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For Karl Ove Knausgaard a weight has lifted. The final part of the Norwegian author’s searingly intimate six-volume autobiography My Struggle is published here next Thursday and he is ready to move on.

“Writing My Struggle was like self-inflicted torture,” says Knausgaard, a graceful 6ft 4in with a shock of grey hair and, in a rock star touch, black sunglasses. He speaks English with a singsong Scandinavian intonation and has a love/hate relationship with the work he is best known for. It begins with his childhood and goes up to 2011, taking in his father’s alcoholism and his relationship with his own children. One in 10 Norwegians owns a copy of My Struggle, and Zadie Smith has said she “needs the next instalment like crack”.

But Knausgaard has tortured himself over its impact on the people whose lives he exposed, unvarnished. “If I had known the consequences I wouldn’t have been able to do it,” he says. He spends much of this instalment painstakingly exploring the ethics of writing about others as he grapples with his marriage — while he was writing his now ex-wife, writer Linda Bostrom, had a nervous breakdown.

Today, though, he seems at ease. With a coy smile he admits the silver band on his left hand is an engagement ring. The wrung-out man in The End “feels like someone I know, but not me. It’s a completely different chapter of my life. I didn’t feel things were falling into place until I was 40, and that’s late.”

His fiancée works in publishing. He spends seven days with her in Blackheath and then goes to Sweden for a week to be with his children.

The variety is still novel enough to make up for so much time in transit. “Half the time I live in a Swedish village of 400 people where I have to drive 15 minutes to get a beer. I love it but it’s great to come here where there is so much going on. I’m almost never bored but in London 10 minutes can be exciting enough to fill a life.”

He’s recognised here and “that’s fun”. And the brutalism of the Barbican where we’ve met appeals to him. He orders a double dose of caffeine, with a Diet Coke chaser for his trademark black coffee.

In Blackheath he likes to cook (wiener schnitzel, barbecues with the children, when they visit), and is trying to enjoy some time off. “I am not good at holidays but we are going to Greece and I think it will be great, with time to read. I like to read philosophy books for some strange reason.”

"My ex-wife understood that I had to write about her. She said I could do it as long as I didn't make her a bore"

His children, Vanja, Heidi, John and Anne, aged 14, 13, 11 and four, love London. “It’s a great thing in their life — they are close to the culture. I am very glad it’s Britain and not the US.”

The End is 1,168 pages long, and 400 of them are about Hitler. Knausgaard didn’t plan this. “That was just because I had called the book My Struggle so then I had to read Hitler’s Mein Kampf and then 400 pages on him came out. I became incredibly interested in it.” Indeed, Knausgaard is most at ease talking about Hitler — you get the sense he could theorise about him all day.

He had to ask a friend to buy him a copy of Mein Kampf because there had been such a backlash against My Struggle in Norway that it would have been controversial. Then he realised he couldn’t read it in public. “I thought people would panic if I read it on the plane and it would be unpleasant.”

Hitler is “a poor writer” but “there’s one thing he writes well about I think people should read, and that’s about propaganda and what it is to just repeat a lie and it will become true — exactly what’s going on now”.

The far-Right’s surge in popularity leaves Knausgaard “lost for words”. “I see parallels with the 1930s but also differences. There is a feeling we have no control over the future — the climate, cloning, the gap between rich and poor getting bigger. That’s a dangerous place to be in. You think things just happen because it is possible to change it, but it requires a lot of people acting together and that is almost impossible.”

He identifies a dangerous collision between identity politics and Right- wing politics. “There’s such a division between them and it’s filled with hatred. Like with the trans debate — that’s turned into some political thing which is just symbolic and basically without value.”

My Struggle began as an attempt “to write plainly about my life”, a distraction from a novel he was stuck on. It became a project to probe what makes a person. As he was writing the final volume his wife had a breakdown. “When Linda was hospitalised there was no writing and it was a kind of crisis.” Eventually he got some words out but it wasn’t right.

“When I sent it to my editor he said there’s nothing on the page. I was crying when I was writing it so to have to do it again was hard. It’s still a long way from what it could have been.” The one thing he’d prepared was the final sentence. “I wanted it to be true so I had to write until it was. It’s always nice to end a novel.”

Bostrom is doing well. “She’s writing,” says Knausgaard, his voice softening. He still refers to her as his wife, correcting himself: “I should say ex-wife. She found me writing about her hard but acceptable. Many people are upset or frustrated because they are reduced in books, Linda didn’t get that. When I started she said, ‘You can do it, just don’t make me a bore’.”

With The End, he tried to return to the spirit of the first two volumes, where he wrote freely because he didn’t think anyone would read them. “With books three, four and five I restricted myself and was kinder. With book six I thought I had to take that innocence back but it wasn’t innocent any more. I had to push myself in directions I found immoral that I didn’t want to go in. There was a physical boundary. I thought ‘I can’t do this’.

“If I could write a book only about myself I would have done so, but that would be meaningless because my life consists of all the other lives around me.” The closer he got to the present, the more people disputed his account. “You can’t trust memory,” he says.

Writing about sex, and with such squirm-inducing honesty, was challenging. “It’s a place where so many things come together: physical, emotional world, almost spiritual,” he laughs.

“One of the most beautiful scenes I know of is about this, in War and Peace, where Andre and Natasha are starting to date. He hears her singing and starts to cry, without understanding why. It is the boundlessness of love and the inner self and the restrictions in the physical world. That’s something Tolstoy must have seen or felt, if not he couldn’t have written it like that. It’s almost like that’s the core of what literature is about that point where everything crosses. My novel is about the inner self — it’s huge but the physical self is constricted.”

His children are the stars of The End, breaking his intensity with innocent humour. “The children are not interested in me and haven’t read the books. That’s a good thing,” he says. “I have no ambitions on behalf of my children. I think you become a writer because something is lacking but that something doesn’t have to be bad.”

Fatherhood made him feel “minimised as a man”. “I did it the Scandinavian way where you share everything and spent a year at home with my girl. I wanted to do it but I also felt like I was not a proper man any more. You have porridge down your top, I had to sing... A lot of it had to do with me being immature. It was a shock and I didn’t know exactly how to behave. Now I have four I couldn’t care less.”

“When I was the age my children are now there were a lot of rules, and I failed on every single one. I cried easily, I remember picking flowers for my father and he threw them away, it was the worst thing a boy could do.”

His children have Instagram but Knausgaard doesn’t touch it, or Twitter. “I am incredibly easily shamed. It would ruin every day.”

It’s partly for his children that he has given up smoking, as of six weeks ago. This is significant from a man who has burned through 40 a day since he was 16. “It’s hard when I can’t write,” he admits. “But that’s the only urgent situation. I stopped because I’m turning 50 and my youngest daughter is only four. I didn’t like being controlled by something.” His fiancée doesn’t smoke.

Next, he wants a challenge. “I could do something similar to My Struggle in my sleep but I need to do something new. I’m trying to write a proper, straightforward novel. It’s set in something that looks like the Nineties. It’s coming easily but it’s not good.”

There have been film offers for My Struggle but he’s waiting for someone “with their own ambition and agenda”.

The End is out on August 30 (£25, Harvill Secker)