Karl Ove Knausgaard

Once, during a teaching exchange in Germany, I found myself learning as much from my students as I was trying to teaching them. This is not unusual. Delivering my thoughts to others, and then having them modified during discussions, helps me to understand what I want to say. By the end of the class, I begin to see what I probably should have known from the start.

In Boyhood Island, the third volume in Karl Ove Knausgaard’s internationally acclaimed My Struggle cycle, we are taken back to where the series began: an island in southern Norway, seven-year-old Karl Ove and his older brother Yngve live under the tyranny of a cruel and taciturn father in the mid-1970s. Unlike the first volume, A Death in the Family (2012), which stays with young Karl Ove for only a few pages before casting off in many different directions, Boyhood Island follows him from ages seven to thirteen in a rarely broken, linear fashion. It ends neatly on the last day of class for the year, as Karl Ove’s family prepares to leave Tromoya, and he farewells a group of friends.