If The End doesn’t provide the answers, it provides additional context for the questions. Is he a chancer, who mined his family history and his daily life for content and passed it off as a radical dismantling of how identity is constructed and fiction made or unmade? Are the novels simply a mirror of our own neuroses? Should we be so bored with a book in our hands? Some of these noises off are explained by the fact that we don’t know quite what to do with Knausgaard. It is exhausting, and this is before you even get to the first paragraph of the 1,150-page The End.

It has been the reverse, in a sense, of the anxiety of viewers waiting for the next tranche of TV’s Game of Thrones, where the rushed writing of epsiodes has felt more like a cartoonish laying of tracks before a hurtling locomotive. In the UK, where the first volume appeared in 2012 and its subsequent episodes in annual instalments, there has been a strange anticipatory tension derived from knowing that all the material was there, merely waiting to be put in a language we could understand all six volumes of Min Kamp were published in Norwegian between 20, Knausgaard’s extraordinary writing speed adding to the mystique surrounding the project. T here is, by now, no separating the Norwegian writer Karl Ove Knausgaard’s six-volume autobiographical novel My Struggle from all that has surrounded it: the repercussions within his own family, most notably prompted by his account of his father’s alcoholism and death, and by his second wife’s breakdown by the title of the series itself, an overt appropriation of Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf and by the unprecedented spread of the books through countries and translations, far outstripping that of other contemporary Norwegian writers.

Ove knausgaard