My Struggle: Book 1 (A Death in the Family) by Karl Ove Knausgaard (Translated by Don Bartlett)

"Intense and utterly honest . . . There is something ceaselessly compelling about Knausgaard's book: even when I was bored, I was interested." —James Wood, The New Yorker "Until the recent publication of My Struggle, a 3,600-page work in six volumes, the career of the Norwegian writer Karl Ove Knausgaard had followed a fairly conventional trajectory: A young man besotted by the beauty of words, nature, music and painting writes a coming-of-age novel that earns him prizes and praise and then tries something more ambitious, which becomes an international best seller and wins more prizes."But with his latest project, My Struggle, whose title deliberately evokes Hitler's infamous autobiography and political screed, everything has changed. Though My Struggle, a minutely detailed examination of Mr. Knausgaard's family life, has done extremely well in Europe—in Norway, about half a million copies have been sold, the equivalent of one for every 10 people—it has also put Mr. Knausgaard (pronoun