Now the point was not to please, it was to speak the truth. For 40 years I'd lived that tension between my inner and outer selves. One of the reasons for that is my father he had that grip on me. There was another reason to write with such ferocious frankness: 'As a person, I'm polite - I want to please. I was ashamed even to show it to my editor,' he says. '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 absent mother and of Knausgaard's father, a distant, unpredictable, sometimes harsh and often feared figure.Įverything went in as it happened. I could write about anything.' Passages of intense detail emerged: painful, pin-sharp recollections of early childhood, a music-obsessed Seventies 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: 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 died allowed me to write about him as an equal. 'That, I think, was the turning point,' he says. Knausgaard had at that stage very nearly hit 40, exactly the age at which his father drank himself to death nearly ten years previously. 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.

Karl ove knausgaard family