ONE SUNNY AFTERNOON this August, in the medieval Swedish resort town of Ystad, the Norwegian author Karl Ove Knausgaard appeared outside my hotel to pick me up, a day ahead of schedule, on half an hour’s notice. Even if the street had been crowded, Knausgaard would have been instantly recognizable, standing 6-foot-4, with a wolf’s mane of silver hair, ice-blue eyes and craggy woodcut features, but Ystad is a sleepy town, and the street was empty. He stood beside a white VW van, calmly smoking a Chesterfield, dressed in a dark jacket and artfully slashed jeans. Walking up, I felt as though I were stepping into the album cover of The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan. It was jarring to think that this unassuming guy, driving a scuffed van cluttered with toys, old CDs and a baby seat, is quite probably in line to receive a Nobel Prize in literature for his epic saga of what he describes as “the tormented inner life of one male.”

The groundbreaking writer Karl Ove Knausgaard reveals insights into his process and his past, and still marvels at the success of his six-volume opus, "My Struggle." A film by MediaStorm The first time I met Knausgaard was in the spring of 2014, after a standing-room-only talk in a cavernous hall of the New York Public Library following the publication of the third volume of his 3,600-page autobiographical novel, My Struggle. He was so thronged by literati that it was hard to get to him. (This was a big change from one of his prior trips to New York, in 2012, when a small group of early Knausgaard adopters turned up at the tiny 192 Books in Chelsea to hear him. Overcome with nerves, he told the moderator, Lorin Stein, the editor of the literary quarterly The Paris Review, “If anyone leaves while we’re talking I won’t be able to go on.”) This summer, I spent three days with him in Scandinavia, amid the church-dotted fields and hills of the village of Glemmingebro, in southern Sweden, where he lives with his wife, the poet and novelist Linda Boström , and their four young children; in Ystad, 20 minutes away; and in Oslo, where I accompanied him for a reading from his newest book, Om høsten (In Fall). At Oslo’s Kulturhuset cafe, he swayed from side to side, barely containing his anxiety while he read from his new book in a deep Norwegian singsong, as the crowd reacted to his text with exuberant appreciation. There was no need for him to be nervous anymore, but he couldn’t override the instinct. “The way I am hasn’t changed, the way I feel hasn’t changed, the success doesn’t help at all in regard to that,” he says. “A way of being has nothing to do with what happens to you; it’s completely irrelevant.” BEAT POET | Knausgaard with his drum set in his writing studio in Glemmingebro, Sweden. Last year, he reunited with his college band, Lemen (‘Lemming’), which Knausgaard writes about in the fifth volume of his six-volume opus, set to appear in the U.S. this spring. Since the emergence of the six volumes of My Struggle, which began in 2009 and continues as the books are translated into dozens of languages, Karl Ove Knausgaard, 46, has become one of the 21st century’s greatest literary sensations. Despite the ominous title—My Struggle (Min Kamp in Norwegian) is also the name of Hitler’s memoir-manifesto, Mein Kampf—this is no warlike screed. It is the intensely personal, discursive and searingly honest story of a Norwegian man’s coming of age, of his continuing ordeals as an adult, of his philosophical preoccupations and of his determination to write the authentic story of his life, as he perceived it, whatever the cost: to “just say it as it is.” WSJ. Magazine 2015 Innovators Angelina Jolie Pitt

Richard Serra

Karl Ove Knausgaard

Miuccia Prada

Thomas Heatherwick

Stewart Butterfield

Mark Parker The books have beguiled and confounded nearly every critic, editor and novelist who has read them. They compare him to Marcel Proust for his magisterial evocation of the past (Knausgaard devoured Remembrance of Things Past in the mid-’90s, as soon as it was available in Norwegian, “a brilliant translation,” he says) and to the Chilean novelist Roberto Bolaño for his contemporary stream-of-consciousness style. In 2012, when the first volume of My Struggle appeared in English, translated by Don Bartlett, Knausgaard’s work went global. The critic James Wood, who dubs the reaction “the Knausgaard effect,” compares him to the Beats, like Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac, and to the Russian greats: Fyodor Dostoevsky for his “contradictoriness” and Leo Tolstoy for his “utterly prosaic centrality.” The author Zadie Smith , upon reading the first 200 pages, tweeted that she craved the next volume “like crack”; the novelist Jonathan Lethem said, “I’m always putting things off to gulp down another episode.” Book Reviews: My Struggle Book 2

