For anyone who has read all or part of the six volumes of Karl Ove Knausgaard’s autobiographical novel My Struggle, I guess it would be a profoundly curious thing to meet him in person. The books – he likes to call them “the project”, as if they were a sort of demonic exercise – set a new standard of literary self-disclosure. Written over two and a bit years, around the time the author turned 40, their 3,600 published pages seem to offer a direct line into the Norwegian’s troubled and attentive mind as it tries to understand itself through the reconstructed detail of everyday life.
My Struggle proceeds as if the clues to Knausgaard’s fractured formative years, the breakdown of his first marriage, his dislocating move from his native Norway to Sweden and a new wife, Linda, and the brief joys and long frustrations of looking after three small children, might make some more sense in their reliving. He wrote, he says, always out of a desire to make something better of his life, in the hope of “a cool hand on a warm forehead”.
As an interviewer, the curiosity of first meeting Knausgaard is doubly unnerving. A default question to any man in middle age, for me, is often: “What kind of man was your father?” In Knausgaard’s case, I have read several hundred unforgettable pages devoted to the emotional actuality of clearing up his dead dad’s rancid home after the hated man, who made his son both a reluctant misery and a writer, drank himself to death. What else might there be to know?
These days, Knausgaard divides his time between London and Sweden. It used to be a one week on, one week off arrangement, but he has spent most of this summer at his home in Blackheath, south London. He has chosen to meet for lunch at Fischer’s, Chris Corbin and Jeremy King’s fabulous Viennese cafe on London’s Marylebone High Street, designed in 1920s style, created four years ago. It is a favourite London haunt of the author: “I like the schnitzel.”
Knausgaard, who became almost as famous for his straggly and somewhat unhinged intensity in interviews when his books first made headlines, seems a sleeker, more measured presence now. His beard is trimmed and his eyes are steady. Though the final translated volume of My Struggle is only now appearing in English, it is more than seven years since the frenzy of writing the books and their scandalous fallout.
By way of hello, he surprises me with something I didn’t know: that 15 years ago we played football against each other for teams representing England and Sweden, at a “writers’ world cup” in Malmö. I convince myself I can recall tangling with all his rangy self-absorption in midfield. And, of course, we talk football for a while, about the prospects of his beloved Liverpool FC, an obsession that hardly made it into his books, though it took root in his head as a nine-year-old and has never gone away.
One passion that does punctuate his writing is food. It is telling of Knausgaard’s power as a writer that when I knew we were to meet for lunch, a menu of dishes from his early books appeared in my head: the sardine sandwiches his father grudgingly set before him and his brother; the meatball and ketchup combinations he made for his own children, in defiance of Swedish clean-eating habits; the meal he tucked into during his wife’s long labour with their third child; the hot blackberries and ice cream he served to his guests at a dinner party; his dislike of boiled fish and the rare epiphanies he finds in seafood. “The crabmeat on the bread was smoother and uneven, reddish brown like the leaves on the field, and the salty, almost bitter taste of sea, softened by the sweetness of the mayonnaise, yet sharpened by the lemon juice, overtook all my senses for a few seconds …”
More often, food in the books pushes at the limits of the mundane: “I forked the last bit of potato, yellow against the white plate, and raised it to my mouth. While I was chewing, I gathered the remaining pieces of meat on my plate, loaded them on to my fork with the knife, together with some onion from the salad, swallowed and lifted the rest to my mouth.”
He studies the Fischer’s menu with a concentrated eye that confirms that sympathetic sense that he would love to do things lightly, but rarely can. Having established that käsespätzle is a “German way of the mac and cheese, with breadcrumbs and parmesan, and an option of bacon”, he has that as a starter, and the familiar wiener schnitzel to follow. I join him with the latter and preface it with a rich chicken broth.
We talk a little about the way his project has permanently fixed a particular time and place, which is lost to him now. “It is more a novel now than when I wrote it,” he says. “There are things in it I can’t relate to any more.”
I suggest that we habitually kid ourselves that life is a narrative, but that personal history is really “just one thing after another”. As you get older, there is more at stake to have things cohere, he suggests. “I sent all the manuscripts out to the people I wrote about before the books were published,” he says. “My friends in childhood did not change anything. But the closer it came to the present it was always, ‘No it was not like that’, or ‘You can’t say that’.”
One of my constant feelings in reading the books, I say, was how the confessional was part of our spiritual culture for hundreds of years, and now it isn’t. Does he imagine we miss it? “I have done it once,” he says, “with a priest. It was when my father died. I went to the church to make the funeral arrangements, I ended up crying, telling about my father, giving it all away. It almost gave me a new understanding of religion, of what it could be.”
The solace of making of things public? “Yeah, and normal and accepted. That was why I baptised my children afterwards. It was completely unrelated to God, just for that social part.”
Are his children now old enough to react to the books? “They haven’t read them – they haven’t been interested.”
I tell him something another writer said to me: “I’ll always think I will have succeeded as a parent if my children don’t want to be writers.” He laughs. “I feel the same way,” he says.
In the days before we meet, I have been reading the final volume of My Struggle, which caused enormous controversy when it first appeared in the original. At its core is a 400-page examination of the book with which Knausgaard’s shared a title, Hitler’s Mein Kampf. He felt duty-bound to read that book because of the borrowing, but he was also motivated to do so by Anders Breivik’s mass murder of Norwegian students, and his confessional, which filled the news while Knausgaard was writing. He insists on the ethical necessity of treating both men not as monsters, but as humans, as he confronts self-justification at its most irredeemable.
“I don’t know why people do not read Mein Kampf more regularly,” Knausgaard says. “It tells you first-hand about all the narcissism; you see that collapse in German culture. There is no chance that anyone could become a Nazi by reading that book. The appeal of nazism was entirely visual; Mein Kampf is a lesson in this very petty, extremely self-righteous way of thinking. It’s horrific, but it seems important to understand that now. I would never compare directly to Trump, but that extreme pettiness and self-righteousness sound similar. Every other context is different, of course it is.”
He was also drawn to it, I guess, because of that desire to explain ourselves to ourselves, which all writers share, and which gripped him so violently. I wonder if he thinks everybody has an equally rich interior life? “Everything in my experience says yes,” he says. “I have met many writers and what strikes me often is the richness of their writing and how little of that is often apparent on the surface.”
Knausgaard fears he falls into that category. “I haven’t said anything,” he says, apologetically, as he clears his plate of schnitzel and puts the last forkful of mash into his mouth. He has said plenty, I assure him.
The End by Karl Ove Knausgaard is out now (Harvill Secker, £25)
