“Why One Norwegian Author’s 6-Volume, 3,600-Page Book Is on the Verge of Breaking Out in America” by Boris Kachka
On New Year’s Eve, 1984, on a snowbound street in southern Norway, a teenager named Karl Ove Knausgaard plotted to smuggle beer into a party, chatted with his mother (“What weather!” “You can say that again”), shoveled the driveway, and chided himself for failing to nail the guitar chords in David Bowie’s “Life on Mars”: “The thought of this could sometimes weigh me down because I wanted so much to be someone. I wanted so much to be special.”
As written by Knausgaard almost 30 years later, that single evening takes up eighty pages, a pileup of mundane detail and digressive pondering that should by rights be insufferable, especially at a time when five pages constitute a “longread.” But among the many remarkable things about My Struggle, the 45-year-old Knausgaard’s six-volume, 3,600-page book-series-cum-alternate universe, is that it’s mesmerizing — to critics, to writers, and to hundreds of thousands of readers. Today marks the American publication of the third volume, Boyhood, and the beginning of the kind of tour most authors would kill relatives to have (Knausgaard, in his truly tell-all books, only gave away their secrets). He will be treated less like a boutique literary find than a visiting dignitary on his bicoastal trip, a literature-in-translation arena tour unprecedented this side of a Nobel prize, never mind for a writer unknown outside Norway five years ago. On various stages in L.A. and New York, he’ll be interviewed by a roll call of our youngish literary firmament — Mona Simpson, Donald Antrim, Nicole Krauss, Zadie Smith, Jeffrey Eugenides — none of whom he’s met. “There is this kind of aura around it that is very strange,” Knausgaard says by phone from rural Sweden, where he now lives. “It’s almost impossible to identify with.”