Book 3

Book 4 Alternating between wide-lens and microscopic focus, jumping back and forth between past and present, My Struggle relays Knausgaard’s everyday routines, terrors, joys, miseries and hopes—from his adult setbacks and insecurities to the agonies he suffered as a boy in small-town Norway in the ’70s and ’80s, when his bullying father mocked his speech impediment and his oblivious mother bought him a flower-sprigged ladies swim cap to wear to the pool, to the adrenaline rush he felt when he bought illicit beer with friends, listened to new songs by the Clash and Echo and the Bunnymen, played in rock bands with his older brother, Yngve, and finally figured out how to have sex. In Book 1, the focus is the death of his father, in 1998, from alcoholism; in Book 2, it is his coup de foudre with Boström and the births of their first three children; in Book 3, his childhood in Tromøya, an island in southern Norway, near the town of Arendal, where his father taught school and his mother worked as a nurse; in Book 4, the gap year he spent as a schoolteacher in a fishing village by the Arctic Circle; in Book 5, his decade in Bergen, Norway, as a university student, self-doubting writer, bad boyfriend and unsuccessful first husband; and in the sixth and final volume, a meditation on Hitler, the Norwegian mass-murderer Anders Behring Breivik and the dark roots of human nature. Four have appeared in English so far; the fifth comes out in the U.S. next spring. In the sixth volume, as yet untranslated, Knausgaard also describes the breakdown Boström suffered after My Struggle was published. Writing that section made him cry, he says; but she was “OK” with him revealing their private life in the books, he says. “She says it’s not flattering, but it’s the way it is,” he says. “So I think she accepts it.” Readers have been astounded by the thoroughness of Knausgaard’s recollections and the granular detail of his descriptions and dialogue. “The point of the book was not my life but what I made out of it in literature,” he says. Explaining his process, he adds, “The recall comes in the writing. I started out with nothing. What went into the book was a few pictures and a few memories; everything was evoked in the process. It was like getting access to that time through writing about it. I think everybody could do it.” Most would not dare, not only because of the project’s ambition, but because of the intimacies Knausgaard forced himself to violate in pursuit of his goal of scrupulous honesty. Other writers can’t help being aware of his confessional innovation, says Geir Berdahl, the recently retired CEO of Forlaget Oktober, Knausgaard’s Norwegian publisher. “Many now are writing about themselves, or personal things,” he says. “But it’s not so easy to write like Karl Ove.”

ASHES TO ASHES | ‘I thought, This is so private it’s almost unreadable—but it worked the other way around,’ says Knausgaard, who did not expect ‘My Struggle’ to be a commercial success. Above: An ashtray overflowing with Knausgaard’s preferred Chesterfield cigarettes in his writing studio.

