In other words, Knausgaard performed a sly transference, a variety of literary hypnosis. You wanted to live in Knausgaard’s brightly illuminated version of a world that you almost recognized as your own. For shockingly long stretches of time, you felt as though your own excellent taste and sensitivity were powering the novels. Reading the novels had the same feel of aesthetic lift and drift as touring a staged room. It was the unity between the experiential and the essayistic that made “ My Struggle” so captivating. In the midst of these scenes, which were recounted almost in real time, Knausgaard offered digressive ruminations on, among other things, the nature of death and the work of various writers and artists. We poured innumerable cups of coffee and tea.

To read Knausgaard was to find even the most mundane action pulsing with, if not meaning, then at least beauty, which can function as its own kind of meaning.Īlongside the great topographical features of Knausgaard’s life-his learning that his parents were fallible, being rejected by his brother and by lovers and friends, discovering literature and music-we experienced the negligibly small. In “My Struggle,” his six-volume autobiographical novel, he achieved an acute, piercing psychological closeness that at times felt suffocating or maddening and at other times utterly sublime. Knausgaard, in particular, strived for a micro-level re-creation of the events that shaped him.

So-called autofiction is the social novel turned inside out in the hands of an autofictionist, one’s own life is a little world.

The contemporary iteration of Sebald’s impulse is a little different insofar as it is vested in a dense, gravitational solipsism.

Sebald was interested in the subjective nature of history and in the tension between the macroscale at which world historical events are understood in retrospect and the individual scale at which they are lived. Sebald, whose work derived its force from the uneasy and, at times, fleeting truce between fact and fiction. For much of the past decade, the Norwegian author Karl Ove Knausgaard has been part of a cohort of writers trailing in the long backdraft of W.

Karl ove knausgaard