(After the outcry occasioned by Book 2, in which he wrote with – it’s said – brutal frankness of his marriages and the emotional strain of pushing a pram around Stockholm, he decided to concentrate on his early years.) The idea was ‘to empty everything, to have nothing left’: ‘I gave up all ambition, I didn’t try to be clever … I just tried to write as fast as I could.’ Yet Knausgaard has spoken of all his books – his fiction included – as a single series, and it’s clear that they all deal with personal material. Knausgaard, who’d moved to Sweden in 2002, remarrying and starting a family, more or less sat out the Norwegian national debate about the ethics of his project. Hyperbolic reviews had also come in from Denmark, Sweden, Germany and Italy.
By the time Book 6 was published, in 2011, Knausgaard’s first wife had made a radio documentary about him and his uncle had threatened legal action against his publishers. Readers testified to their addictiveness – sales reached 200,000 in a population of under five million – and reporters laid siege to people he’d written about. Critics spoke of ‘an existential literary experiment without parallel in Norwegian literature’ and of the books’ ‘sensationally high literary quality’. ‘I was discussed,’ he told the Telegraph recently, ‘but as you discuss literature – in a kind of sober way.’ That changed in the autumn of 2009, when the first three books of My Struggle ( Min kamp) – a six-part novelised autobiography narrated by the writer in his own person, which he’d embarked on, he said, as a ‘literary suicide’ – caused an epidemic of ‘Knausgård-manien’. Karl Ove Knausgaard’s first two novels, Out of the World ( Ute av verden, 1998) and A Time to Every Purpose under Heaven ( En tid for alt, 2004), attracted admiring reviews and won prizes.
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