When the first volumes of My Struggle emerged in Norway in 2009, they created a national uproar. Nobody was more stunned than Knausgaard that when others beheld his self-portrait they saw their own faces. “It was very shocking when I realized how people read it,” he says. “I thought, This is so private it’s almost unreadable—but it worked the other way around.” He was so convinced that the book would hold no interest for non-Scandinavians that he told a British publisher who expressed interest not to buy it. He was ashamed of the writing. “It’s bad,” he still says. “I wrote it rather blindly, I didn’t think it was exceptional. I thought this would be a minor literary book, I thought it would be a step down from my other books, I thought maybe it was boring and uninteresting and really about nothing.” He realized his mistake only when he met Scandinavian journalists for the first time, “and some of them were almost white in the face and found it very hard to discuss the book. I thought then: Something is going to happen.” It did; a new British publisher soon came calling and publishers from dozens of other countries. Now he says, “I think people almost vomit when they hear my name because I’m so often in the news. It’s true. Oh, God. I try to keep a low profile in Norway, but it’s hard. It’s terrible.” AT KNAUSGAARD’S HOME in Glemmingebro, three long, low houses enclose the sides of a grassy yard dotted with trees, ornamental bushes, pink hollyhocks and a rustic old pump. On the fourth side is a trampoline behind an apple tree, closing the rectangle. The back of the main house looks across the lawn to the cottage that holds Knausgaard’s writing studio. It resembles an illustration in an old Mother Goose book—cream walls with burgundy-trimmed casement windows and half-pipe tiles on the roof. Boström came to the door of the main house as we crossed the lawn. Petite and daintily built, she held their youngest child, Anne, 18 months old, on her hip (they also have Vanja, 11, Heidi, 10, and John, 8). Anne stretched out her arms for her father, and he reached for her. Entering his studio, I saw books everywhere—lined up in shelves, stacked on the floor, propped in piles leaning against other books—hardbacks and paperbacks, galleys and manuscripts, rising in towers from the coffee table. Some came from Pelikanen, the company he formed in 2010, which publishes mostly fiction in translation and contemporary Norwegian literature. The room recalled a post-apocalyptic college library. Empty beer cans, Pepsi Max bottles, water glasses and coffee mugs rose amid the bookscape; and cigarette ash dusted everything, trailing in shallow rivulets between the books, bottles and crockery. A guitar in a blue nylon bag leaned against a doorway into a den, where I could see speakers, amps and a drum set. Sunlight spilled through the open door and window, and as we sat down, I heard leaves rustle in the garden and the unfamiliar caws of Swedish birds.

TIME REGAINED | Knausgaard in his studio. Of writing ‘My Struggle,’ he says, ‘I was going to use everything I had, and use it up, so I couldn’t use it again, so there would be nothing left to write.’ He compares the impulse to suicide.

That morning, Knausgaard tells me, he had woken before sunrise, as he always does, to write before his children got up. His task was to produce the final entry for his upcoming book Om vinteren (In Winter). Like Om høsten, it is part of a quartet (the others are In Spring and In Summer) of essays on 240 different subjects—his selective lexicon of the universe. He conceived the project while awaiting Anne’s birth, wanting “to show her the world she will find, all the objects: This is everything; there’s no difference between a toilet seat, vomit, a rainbow or gold. I wanted to look at everything without prejudice.” Before flying to Sweden, I had been unnerved by the prospect of interviewing a man whose every secret had already been printed, published, discussed and dissected. I confessed these fears to him. “I have secrets, some things I haven’t told anyone,” he reassured me. “I guess everyone is like that.” One of the confidences he disclosed was that, during a recent visit to Tromøya, he met a teaching colleague of his father’s who told him that his father had been beaten when he was a child by Knausgaard’s grandfather. “I also got letters from childhood friends of my father that gave me the same impression,” he says. “I was very happy that they didn’t tell me these things before I wrote the book, because the book is based on my perspective of what I saw.” Knausgaard forced himself to start writing these pages in 2008—the year he turned 40—at breakneck speed, without second-guessing the quality of his output, to break through a long period of writer’s block. He had previously published two literary novels: Out of the World (1998), which made him the first debut novelist to win the Norwegian Critics Prize for Literature; and A Time for Everything (2004), his own favorite, but which “nobody else is interested in because it’s the most fictional book,” he says. “It’s about angels, like angels do exist, they really were around. The mystery in the book is where did they go? It’s a retelling of the stories in the Bible.” But in the middle of the aughts, a number of distractions, including the sudden onset of fatherhood, with its relentless cycle of diapers, feedings, tantrums, grocery runs and baby parties, had derailed his vocation. “I felt like I was living somebody else’s life, not my own life,” he recalls. “I wrote for four or five years with no result, with nothing.” In Book 2, he calls this period a midlife crisis. “When you were 40 you realized it was all here, banal everyday life, fully formed, and it always would be unless you did something,” he writes. “Unless you took one last gamble.” My Struggle was that gamble. “ I think people almost vomit when they hear my name because I’m so often in the news. It’s true. Oh, God. I try to keep a low profile in Norway, it’s hard. It’s terrible. ” — Knausgaard No other Norwegian writer had dared such full disclosure. France has a tradition of autobiographical fiction, and memoir is common in the United States but not in Scandinavia. Lorin Stein observes, “Norwegians say that the confessional instinct is so culturally alien to them that it was, in a funny way, useful to him.” As Knausgaard sees it, “There was a threshold for writing about real people, and it was shockingly open. That was very important to me, it gave me courage.” To heighten the stakes and to increase Knausgaard’s resolve, his publisher at Oktober suggested he produce the book serially, “as Dickens did,” one short volume a month, then rerelease them as a single, 1,500-page magnum opus. Knausgaard thought the idea was “fantastic.” If he missed a single deadline, he would be publicly shamed, at least in his own mind. “The risk factor was very important,” he says. “I couldn’t say, ‘I need more time.’ If you have to do it in eight weeks, you can’t care about the writing or composition; anything goes. It’s a way of making yourself free.” However, once the terror of falling behind on his deadlines had liberated him, Knausgaard wrote so many pages so quickly that he and his editor, Geir Gulliksen, realized a new format had to be devised. They and Oktober’s then-CEO, Berdahl, announced that they would publish six full-length novels, back to back: And thus, My Struggle was born. Fed up with the artifice of fiction, Knausgaard decided to use actual names and events to the greatest extent possible. “I felt like I never said what I really meant to anyone; I was trying to please everybody. I felt like a coward, and I wanted to break out of all of that.”

