I was a My Struggle completist. I was taken not so much by the scope of Karl Ove Knausgaard’s six-volume project but by its relentlessness in scrutinizing the predicament of a man with a Romantic temperament born into a modernized, bureaucratized, and banalized world. As a service to the uninitiated, here, in descending order, is how I rank the six volumes: Six, part three (wife’s nervous breakdown); Two (the ecstasies of love and the agonies of parenthood); One (dad’s dead); Five (becoming a writer); Four (high school and its aftermath); Six, part one (how I wrote the previous books and what it did to my life); Three (childhood); Six, part two (the essay on Nazism).
So: What to do after you become an international literary sensation for writing an autofictional epic disclosing every detail of your life, angering your litigious relatives, and implicitly comparing your grandfather, your father, and yourself to Hitler? Knausgaard’s answer in the wake of My Struggle has been a three-stage process.
