THE man standing on the platform at Ystad station, in southern Sweden, looks more like a grunge rocker than a literary superstar: long hair, beard, scuffed boots, glowing cigarette, hat pulled down against the bitter cold. His white van is so grimy that it is almost black. The stereo blasts out at full volume. There is a fearsome-looking dog cage in the back.

Karl Ove Knausgaard tries to reassure his guest. He turns the music off. He chats about the latest Bill Bryson. The dog turns out to be a soppy spaniel that he bought for his children. But the grunge keeps reasserting itself. Mr Knausgaard smokes like a fiend in his garden study (though not in his impeccably tidy house) and keeps an electric guitar and a drum kit next to his desk. What also reasserts itself repeatedly is the sense that this is a man in the grip of a huge literary talent.

Mr Knausgaard is the author of one of the most idiosyncratic literary works of recent years: a six-volume, 3,500-page autobiography called “My Struggle”, after Hitler’s “Mein Kampf”. It starts with a portrait of his father’s alcohol-soaked death, ends with a meditation on Hitler and takes the author through the cycle of his life. Mr Knausgaard is now 45.

“My Struggle” turned him into a superstar in his native Norway. One in ten Norwegians have read some of the book, and companies have introduced “Knausgaard-free days” in order to keep people’s minds on work. It has also turned him into something of a pariah, not just because he called the book “My Struggle”, but also because he lays bare the lives of everyone around him. His father’s side of the family refuse to speak to him. Ordinary Norwegians regard him with horror as well as fascination. He is now an exile from both fame and scandal, living in tiny Osterlen, where nobody gives a damn about literary celebrities.

“My Struggle” is being translated into English with frequently ecstatic reviews (this week sees the publication of the third volume, “Boyhood Island”). It is the most exhaustive account of a modern life ever written. Mr Knausgaard devotes pages to buying beer as a teenager, or pushing a pram as a new father. But he is saved from being boring by four things. The first is the energy of his writing: what it lacks in polish it makes up for in immediacy. The second is his willingness to “put everything into a book”, as he describes it. He not only dwells on things that other writers might consider to be beneath consideration. He dares to be politically incorrect: to reveal, for example, how humiliating it is for a hulking man to take his children to play groups. The third element is the sense of transcendence: “My Struggle” is full of quasi-religious moments when the author sees something bigger lurking beneath the surface of events. The fourth and most important thread is Mr Knausgaard’s father, a figure who provides the book with both its narrative drive and its all-enveloping sense of menace. Knausgaard senior was a brooder and a stickler for rules who left his children in a permanent state of anxiety. He eventually moved in with his senile, incontinent mother and drank himself to death. In a moving passage in “Boyhood Island”, Mr Knausgaard writes that he has dedicated his mature life to making sure that his children (he has four) will never be burdened with the sort of memories that have burdened him.

He wrote the first version of his autobiography in a state of frustration. His second marriage was going through a difficult patch. His writing career had hit the buffers, despite two well-received novels. He had failed to produce anything that he thought worthy of publication for five years. Convinced that he had nothing to lose, he produced 1,200 pages of raw autobiography in a white heat of creativity. But then two things happened. He came up with the idea of calling it “My Struggle”—a title which embodied both his “fuck-you mood”, as he puts it, and guaranteed him instant notoriety. And his publishers astonished him by telling him to make the book longer. They suggested turning it into 12 volumes, to be published in monthly instalments, but eventually settled for six.

This plunged him into a bizarre literary exercise. He was writing up to 20 pages a day in order to hit his deadlines. But unlike Charles Dickens, who produced plot-driven novels to order, he was baring bits of his soul to a timetable, coping, on the one hand, with the growing fury of his family and, on the other, with the ever-present fear of failure. Mr Knausgaard used the sixth volume, which has not yet been translated into English, to tell the story of the book’s reception, including his wife’s mental breakdown, and to analyse his own response to reading Hitler’s “Mein Kampf”, which he had not touched until then. The final volume was given an extra jolt by the worst act of terrorism in Norwegian history: Mr Knausgaard agonises over whether Anders Behring Breivik was an isolated madman or “one of us”.

“My Struggle” is frequently compared to Proust’s “A la recherche du temps perdu”. Mr Knausgaard certainly regards Proust as the biggest influence on his work. And he is as obsessed as Proust with the mechanics of memory: he claims that he does not have a good memory until he starts writing. But Mr Knausgaard belongs to a very different world from Proust’s overripe French aristocracy: the world of the overgrown Nordic welfare state with its vast army of employees (his father was a teacher, his mother a nurse) and its smug sense of self-righteousness. And he also belongs to a world in which the parameters of good and evil have been redefined by the Holocaust.

Mr Knausgaard describes himself as a romantic conservative: he is equally critical of capitalism, which breaks down established communities, and the welfare state, which promotes politically correct complacency. How can his fellow Scandinavians devote such energy to eating the right food, when their predecessors agonised about God and the devil? (Though not a Christian, he was involved with a recent new translation of the Bible into Norwegian.) Yet his biggest political obsession is with the horrors of Nazi Germany. Mr Knausgaard used the title “Mein Kampf” to attract attention to an idiosyncratic book about himself. But that choice proved fateful: the author of the second-most-famous book to bear that terrible name now spends much of his time thinking about the author of the most famous one.

Listen to our interview with Karl Ove Knausgaard