| Karl Ove Knausgaard |
Knausgaard’s Selflessness
April 20, 2016
Five volumes in, there’s still a temptation to redeem Karl Ove Knausgaard from egotism—to find, in his multi-volume autobiographical novel “My Struggle,” some subject other than Karl Ove's life, some theme profound enough to justify these thousands of pages. Earlier this month, in an essay on the fifth volume in The New Republic, Ryu Spaeth argued that “My Struggle” is “actually a commentary on contemporary life in the West, a sweeping novel of ideas in the tradition of Thomas Mann and Fyodor Dostoevsky.” Other critics have likened Knausgaard to Proust, whose novel wasn’t just a life story but a philosophical meditation on aesthetics, time, and selfhood. The final volume, it’s thought, will reveal the novel’s grand intellectual design.