I've been hearing about this book from various smart people online and it sounded really interesting. Fortunately, my sis gifted this to me for Christmas so I got the opportunity to see if it lives up to the hype.

I found this book refreshing and addictive. Knaussgard's crisp writing is lucid and compelling. Writing a book like this presents dangers of extreme navel-gazing and narcissism or self-deprecation, yet he manages to weave his narrative of descriptive memory through both emotion and intellectual discursion without being drawn down into those pits. He can be any and all of those at certain moments, yet manages to bob back up. He reveals his humanity in full, in moments of weakness and strength, despair and revelry, never quite one thing, always in flux, with death as this novel's neat bookends.

This is a book that I wish I could write.