Dancing in the Dark: My Struggle Book 4(My Struggle)

18 years old and fresh out of high school, Karl Ove Knausgaard moves to a tiny fisherman's village far north of the polar circle to work as a school teacher. He has no interest in the job itself - or in any other job for that matter. His intention is to save up enough money to travel while finding the space and time to start his writing career. Initially everything looks fine- He writes his first few short stories, finds himself accepted by the hospitable locals and receives flattering attention from several beautiful local girls. But then, as the darkness of the long polar nights start to cover the beautiful landscape, Karl Ove's life also takes a darker turn. The stories he writes tend to repeat themselves, his drinking escalates and causes some disturbing blackouts, his repeated attempts at losing his virginity end in humiliation and shame, and to his own distress he also develops romantic feelings towards one of his 13-year-old students. Along the way, there are flashbacks to his high school years and the roots of his current problems. And then there is the shadow of his father, whose sharply increasing alcohol consumption serves as an ominous backdrop to Karl Ove's own lifestyle. The fourth part of a sensational literary cycle that has been hailed as 'perhaps the most important literary enterprise of our times' (Guardian)

About the Author :
Karl Ove Knausgaard's My Struggle cycle has been heralded as a masterpiece all over the world. From A Death in the Family to The End, the novels move through childhood into adulthood and, together, form an enthralling portrait of human life. Knausgaard has been awarded the Norwegian Critics Prize for Literature, the Brage Prize and the Jerusalem Prize. His work, which also includes Out of the World, A Time for Everything and the Seasons Quartet, is published in thirty-five languages.

Review :
"A living hero" "A work of genius" "Fires every nerve ending while summoning in the reader the sheer sense of how amazing it is to be alive" "Beautifully human... Being drawn into his world is an ineluctable pleasure" "It has strong claim to be the great literary event of the twenty-first century" "Why would you read a six-volume, 3,600 page Norwegian novel about a man writing a six-volume, 3,600 page novel? The short answer is that it is breathtakingly good and so you cannot stop yourself, and would not want to" "It's unbelievable...I need the next volume like crack. It's completely blown my mind" "Perhaps the most significant literary enterprise of our times" "Knausgaard perfectly captures the heady mixture of elation and confusion to be found in late adolescence... My Struggle remains addictive, intensely funny and intensely serious. Like the young man here portrayed, it is "full to the brim with energy and life"" "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 overdub of detail, Dancing in the Dark delivers a knockout kick" "The narrator may be intellectually earnest, an aesthete who mediates on the sublime, but he is also a hapless fool, prone to Chaplinesque pratfalls. In exposing himself as a bundle of contradictions, Knausgaard allows us to see ourselves...it works wonderfully well" "If the function of literature is to take you out of your own life and involve you in someone else’s then My Struggle is literature…gripping" "The most appealing in the series so far" "Irresistible" "If you have read the first one, you will need to read on – and you shouldn’t stop reading until the end" "So intense, so passionate and so compulsively readable" "An elegiac kind of comic novel, and it is pure Karl Ove Knausgaard" "Addictive" "His work is transformative: to read it is to experience his life alongside him…. To read it is also to feel more human, more certain of what is means to be alive… It’s a brilliant depiction of an intense, philosophical and provocative young man" "[Knausgaard] writes a clear prose that transforms ordinary events, detailing the span of his life with such directness that everything seems to be happening in real time"