Dancing in the Dark by Karl Ove Knausgaard

Since the first of the series was originally published in 2009, Karl Ove Knausgaard’s My Struggle has sent a literary shockwave rippling down through every level of the cultural hierarchy, simultaneously becoming a national bestseller with unparalleled mass appeal and sweeping up award after award as critics heralded it as one of the great works of its time. A novel in six volumes charting his growth into a writer, the book stands as its own origin story and has been constantly compared to Proust’s In Search of Lost Time, in terms both of its structure and significance.

While each volume drifts dreamily between different points in Knausgaard’s life, Dancing in the Dark (My Struggle: 4) focuses mainly on the author at eighteen years old. He spends his days teaching at a tiny village school in northern Norway and his nights in a drunken haze. Thrashing about in the dark in a frenzied pursuit of meaning, art and sex. It’s at this time that he soaks up the works of writers like Hemingway, whose plain-spoken, understated style he would eventually make his own, lending his prose its unembellished beauty.

As the English version of each volume arrives, the comparisons to Proust start to sound less and less hyperbolic, and Knausgaard’s status as a giant of contemporary literature moves further beyond question. He tells his story and builds his literary legacy with each turning page.