That said, the first half of the book is rather warm and wistful, an account of the author's childhood and teenage years. Of course, both are also deeply concerned with death, especially Knausgaard. Instead, the closest writer I know of would be Chris Ware, who also does a wonderful job of both capturing ordinary life and the mix of emotions and resonances right below the surface. Famous for this sort of all-encompassing personal writing, rich with memory and meaning, he's the closest analogue touted by critics. I've gone this far without mentioning the P word, but that's because I've never actually read any Proust-a crime, I know. Even the juvenilia is faithfully rendered in English, with the character at one point getting a 'stiffy' from being near a girl. Bartlett's translation is superb while I can't attest to the fidelity, it was wonderful to read and outside of the place names and a few charming idioms, I couldn't have told it was originally written in another language.

That's not to say that this is an experimental work indeed, Knausgaard's writing might be some of the most conventional I've read. Indeed, he only briefly acknowledges towards the start that this is an explicitly written work for the rest, it is one long stream of consciousness that seems to pour directly from his head to ours, not even interrupted by chapter or scene breaks. Knausgaard can be a skeptic as a person (and especially as a teenager), but he is never so as a writer. This is fiction's partnership with empathy, rendered in its truest form. Other readers and critics have noted his complete, reckless honesty-necessary so that the experience is mediated as little as possible. To get there, Knausgaard doesn't try to stab at the moments directly, instead trying to catalog their surroundings and let the figures emerge from the ground, sort of like the whitespace in the margins of our lives. Their very uncommunicability means they're rarely portrayed in fiction at all, let alone to this persistent level of success. We all enjoy and suffer from these feelings, the most private and personal experiences of our lives. Knausgaard's project is to capture those moments that seem imbued with meaning beyond their contexts, an alignment of thought and happenstance that seems so glancing, so capricious that to explain it to anyone else would be to render it silly, impotent.

Karl ove knausgaard my struggle book 1