Review by New York Times Review
MY STRUGGLE: Book 6, by Karl Ove Knausgaard. Translated by Don Bartlett and Martin Aitken. (Archipelago, $33.) This hefty volume concludes the Norwegian author's mammoth autobiographical novel with lengthy exegeses on art, literature, poetry and Hitler (whose "Mein Kampf" gives Knausgaard his title). LAKE SUCCESS, by Gary Shteyngart. (Random House, $28.) Shteyngart's prismatic new road-trip novel stars a Wall Street finance bro, loaded down with job and family woes, who impulsively hops on a Greyhound bus headed west. We do not root for him, but we root for his comeuppance. THE FIELD OF BLOOD: Violence in Congress and the Road to Civil War, by Joanne B. Freeman. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $28.) A noted historian uncovers the scores of brawls, stabbings, pummelings and duel threats that occurred among congressmen between 1830 and 1860. The mayhem was part of the ever-escalating tensions over slavery. OHIO, by Stephen Markley. (Simon & Schuster, $27.) This debut novel, set at a class reunion, churns with such ambitious social statements and insights - on hot-button issues of the past dozen years - that at times it feels like a kind of fiction/op-ed hybrid. HIS FAVORITES, by Kate Walbert. (Scribner, $22.) A middle-aged woman recalls, haltingly, how she was groomed by a charismatic high school English teacher in this powerful novel of trauma and survival that couldn't be more timely. The looping narrative amounts to a cathartic experiment in taking control of one's own story. IMMIGRANT, MONTANA, by Amitava Kumar. (Knopf, $25.95.) Kumar's novel of a young Indian immigrant who recounts his loves lost and won as a college student in the early 1990s has the feeling of thinly veiled memoir. It's a deeply honest look at a budding intellectual's new experience of America, filled with both alienation and an aching desire to connect. PASSING FOR HUMAN: A Graphic Memoir, by Liana Finek. (Random House, $28.) Finck's cartoons in The New Yorker offer dispatches from an eccentric, anxious mind. Her memoir grapples with what it means to accept your own weirdness and separation from a world that doesn't understand you. THE WINTER SOLDIER, by Daniel Mason. (Little, Brown, $28.) In this crackling World War I novel, a young medical student is dispatched to a desolate hamlet on the Eastern Front, where he teams with a rifle-wielding nun to treat soldiers. THE ASSASSINATION OF BRANGWAIN SPURGE, by M. T. Anderson and Eugene Yelchin. (Candlewick, $24.99; ages 10 and up.) In this wildly original book (a National Book Award contender), emissaries of the feuding elf and goblin kingdoms seek peace. The full reviews of these and other recent books are on the web: nytimes.com/books
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [August 23, 2019]
Review by Booklist Review
*Starred Review* At last, the highly anticipated conclusion to Knausgaard's six-part masterwork arrives in English, nearly a decade after its first release, in Norway. This saga's final chapter opens just as Book One is about to go to print, with Karl Ove contacting friends and family members who will no doubt discover themselves in barely fictionalized form in the novel's pages. Especially distressing is a fight put up by Karl Ove's estranged uncle Gunnar, who threatens to sue the publishers and to take his outrage to the newspapers. In this way, Knausgaard's penchant for turning autobiography into fiction becomes a dangerous ouroboros, as the novel devours his everyday life (which in turn provides fodder for this later text). But perhaps most notable about Book Six is a 400-page examination of Hitler, Nazism, and the nature of evil, which draws parallels between Mein Kampf and My Struggle: Not only were the words on its pages transformed into real life, but what happened there, in real life, stains each and every word. This uncomfortable comparison simultaneously explodes the purview of what fiction can do while zeroing in on the unique concerns of his narrator. Perhaps the most compelling of this epic's installments, and an undeniably impressive literary accomplishment.--Diego Báez Copyright 2018 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
The final book of Knausgaard's six-volume masterpiece goes maximalist and metatextual, examining the impact that the autobiographical series has had on the author's life and the lives of those around him. The book is split into three large sections, each of which is subdivided into several digressions. The first section is set just before My Struggle: Book One is slated to come out. Knausgaard suffers from anxiety after his uncle sends a litigious email arguing that the novel's assertions of his brother's alcoholism are false. Like Chantal Akerman's Jeanne Dielman, the focus on the banal-shelling shrimp, choosing an ATM pin code, taking his three children to day care-takes on strange significance and ramps up the tension as readers sense the storm brewing in the background. The second section, a ranging, 400-page interpolated passage on Hitler's Mein Kampf, explores questions of "we" and "I" in Nazi Germany. This section boasts intriguing parallels to the overall work, but, with its extended dives into subjects like the poetry of Paul Celan and the notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci, doesn't always move briskly. The third section is an extraordinary coda, as Knausgaard depicts the release of books two through four and his wife Linda's bout with bipolar disorder. Her deep depression, then her mania, are disturbingly vivid and wonderfully written. This section also closes threads about Knausgaard's father and the nature of sudden literary fame. Friends that readers haven't seen in thousands of pages return, and the effect is valedictory and moving. As Knausgaard keeps a journal of his last days writing his book while caring for his family and trying to sell a home, the rationale for his project comes into brilliant focus. This volume is a thrilling conclusion to Knausgaard's epic series. (Sept.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
In which the author faces the consequences of publishing his massive autofiction project.Though this is the longest volume of Knausgaard's (Summer, 2018, etc.) autobiographical novel, it's effectively an afterword, contemplating the impact and meaning of its five predecessors. The story opens as the novel nears publication in 2009, with Karl Ove nervously informing friends and relatives of how he's mined their lives. Most approve of (or at least accept) what he's done. But his uncle Gunnar, the brother of Karl Ove's father (whose death in alcoholic squalor inspired this work in the first place), threatens to sue over what he calls "verbal rape." Amid Gunnar's saber-rattling, Karl Ove questions his memory, stresses about parenting his three young children, and distills his anxiety into a 400-plus-page disquisition on the nature of individual and collective identity, rooted in deconstructions of a Paul Celan poem and the namesake of Knausgaard's project, Adolf Hitler's Mein Kampf. The section is digressive, occasionally drowsy reading but ultimately purposeful. Knausgaard explores the various ways language can be leveraged for honest disclosure and tragic nationalism ("the we's need of a they" was the root of the Holocaust, he writes) and whether confessional style can be a force against propagandistic writing. Answer: inconclusive. But after the books come out he has more pressing issues anyway: literary celebrity and prizes, hostile reporters, and his wife's growing depression. Candor has its consequences, he learns, many of them harmful. This is structurally the most slovenly book of the series, yet it caps a remarkable achievement. For nearly 3,500 pages, Knausgaard has confessed, complained, reminisced, spouted off, made himself look ridiculous, and considered what it means to be candid, giving his life artistic shape while fighting against artifice. The book's very existence has prompted eye-rolls; many of its pages do as well. But his all-in temperament richly rewards anybody who takes first-person writing seriously.A fittingly bulky end to a radical feat of oversharing. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
