This is not boring in the way bad narrative is boring; it is boring in the way life is boring, and somehow, almost perversely, that is a surprising thing to see on the page. My Struggle (a slippery, self-ironising title) is composed of small incidents, some described at great length – 50 pages at a children's party, more about a teenage plan to hide some cans of beer one New Year's Eve. There are sections about more traumatic or intimate events – the harrowing job of cleaning up after his father's death, a drunken episode of self-cutting after a sexual rejection at a young writers' residential course – but Knausgaard appears to have shaped his narrative according to the "sly and artful" dictates of his memory. One has the sense that many significant things have been omitted, while seemingly insignificant things are being given undue or unlikely weight. In the first two volumes the narrative hops about between times and places, incorporating digressions about art and writing and the nature of remembering. The third is a more conventionally linear childhood memoir. What there isn't is a plot. The various events are allowed to take their own shape, without being forced into a conventional mould.
. . .
The experience of reading My Struggle is that of the world seeming to step forward from the world. It is not the world mirrored or photocopied; its relationship to reality is less direct, less innocent. The book is the record of someone trying and failing (failing better, as Beckett has it) to make an accurate representation of himself; the gap between the world and that representation, between the world and itself, is the space where all sorts of questions about truth and personal identity arise.