An Evening with Karl Ove Knausgaard, St. George's Bloomsbury

Karl Ove Knausgård’s six volume sequence Min Kamp (‘ My Struggle ’) have been something of a literary sensation since their publication in Norway between 2009 and 2011. On September 5th, the London Review Bookshop are offering a rare chance for UK-bound readers to hear him talk at the nearby Saint George’s, Bloomsbury. Knausgård will read extracts from the books and discuss the world as a whole.

My Struggle, whose first three volumes have been published in English thus far, is a compendious work of autofiction. Over 3,500 pages, Knausgård painstakingly recalls the details of his life. They have courted controversy, and not just because of the Hitler-redolent name: Knausgård lays bare the private lives of his friends and family. However amoral this is, though, it’s refreshing to see so much ink spent on the quotidian, with the lives of the author’s thinly veiled acquaintances as engagingly wrought as those of many fictional characters.

Many critics have compared My Struggle to Proust, but such comparison is facile – though as lengthy and digressive, they are staunchly plain in style. There’s something mesmerizing about the author’s shopping list sentences and reams of detail. Even the most banal instances become fascinating – as New Yorker critic James Wood remarked, “Even when I was bored, I was interested.” It’s not always particularly good prose, but then neither is life – sublime moments jolting out from a sea of unremarkable experience. And when Knausgård does deploy a metaphor or striking turn of phrase, it’s perfectly judged. His talk is sure to be unguardedly honest and sprinkled with poetic insight.