His beard is trimmed and his eyes are steady. Knausgaard, who became almost as famous for his straggly and somewhat unhinged intensity in interviews when his books first made headlines, seems a sleeker, more measured presence now. It is a favourite London haunt of the author: “I like the schnitzel.” He has chosen to meet for lunch at Fischer’s, Chris Corbin and Jeremy King’s fabulous Viennese cafe on London’s Marylebone High Street, designed in 1920s style, created four years ago. It used to be a one week on, one week off arrangement, but he has spent most of this summer at his home in Blackheath, south London. These days, Knausgaard divides his time between London and Sweden.

What else might there be to know? When I baptised my children, it was completely unrelated to God A default question to any man in middle age, for me, is often: “What kind of man was your father?” In Knausgaard’s case, I have read several hundred unforgettable pages devoted to the emotional actuality of clearing up his dead dad’s rancid home after the hated man, who made his son both a reluctant misery and a writer, drank himself to death. 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”.Īs an interviewer, the curiosity of first meeting Knausgaard is doubly unnerving.

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. 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. 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.

F or 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.

Karl ove knausgaard my struggle book 1