Motherhood ), and more recently Rachel Cusk ( Outline ;  Transit ;  Kudos ). All of these have their merits and I've been attracted to them and felt like they were up my alley but when it comes to what I look for in writing as a reader (audacity, authority, execution, heft, oomph), the My Struggle series completely fulfills its exaggerated ambition, and by doing so fulfills the need I felt in 1997 or so when I felt like it felt right to write about my life. It's hard to explain. It's like there was a sense that conventional fiction wasn't sufficient and that by writing about life like in DFW's essays or a less "hip"/annoying explicitly Buddhist way like Keroauc there was an under-occupied space and way forward. Now, it's clear that "My Struggle" has not only occupied that space but will be a sort of black hole warping the light of all further autofictional energy. At the end, in the last line, he says he's no longer a writer, something he's since disproven. But there's something about this that's like he's put it all out, eviserated himself and stretched the entrails out like Keroauc's unfurled scroll along a shuffleboard table. He's exhausted his capacities. And I'm sure that's something that many writers have wanted to do at one point but never come close to achieving.   Stray thoughts :  Very few similes. At one point I noted "no similes" and then a few pages later three appeared on one page. But generally very few similes. Eschews those little metaphorical flourishes that so often signal that the writer is intent on achieving Proper Literary Tone, which KOK purposefully tries to avoid.   Very little social media -- not until the end of Book Six is Linda posting updates on Facebook. Otherwise, I can't imagine what this project would be like if the author posted all the time on Twitter and Facebook and Instagram. In many ways, it's the anti-thesis of social media updates by writers. Definitely not character restricted, not going for the laugh, no group think, not concerned with pop culture or self-promotion. Reading this book actually felt like the antidote to social media -- I was off it other than Goodreads as I read this. It felt good never to reach for my phone to scroll through updates when I needed to take a break from it.  The translators will win all the awards for this I'm sure -- it seems like one of them handled the dramatized parts and the other handled the essayistic parts. The tone is similar but not exact, although that of course could have more to do with KOK than the translator.  I liked that the cover is the same color as my 2014 novel  The Shimmering Go-Between .  Will I re-read Book 1 now? Like with  In Search of Lost Time , I would love to read a volume each year, over and over forever, but lord knows if I will.

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