Some Rain Must Fall
My Struggle: Book 5
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The fifth installment in the epic six-volume My Struggle cycle is here, highly anticipated by Karl Ove Knausgaard's dedicated fan club--and the first in the cycle to be published separately in Canada.
The young Karl Ove moves to Bergen to attend the Writing Academy. It turns out to be a huge disappointment: he wants so much, knows so little, and achieves nothing. His contemporaries have their manuscripts accepted and make their debuts while he begins to feel the best he can do is to write about literature. With no apparent reason to feel hopeful, he continues his exploration of and love for books and reading. Gradually his writing changes; his relationship with the world around him changes too. This becomes a novel about new, strong friendships and a serious relationship that transforms him until the novel reaches the existential pivotal point: his father dies, Karl Ove makes his debut as a writer and everything disintegrates. He flees to Sweden, to avoid family and friends.
About this Author
KARL OVE KNAUSGAARD's first novel, Out of the World, was the first ever debut novel to win The Norwegian Critics' Prize and his second, A Time for Everything, was widely acclaimed. A Death in the Family, the first of the My Struggle cycle of novels, was awarded the prestigious Brage Award. The My Struggle cycle has been heralded as a masterpiece wherever it appears.
Format: Trade paperback
Series: MY STRUGGLE
Pages: 672
Publisher: Knopf Canada
Published: 2017-03-14
Reviews
INTERNATIONAL BESTSELLER
"He broke the sound barrier of the autobiographical novel." --Jeffrey Eugenides
"[T]he first monumental literary production of the twenty-first century." --Dwight Garner, The New York Times Book Review
"Some Rain Must Fall is a meticulously detailed account of the formative years in Knausgaard's development as a writer and a young man. . . . His appeal begins with his insatiable appetites and his love for life. But it goes deeper than that. It's also his elevation of the utterly mundane as worthy of literary treatment. . . . In Knausgaard's hands, the effect of elevating the mundane is to elevate a life. It's one of his great gifts as a writer." --Ottawa Life Magazine
"[B]eguiling . . . [a] beautiful instalment." --Financial Times
"Replicates the vivid, overwhelming sense of being alive on the page. . . . We may all be hooked on Karl Ove's past, his triumphs and disasters, glory and silliness, but his struggle is our struggle, too--for meaning, love, and friendship in a world beautiful and baffling." --The National
"Amusing episodes coexist alongside weighty, meditative, and essayistic passages on art and literature. . . . Those who have come this far in the series will not be disappointed by book five; it is a pleasure to witness the gradual emergence of a dedicated artist over the course of a decade." --Publishers Weekly (starred review)
"Knausgaard is uniquely gifted at imagining his own life--and obsessively devoted to the process. . . . Damned if Knausgaard doesn't draw us in. . . . Karl Ove's everyday trials and occasional triumphs shed light on our own. . . . My Struggle evokes the contemporary search for meaning: this is literature in the age of the Facebook timeline and the Fitbit." --Mike Doherty, Maclean's
"Because he is so minutely observant, and because he has clearly spent so much time marveling over his own childhood, Knausgaard's attention to detail results in a high level of insight when it comes to his own children. . . . [T]here's something at once so particular and so universal in his writings on parenthood that speaks to me and to many people." --Laura June, New York Magazine
"[Some Rain Must Fall] feels more insular than the others, but that's where Knausgaard has always been at his best. The inner life inspires him. It's what gives the sentences their urgency. He's the rare writer who has made self-absorption work for him." --The Washington Post
"Like the rest of My Struggle, this fifth volume, with its loving descriptions of everyday life, will be sheer magic to [Knausgaard] aficionados. . . . Knausgaard is the most humane writer in the world. . . . Very funny. . . . Another sign of the genius of [Knausgaard's] translator, Don Bartlett." --Daniel Swift, The Spectator
"I raced through the 662 pages like bingeing on the most moreish TV box set." --James Kidd, The Independent
"[T]he unique and complex pleasures of Knausgaard's writing alone make this volume, and the entirety of My Struggle, essential. . . . Though [Knausgaard's] manoeuvres seem incomprehensible in point form, they read beautifully, adding to the relentless forthrightness and seeming veracity that forms not only the backbone, but the entire being of the book. As well, the flatness of each major, revelatory statement, arriving as it does--unadorned and adrift in a sea of minutiae--lands with unprecedented, incalculable impact. . . . The journey through My Struggle as a whole is consistently, confusingly rewarding, but it is here, in its penultimate volume, that the project is catapulted from a compulsively, serially and almost perversely pleasurable set of individual books to being an unassailable, comprehensive masterpiece--both demonstrative and instructive in recognizing the intricacies of self and the value of expression." --Doug McLean, Winnipeg Free Press
"How does Knausgaard manage to make [Some Rain Must Fall] so gripping? That's the question that seems to greet each of his long, mesmerizing books. . . . Over the past couple of years, I've read something like 2,500 pages of Knausgaard, and I can attest that he has an astonishing knack for insinuating you into the minutiae of his daily affairs. . . . [Some Rain Must Fall is] a bracing, strange and singular reading experience. . . . [Some Rain Must Fall] is a book that does a remarkably good job of depicting failure, and of capturing the single-mindedness required to make real artistic progress. . . . [E]ven [Knausgaard's] fiercest critics might concede that [Some Rain Must Fall] contains fascinating insights about inspiration and hard work." --San Francisco Chronicle
"All of the books [in My Struggle]--there will be six total--are fascinating crawls through specific periods in Karl Ove's life. . . . As with the other four books, [in Some Rain Must Fall] Knausgaard meticulously walks us through this time, which he recounts almost minute-by-minute. This should be tedious. Miraculously, it's not. [Some Rain Must Fall] is highly curated. . . . [My Struggle] feel[s] like an antidote to the sterile, branded curation we sift through every day. It offers this rich texture as a contrast to the perfection of those suntanned smiles." --Trine Tsouderos, Chicago Tribune
"[G]ut-wrenching. . . . What is extraordinary about My Struggle is that Knausgaard's willingness to expose his shame, without ever flinching, is balanced everywhere by his openness to beauty, his belief in transformation, his heartfelt yearning. . . . Everything Knausgaard writes is wedded to feeling, and all is expressed so openly, so unguardedly, that we are consistently disarmed. . . . . Knausgaard is an intensely visual writer. Like Marcel Proust, the author to whom he is so often compared, he loves painting and knows his art history. [Some Rain Must Fall] is filled with marvelous descriptions of the appearance of things. . . . [W]hat stands out in [My Struggle] above everything--above the shame and the rainy days in Bergen--is Knausgaard's feeling for beauty." --Sebastian Smee, The Boston Globe
"[Some Rain Must Fall is] as strong as the earlier books and may, in fact, surpass them in terms of its significance to both the structure of the series and to the questions that surround it. . . . Knausgaard hasn't failed us yet." --Robert Wiersema, National Post
"[G]ripping. . . . [T]his extraordinary work of which he has been dreaming, is the book we hold in our hands." --Kate Kellaway, The Guardian
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