Running for Your Life: Karl Ove Knausgaard’s “My Struggle” Vol. II (and New Shoes!)

Volume I ends with the burying of the father, begins with a Proustian meditation on death.

Enter Volume II. Our hero doesn’t care what he eats as long as he has fuel for writing … then, with no explanation, he, a bitter-ish house husband, is planning and buying food at gourmet shops for elaborate meals. There are long, amazingly authentic sounding, all-inclusive literary, intellectual and philosophical eruditions between him and Geir, his close friend. Deeply personal, if not intensely intimate, details about the dark psychology of his one true love, his wife Linda. Being a parent. A bad one. Having one child and what she is about, how very early she is free and apart from him in her judgments and needs and preferences. There is a second child. A third. No wonder birth order matters. It has to. It’s “Your Struggle.”

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New shoes! New shoes! New shoes! I have been out for the second time in them. The first outdoors (Jan. 29) in the Asics Gel-Kinsei 5, a neutral bomb of a shoe!

You forget the difference new shoes make. Must mean I’m back in marathon-training mode. (Or could have as much to do with the Blizzard of ’15: I neglected to pack my running clothes and my old Brooks Bangers when I was tapped for an overnight emergency stay due to the surprise closing of the subways, and I bought them at an athletic-wear store not far from my Times Square area office building. Note to crowd haters: shop in the hours before a New York blizzard hits. The combined forces of a paranoid media and power-mad despot politicians keep people indoors. The usually jammed store was blissfully empty.)

Do yourself a favor and check out these beauties. If nothing else, just a walk around the shoe store floor. Asics Gel-Kinsei 5. This longtime Brooks believer is suddenly feeling like a convert!

Next: Running for Your Life: The Big Outdoors