What the critics thought of Some Rain Must Fall by Karl Ove Knausgaard, The Life Project by Helen Pearson and Anatomy of a Soldier by Harry Parker
“The mystery remains: how do we stomach reading Knausgaard?” These “extensive descriptions of ordinary Norwegian life” have become, as Laurence Scott put it in the Financial Times, “a sort of cultural obligation”, with every spring bringing a fresh slab of fictionalised autobiography in which Karl Ove lays himself bare in agonising slow-motion detail. The penultimate book in the six-novel cycle attracted some typically rave reviews: the FT concluded that Some Rain Must Fall, which charts his struggle to become a writer, again “dramatises, better than any novel I have read, the experience of living in time. It is a pen-and-paper virtual reality; after reading it you feel that another past has been downloaded into your mind.” “I raced through the 662 pages like bingeing on the most moreish TV box set,” enthused James Kidd in the Independent, comparing Knausgaard’s opus to both Wordsworth and Rowling. But for Melissa Katsoulis in the Times, “after thousands of pages of his life story, even the most ardent fan risks burnout … This latest instalment focuses on seven miserable years in Bergen as a student, drifter and failed writer, and the unrelenting mood of boredom is as mind-numbing as the constant rain that falls on that dark coastal town.”
Related: Karl Ove Knausgaard: the shame of writing about myself
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