‘There is no chance that anyone could become a Nazi by reading that book,’ says the Norwegian author who discusses his autobiographical novels, his love of schnitzel and Liverpool FC
For anyone who has read all or part of the six volumes of Karl Ove Knausgaard’s autobiographical novel My Struggle, I guess it would be a profoundly curious thing to meet him in person. The books – he likes to call them “the project”, as if they were a sort of demonic exercise – set a new standard of literary self-disclosure. Written over two and a bit years, around the time the author turned 40, their 3,600 published pages seem to offer a direct line into the Norwegian’s troubled and attentive mind as it tries to understand itself through the reconstructed detail of everyday life.
My Struggle proceeds as if the clues to Knausgaard’s fractured formative years, the breakdown of his first marriage, his dislocating move from his native Norway to Sweden and a new wife, Linda, and the brief joys and long frustrations of looking after three small children, might make some more sense in their reliving. He wrote, he says, always out of a desire to make something better of his life, in the hope of “a cool hand on a warm forehead”.
When I baptised my children, it was completely unrelated to God
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