The scene in Knausgaard’s studio

Upon the release of the first volume, A Death in the Family, in Norway in 2009, Knausgaard’s uncle (his father’s younger brother) threatened to sue to stop publication. In that book, Knausgaard wrote in wrenching detail of his father’s drunken demise, describing the visit he and his brother, Yngve, made to their addled grandmother’s house, where their father had died. Finding befouled carpets and sofas, mountains of empty bottles and piles of rotting clothing, “not only mildewed, they were decomposing,” they cleaned up the filth, putting on rubber gloves and getting out bleach and Jif cleanser to “scour and scrub and rub and wipe” as if “all that had been destroyed here would be restored. All. Everything.” Knausgaard’s uncle charged that his nephew had invented the squalid denouement. “The claim was that he died of natural circumstances,” Knausgaard says, “that it was a heart attack and there were no bottles in the room and so on. I started to doubt what had really happened. I wondered, Had I exaggerated because I wanted a better novel? It was like I was going insane.” When a doctor who had witnessed the disturbing scene wrote a letter corroborating his story, Knausgaard’s account was validated. Today, he defends, in absolute terms, the right to free expression: “There’s no danger in saying even the most terrible thing,” he says. “You must be allowed to say it.” Still, his father’s side of the family no longer speaks to Knausgaard. And more controversies were to come. In Book 2, A Man in Love, Knausgaard describes his reaction to being rejected by Boström upon their first meeting, in 1999, at a writers’ retreat, while he was still married to his first wife, the journalist Tonje Aursland, whom he had married in 1995. When Boström turned him down, he took a shard from a broken water glass and carved long cuts on his face. Seeing him the next day, she cried. When they remet in Stockholm three years later, they fell in love. Knausgaard fainted at their first kiss. Aursland knew none of this history until she read My Struggle. Devastated, she produced a radio documentary, Tonje’s Version, in 2010, in which she confronted her ex; but since then, they have repaired their friendship. Knausgaard dodged awkwardness with the third volume, Boyhood Island, by warning his mother, with whom he has a warm relationship, to skip it, fearing she would be hurt by his examination of his boyhood griefs. (She obliged.) She had been so upset by his first novel, Out of the World, which draws on Knausgaard’s unhappy memories of his father, that she “went silent for two weeks. She was shocked,” he says. “She has a very different impression of who I am. That was hard for her.”

Knausgaard at his home in Glemmingebro, Sweden, where he lives with his wife, Linda Boström, and their four children. ‘I know where my fascinations lie, I try to go there,’ he says of his process. ‘You can really write about anything—you don’t need a subject or a story. You can just write.’