Hermione Hoby, considering why Karl Ove Knausgaard’s sprawling six-volume autobiography has captivated so many Anglophone writers, concludes that the maximalist approach “gives a reader the irresistible sensation of reading a life as it’s lived – reality, in real time”:
Real life, of course, is mostly boring, and in book one, the longueurs are almost comic in their banality. A teenage mission to procure beer for a New Year’s Eve party, for example, occupies about 70 pages. Throughout, innumerable quotidian tasks are rendered as meticulously and exhaustively as autopsies. Here, for example, is the making of a cup of tea: “After a while I picked up the teapot and poured. Dark brown, almost like wood, the tea rose inside the white cup. A few leaves swirled and floated up, the others lay like a black mat at the bottom. I added milk, three teaspoons of sugar, stirred, waited until the leaves had settled on the bottom, and drank. Mmm.”
Yet, as the New Yorker‘s book critic James Wood put it, “even when I was bored, I was interested.” There is something so compelling and addictive about being immersed in a life like this that it is, as one novelist put it recently, “like reading a vampire novel.” Zadie Smith is among the many writers to declare their fandom, writing at the end of last year: “A life filled with practically nothing, if you are fully present in and mindful of it, can be a beautiful struggle.”
Hoby detects a touch of envy amid the accolades – not because Knausgaard is such a talented writer, “but because he has a knack for defying every piece of received wisdom about how to write well”:
As he declared in one interview: “The critical reading of the texts always resulted in parts being deleted. So that was what I did. My writing became more and more minimalist. In the end, I couldn’t write at all. For seven or eight years, I hardly wrote. But then I had a revelation. What if I did the opposite? What if, when a sentence or a scene was bad, I expanded it, and poured in more and more? After I started to do that, I became free in my writing. Fuck quality, fuck perfection, fuck minimalism. My world isn’t minimalist; my world isn’t perfect, so why on earth should my writing be?”
The Dish 