THE END

KARL OVE KNAUSGAARD

Harvill Secker, 1,160pp, £25, Oldie price £17.21 inc p&p

The last and sixth volume in Knausgaard’s My Struggle was hailed by critics as both preposterous and magnificent. It is written amid the chaos of small children and marriage to a bi-polar writer and looks back to the fallout from previous volumes. There is also a 450-page digression about Hitler, consisting in part of an attack on the British historian Ian Karl Ove Knausgaard: addictive

Kershaw for daring to suggest that the teenage Hitler was already evil. Knausgaard’s argument is that ‘only his innocence can bring his guilt into relief’. Melissa Katsoulis in the Times acknowledged the pleasure of ‘total immersion in the soap opera of another person’s life’ while finding the passages about his wife’s depression and mania hard to read. Keith Miller in the Literary Review described some passages as ‘first year undergraduate, two joints in’ and compared the author’s hostility to Ian Kershaw to ‘a man in the pub barracking a professional footballer on television’. Jake Kerridge in the

Daily Telegraph acknowledged My Struggle as ‘addictive’ but wondered about its worth. ‘Knausgaard does not, like his masters Joyce and Proust [did], find a new way to represent reality linguistically, a way that cuts through our hardened conceptions of the world and helps us see it afresh. His way of describing “reality as it is” is to expand the range of thoughts and actions, however mundane or shameful, that a human being will publicly admit to.’