After the Party

The fourth volume of Karl Ove Knausgaard’s six-part series, “My Struggle,” will be published by Archipelago Books on April 28th. The book covers the year that Knausgaard, at eighteen, spent working as a teacher in northern Norway, and details the concerns of a young man—how to meet girls, how to have sex, how to drink to excess as often as possible, how to be a writer. But the book, as with all the volumes of “My Struggle,” is also an exploration of Knausgaard’s father and the great mystery of his transformation, in middle age, from the controlling and controlled figure of Knausgaard’s childhood to a man increasingly out of control of his life. Memories of that time, when Knausgaard is sixteen, interrupt the narrative of his year in the north and form the heart of the fourth volume. This edited excerpt is drawn from that part of the book and traces the relationship between Karl Ove and his father after his parents’ marriage ends.
—Cressida Leyshon

Read excerpt here: The New Yorker