Karl Ove Knausgaard, My Struggle, Book Four

At that time, I was sixteen that summer, there were only three things I wanted.  The first was a girlfriend.  The second was to sleep with a girl.  The third was to get drunk.
Or, if I am being totally honest, there were only two things:  sleeping with a girl and getting drunk.  I had lots of other interests, I was full of ambition in all sorts of areas:  I liked reading, listening to music, playing the guitar, watching films, playing soccer, swimming and snorkeling, traveling abroad, having money and buying myself bits of equipment, but in effect all that was about having a good time, about spending my time in the most agreeable fashion possible, and that was fine, all of it, but when it came to the crunch there were only two things I really wanted.
No, when it actually came down to it, there was only one.
I wanted to sleep with a girl.
That was the only thing I wanted.
--Karl Ove Knausgaard (translated from the Norwegian by Don Bartlett).

The fourth book in Knausgaard's saga is the most recently translated.  We have to wait a year for the next one and a year after that for the sixth and final volume.  There have been numerous attempts to analyze what makes these volumes so compelling and I think "totally honest" is one of the reasons, as well as a feeling for the poetry of the mundane and the quotidian, something Joyce, Faulkner and Nabokov all had.  Volume four is somewhat more organized and limited in time than the previous three volumes; it covers ages sixteen to nineteen, starting with Karl Ove going to northern Norway to teach school at 18 and flashing back to his last two years of high school (apparently in Norway one can be a teacher without any college). 

Karl Ove's attempts to sleep with a girl are constantly thwarted by premature ejaculation:
I rubbed against her, and then, oh no, for Christ's sake it can't be true, not now!  Not now! But it was. A jerk, a spasm and it was all over.
Of course it never occurs to him to seek medical or psychological help with this problem; he keeps it to himself and just keeps trying, not letting it interfere with his teaching, his reading and, especially his writing, from record reviews to short stories.  He is as determined to be a writer as he is to successfully have sexual intercourse.

Throughout the book Karl Ove struggles with his family, living with his mother and brother before and after going off to teach and going to his abusive father's second wedding (where he falls asleep, drunk in the bathroom, and misses the celebratory dinner).  There are marvelous descriptions of the people and the weather in the fishing village where he teaches and works hard to reach the sometimes indifferent students.  And throughout he has the observant eye of a poet:  I shook my head and passed a garden surrounded by wire fencing, inside which there were three trees groaning with dark red apples.  A blue station wagon parked in the adjacent drive glinted in the sunlight.