Out of the World — Karl Ove Knausgaard

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.