The making of a novelist

Karl Ove Knausgaard was eight months old when his family moved to the island of Tromøya; he left it aged 13, because of his father’s higher-grade teaching appointment on the mainland. As they drove over the bridge linking the island with the southern Norwegian port of Arendal, ‘it struck me with a huge sense of relief that I would never be returning, that… the houses and the places that disappeared behind me were also disappearing out of my life, for good.’

Only in a literal sense did they disappear. And the six-volume autobiographical novel sequence, My Struggle, on which Knausgaard embarked after the success of his first two books, demanded his coming to terms with his formative early milieu. In this third book of the sequence, memory — to a greater degree than previously — had to be his principal guide, and the author admits at the outset that ‘memory is not a reliable quantity in life … it doesn’t prioritise the truth’; it is ‘pragmatic, sly and artful’. Yet Knausgaard employs his own literary artfulness to release a presentation of his young evolving self — in roughly chronological order, but expanding or foreshortening according to thematic demands — with an immediacy as astonishing as that of its two predecessors.

Not that we can — or should — forget these. The first book, A Death in the Family (published in English in 2012), showed how Knausgaard’s father, here an enterprising young professional and household martinet, died a lonely alcoholic in appallingly squalid conditions. The second, A Man in Love (2013), gave us the author as the affectionate, interested, responsible father of three children, but laid bare his dilemmas over work versus family life. Could these be rooted in his past? And both the books made clear the importance to Knausgaard of his older brother, Yngve, not least through the full-rounded richness of his portrait of him.