On September 28, The Morning Star, Knausgaard’s first new novel since My Struggle, will be published in the U.S., translated from Norwegian by Martin Aitken.
Instead, he just types and seeks presence, writing about anything and everything in that pursuit, like a soccer player who spends most of the game passing the ball around midfield, awaiting a moment of transcendent athleticism that makes all the tedium seem like a prelude to brilliance. Knausgaard, who is Norwegian and lives in London, famously edits very little, doesn’t plan his books in advance, and doesn’t even believe in “craft,” that ubiquitous dogma of the American M.F.A. For me, a trans writer, Knausgaard taught me about writing shame as liberation from it - a literary version of the kind of emotional breakthrough one normally experiences in therapy.
Knausgaard has become a byword for a certain kind of autofiction, a putatively fictional style in which the author details the self and the people in their orbit, occasionally resulting in scandal - as was the case for Knausgaard himself after he wrote bracingly and perhaps invasively about his father’s death, his then-wife’s bipolar diagnosis, and his crush on a student. I’ve met them at a queer separatist compound. I’ve encountered Knausgaard obsessives who work for the government. I’ve gone on a Knausgaard bender with a young gay black man and an Australian grandmother - together.
In private, we indulge our vice by spending hours analyzing every little aspect of his character, speculating on what he meant by this or that section, on whether he really is as good a writer as we think he is, especially when there’s so much opinion to the contrary. The stereotype of the Knausgaard fan is of a thwarted literary man eager to tell you about his own idea for a systems novel, but there are many of us out there who don’t fit that description and are obsessed - to the exasperation of our loved ones - with a writer best known for an epic six-volume work called My Struggle (yes, the same title as Hitler’s memoir yes, it’s intentional). This distresses many of my female, queer, and trans friends: Torrey, you have every woman writer in the world available to admire, but you won’t shut up about a tall, handsome Nordic-dad dude who spends five pages explaining how to turn on a stove? Guilty. Karl Ove Knausgaard is one of my literary heroes.
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