My Struggle: Book Two (A Man in Love) review

       The most recent addition to the complete review is my review of Karl Ove Knausgaard's My Struggle: Book Two, published in the UK as A Man in Love.
       An endless amount to say about this (but then there are four more volumes to put all those thoughts together about ...); among Knausgaard's own observations of interest:

The last good Norwegian novel was Fire and Flame by Kjartan Fløgstad, and that was published in 1985, twenty-five years ago. The last good one before that was The Birds by Vesaas, which appeared in 1957

       I don't think Knausgaard quite means that -- there's some nice Dag Solstad-love early on, for example (he says Solstad: "has always been the chronicler of his age"), and I think it's hard to deny Shyness and Dignity is a truly great novel -- still, I'm pleased to note that I do have both the only one of Fløgstad's novels to be translated into English (yeah, sorry, it wasn't Fyr og flamme), as well as The Birds -- I'll try and get reviews up.
       Meanwhile, I'm curious how the Knausgaard-in-English experiment will go. Volume one got some nice critical attention (including from James Wood), and Farrar, Straus & Giroux have teamed up with Archipelago in the US to bring out the whole six-volume work (FSG taking care of the paperbacks, Archipelago the hardcover editions). I wonder if the domestic detail -- especially at the beginning -- will scare off folks here. I still find this stuff great -- this was a real nice drawn-out reading pleasure which I took my time with and thoroughly enjoyed.