"I thought this was only interesting for me. It was high-risk: it could, the author admits, have been an artistic catastrophe. Nothing was changed, certainly not the names. Of an older, less complicated brother, a kind, loving but often somewhat absent mother and of Knausgaard's father, a distant, unpredictable, sometimes harsh and often feared figure.Įverything went in as it happened. Passages of intense, almost hallucinatory detail emerged: painful, pin-sharp recollections of early childhood, a music-obsessed 70s adolescence, school, early fumblings with girls. Unconcerned with literary niceties such as a narrative arc, Knausgaard "developed a new kind of language almost, of the banality of the everyday. The writing flowed and fast: five pages a day, increasing to 20 by the end. And I started just writing it as it was: the truth, no artifice, no cleverness. Before, I think he had been like a kind of statue for me.
"That realisation that I was as old as he was when he left home allowed me to write about him as an equal. "That, I think, was the turning point," he says. It was ten years since his father had died. Knausgaard had at that stage very nearly hit 40, the age at which his father left home and began drinking himself to death. For three years I tried to write a kind of regular, realistic but fictional work about his death.
"About his fall, how he somehow changed from being a father, a perfectly ordinary teacher, a local politician, to a divorced, dead alcoholic. "I wanted to write something completely different, and I wanted to write about my father," he says. Before 2009, Karl Ove Knausgaard, 43, was just a critically respected Norwegian novelist, author of the first debut novel to win the Norwegian Critics' prize and of a weird but widely admired book about angels called A Time to Every Purpose Under Heaven.
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