To that end, he plays hopscotch with time, place and mood. Volume One begins with a highfalutin riff on death, moves into a 100-page account of underage Karl and a pal sneaking beer for New Year's Eve, and builds to the burial of his father in one of the unforgettable sequences in contemporary literature. In contrast, the comparatively lighthearted Volume Four is filled with boozing and sexual embarrassment — no writer has ever admitted to quite so many premature ejaculations.
Knausgaard's confident directness has won him raves from scads of star writers who clearly see new possibilities for their own writing in his books. They especially admire the ways he's not like them. He's earnest, not cute, bouncy or ironic. He's not afraid to use clichs and doesn't polish every sentence like a new Lamborghini. Unlike most novelists, who feel they must compete with video games and Game of Thrones, he doesn't kill himself trying to make every moment exciting.
There may be something oedipal in this. In Volume Three, Knausgaard revealingly notes that one of his dad's unbearable qualities was purging any situation of everything that had no direct relevance to what they were doing. If they were going somewhere, dad drove there grimly fast; if they ate, it was only because food is necessary. Knausgaard's own vision of life is almost the opposite. I've never read a good novelist who deliberately included so many things that served no evident point. For him, such unfiltered inclusiveness does justice to the cluttered density of experience, and it gives his work a strong, hypnotic pull.
In calling his book My Struggle, Knausgaard daringly echoes Hitler's Mein Kampf, which I'm told he talks about at length in Volume 6. But he's not being flip with this title the way an American writer would be. The book actually is about his struggle — with his father, with death, with his Muse, with his feelings of inadequacy, with the dreariness of a daily life that offers teasing glimpses of transcendence. If this sounds a bit grandiose, it is.
Yet Knausgaard is not a "difficult" writer like Proust, Joyce or David Foster Wallace. He's pointedly un-literary. Anyone can understand what he's writing. And, paradoxically enough, his honest, obsessive self-absorption makes his life feel universal. As I was reading, every single subject that came up in my daily living — parents, politics, education, Italian food, trees, even David Byrne — reminded me of something in Knausgaard. His work makes you realize that each and every one of our lives contains rich enough material for a long, daunting book called My Struggle.