A Death in the Family

Karl Ove Knausgaard

The combination of heightened self-understanding with intense emotion over the complex relationship with his father, plus a lyrical description of everyday events, makes for extraordinary food for reflection. All very different from what you might expect from an autobiographical novel.

Extract

Only a few years ago it had been different. Until I moved to Stockholm I had felt there was a continuity to my life, as if stretched unbroken from childhood up to the present, held together by new connections, in a complex and ingenious pattern whereby every phenomenon I saw was capable of evoking a memory which unleashed small landslides of feeling in me, some with a known source, others without.

Parallels