Is it true that “My Struggle” was originally going to be twelve books? This interview has been edited and condensed. What I’d taken for a self-portrait was more like a snapshot, and what had seemed like a monument was actually something stranger-what Knausgaard, in our conversation, called a “cave in time.” Over the course of an afternoon’s conversation and a subsequent e-mail exchange, it became clear to me that I had not quite understood Knausgaard’s book. But if the passage of time has made the man a little blurrier, it’s also brought the novel into greater focus. To some readers, these changes may feel almost like a betrayal-as though “Karl Ove,” the character, has walked off the page, gone rogue. (“I have to hide from myself how much people know about me,” he said.) He is divorced from Linda Boström, to whom he is married in the novel. He is now, for one thing, famous in an unusual way, having shared a remarkable number of intimate and embarrassing details with his readers. The person who wrote those books both is and is not the man who, last month, came by my office to talk about them. But it came out in Norwegian, in 2011, three years after Karl Ove Knausgaard began writing the first volume, in 2008. The sixth and final volume of “ My Struggle” was published in English this fall.
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