In 2012, when the first volume of My Struggle appeared in English, translated by Don Bartlett, Knausgaard’s work went global. They compare him to Marcel Proust for his magisterial evocation of the past (Knausgaard devoured Remembrance of Things Past in the mid-’90s, as soon as it was available in Norwegian, “a brilliant translation,” he says) and to the Chilean novelist Roberto Bolaño for his contemporary stream-of-consciousness style. The books have beguiled and confounded nearly every critic, editor and novelist who has read them. “A way of being has nothing to do with what happens to you it’s completely irrelevant.”
“The way I am hasn’t changed, the way I feel hasn’t changed, the success doesn’t help at all in regard to that,” he says. There was no need for him to be nervous anymore, but he couldn’t override the instinct. Overcome with nerves, he told the moderator, Lorin Stein, the editor of the literary quarterly The Paris Review, “If anyone leaves while we’re talking I won’t be able to go on.”) This summer, I spent three days with him in Scandinavia, amid the church-dotted fields and hills of the village of Glemmingebro, in southern Sweden, where he lives with his wife, the poet and novelistĪnd their four young children in Ystad, 20 minutes away and in Oslo, where I accompanied him for a reading from his newest book, Om høsten (In Fall). At Oslo’s Kulturhuset cafe, he swayed from side to side, barely containing his anxiety while he read from his new book in a deep Norwegian singsong, as the crowd reacted to his text with exuberant appreciation. (This was a big change from one of his prior trips to New York, in 2012, when a small group of early Knausgaard adopters turned up at the tiny 192 Books in Chelsea to hear him. He was so thronged by literati that it was hard to get to him. The first time I met Knausgaard was in the spring of 2014, after a standing-room-only talk in a cavernous hall of the New York Public Library following the publication of the third volume of his 3,600-page autobiographical novel, My Struggle. The groundbreaking writer Karl Ove Knausgaard reveals insights into his process and his past, and still marvels at the success of his six-volume opus, "My Struggle." A film by MediaStorm
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