Description

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Out of the World imagines the life, history, and strange future of a young teacher who becomes infatuated with one of his students. Karl Ove Knausgaard's formally innovative and philosophically-driven debut novel won the Norwegian Critics Prize for Literature on its release in 1998.

The first novel from world-renowned writer Karl Ove Knausgaard, Out of the World unfolds the life of a young Norwegian teacher with formal daring and exacting attention to the texture of existence. Henrik, a 26-year-old high school teacher in a remote village in northern Norway, becomes infatuated with one of his students, and eventually enters into a sexual relationship with her. He flees to Kristiansand, the city of his childhood, and the narrative pivots to the story of his parents' courtship and Henrik's own birth. Back in Kristiansand, Henrik relives painful memories of his school days, and in an ethereal dream, enters a futuristic parallel world, living out his life on a strange rig in the middle of the ocean. A uniquely inventive and masterfully written novel, Out of the World mines the deepest intricacy of human emotion.

About the Author

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Karl Ove Knausgaard was born in Norway in 1968. His debut novel Out of This World won the Norwegian Critics Prize in 2004 and his novel A Time for Everything was a finalist for the Nordic Council Prize. For My Struggle: Book One, Knausgaard received the Brage Award in 2009, the 2010 Book of the Year Prize in Morgenbladet, and the P2 Listeners' Prize. My Struggle: Book One was a New Yorker Book of the Year and Book Two was listed among the Wall Street Journal's 2013 Books of the Year. My Struggle is a New York Times Best Seller and has been translated into more than fifteen languages. Knausgaard writes regularly for The New York Times Magazine. About the translator: Martin Aitken is the translator of numerous novels from Danish and Norwegian, including works by Karl Ove Knausgaard, Hanne Ørstavik, Peter Høeg, Kim Leine, and Josefine Klougart. His translations of short stories and poetry have appeared in many literary journals and magazines. In 2012, he was awarded the American-Scandinavian Foundation's Nadia Christensen Translation Prize. His translation of Hanne Ørstavik's Love won the 2019 PEN Translation Award and was a National Book Award Finalist for 2018.