But the prose has little of Proust’s delicate refinement. The most obvious antecedent is Proust, whom Knausgaard has said he “virtually imbibed” when A la recherche du temps perdu was finally translated into Norwegian in the 1980s. Whether he’s writing about his adult alienation at a toddler’s birthday party or the memory of trying to get hold of alcohol as a teenager on New Year’s Eve, Knausgaard is prepared to go into extraordinary sensuous detail that can last 50 pages or more. You don’t simply ‘identify’ with the character, effectively you ‘become’ them.” As Smith put it: “You live his life with him.

He seems to punch a hole in the wall between the writer and reader, breaking through to a form of micro-realism and emotional authenticity that makes other novels seem contrived, “made up”, irrelevant. The answer lies not in Knausgaard’s depth of revelation so much as the intensity of focus he brings to the subject of his life. Knausgaard in his writing studio: ‘I get so tired of my own voice.’ Photograph: Katherine Anne Rose/Observer So what is it that has led fellow authors like Zadie Smith and Jonathan Lethem to rave about Knausgaard and hail him as literary pioneer? Why did the novelist Jeffrey Eugenides speak of the Norwegian breaking “the sound barrier of the autobiographical novel”? Knausgaard’s portrait of his cold, authoritarian father, who drank himself to a squalidly premature death, may have scandalised the reading public of Norway, but it’s a tale of mild familial dysfunction by comparison with, say, Edward St Aubyn’s autobiographical Patrick Melrose series. Bookshops are full of unflinching memoirs, and even the literary novel is no stranger to the genre. And given the size of the undertaking, the widespread critical acclaim and cultural buzz the series has generated, it has strong claim to be the great literary event of the 21st century – so far.Īlthough the series is ostensibly fiction, it is also an unflinching memoir, from early childhood right up to the controversial reception of the book itself. In English, the fourth volume, Dancing in the Dark, is about to be published. It has subsequently been translated into 22 languages. In Knausgaard’s native Norway, where the book was published between 20, it was an unprecedented phenomenon, selling half a million copies in a nation of 5 million people. Yet that is precisely what he did in writing a six-volume, 3,600-page novel-cum-autobiography, provocatively titled My Struggle – or in Norwegian Min Kamp.

The morning star karl ove knausgaard