Whatever your knowledge of Karl Ove Knausgaard’s internationally celebrated My Struggle sequence, its third volume is likely to surprise. For those already immersed in Karl Ove’s meticulously rendered life story, Boyhood Island is a departure in structure and purpose. For those yet to read him, it may be a question of wondering what all the fuss is about. It is testament to the power and immediacy of Knausgaard’s writing, however, that both camps are ultimately rewarded with a subtle, burning sense of the lost years of childhood.
The previous novels – A Death in the Family, A Man in Love– are direct in approach, but complex in their structure: Knausgaard looking back on his life, framing his experiences with older eyes, while never forgetting that his past actions belong to another life. This approach is abandoned in Boyhood Island in favour of a straight narrative, told almost entirely chronologically, through the eyes of a growing child.
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