It is nearing a month of immersion in Karl Ove Knausgaard’s My Struggle. His voice threads itself through the hours. I began the final volume this weekend. It will, I think, take far longer to approach any fuller understanding of what this project means, what it does to the body of literature.

It raises again that old adversary: the will of the text, its puppetry, its attempt to dominate the reader through a demand for suspended disbelief. It is, of course, fiction, as much so as any journal or autobiographical work, but it feels less (beneficently) aggressive than those instances when a writer conjures characters and situations to draw the reader toward some spiritual or moral resolution. There is resistance here, a refusal of that kind of contrivance. Its effect, for me, is a reduced distance: a micro-engagement with the very texture of living. Not just in a speculative or existential sense, though that too is present, but with the ordinary struggle to apprehend another consciousness.

In Don Bartlett’s translation, shared with Martin Aitken in The End, there is also a quiet challenge to the Flaubertian fetish for the sentence. There is much beauty in My Struggle, especially in Knausgaard’s forensic attention to nature and place, but it avoids the queasy unease of over-laboured prose.

This work edges closer to Balzac’s ambition to delineate social and class structures, though its lens is trained inward, relentlessly so. Whatever disinclinations one brings to Knausgaard’s form and temperament, for those who stay with it, it is hard not to admire the scrupulousness of its essence.