My Struggle Vol. 1: A Death in the Family

In the first volume of his epic memoir cycle, My Struggle, Norwegian author Karl Ove Knausgaard recounts the emotional vicissitudes of his adolescence and young adulthood with a sense of guilelessness and detail unprecedented in literature. The death of Knausgaard's father, a taciturn, emotionally remote man who walked out on the family when Knausgaard was a teen, and would ultimately succumb to alcoholism, isolated and embittered, fuels this profound parsing by a brilliant mind of the ties that bind us in and of this world, and how we not only endure, but lead a 'good' life, in the face of certain mortality.