The End

Reviews / Votes

For all its complexity, My Struggle achieves something pretty simple, the thing that enduring fiction has always done: it creates a world that absorbs you utterly... The End is alive. * Sunday Times * Knausgaard's rendering of this crisis - the jitteriness, the relentlessness with which he goes over events again and again, his overwhelming sense of transgression and shame - is riveting... Every changed nappy, every cigarette smoked on the balcony, every cup of coffee poured from that damn vacuum jug is another alibi; the creation of the normal life that distracts from the roiling mess within... That we cannot quite name what we've experienced is part of the brilliance. * Guardian * The End is woven of a man's love for his family and his obsession with the solitary writing life, the warp and weft of these contradictory passions sometimes meshing together perfectly... My Struggle is a cultural moment worth getting involved in. The six volumes offer something special: total immersion in the soap opera of another person's life. * The Times * A uniquely compelling and absorbing reading experience... captivating interplay between banality and beauty, the redundant and the sublime. * New Statesman * Compulsively addictive... His way of describing "reality as it is" is to expand the range of thoughts and actions, however mundane or shameful, that a human being will publicly admit to. * Daily Telegraph * This central tension, between the needs of the artist and the need of the husband and father, one that has coursed through My Struggle's thousands of pages, Knausgaard appears to bring to a moving, wholly fitting resolution... its totality, its absolute commitment to its own ideals, make it - and the whole sequence - a mesmerising, thought-provoking and genuinely important work of art. * Spectator * A daring end to a brilliant series... I will read this series again and again. * Evening Standard * It is hard not to be impressed by the fluency and erudition on display as Knausgaard charts his course through history, philosophy, literature and the visual arts... In the end, reality does not break down under Knausgaard's gaze. We are left instead with the world as it is: the click of a seatbelt, the shock of melted margarine, the centuries slipping away in Rembrandt's eyes. * Financial Times * The inner conflicts swirling around exert a gravitational pull on the reader, the challenges of empathy becoming universal through their particularity. Over and over, he asserts something fundamental to literature, art and life... these books will endure. * Independent * My Struggle just keeps coming at you, much as life does... Knausgaard succeeds in producing prose that is "alive", partly because of his eye for detail and partly because of the quality of his intellect. * Economist *