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“... of a brain haemorrhage two years later. This sounds more associatively dire than it should. But Karl OveKnausgaard’s Seasons Quartet puts the reader in a highly associative state of mind. Autumn, which begins the project, announces itself as a letter to an unborn daughter, ...”

“... Last year, I happened to meet the Norwegian writer Karl OveKnausgaard. I had just read part of Book 1 of My Struggle, his six-volume autobiographical series, and in a scene that imprinted itself on my memory – a scene from his childhood, set on New Year’s Eve before he heads out with his friends – he steps into the family kitchen: I got up, grabbed the orange peel, went into the kitchen, where mum was scrubbing potatoes, opened the cupboard beside her and dropped the peel in the wastebin, watched dad walk across the drive, running a hand through his hair in that characteristic way of his, after which I went upstairs to my room, closed the door behind me, put on a record and lay down on my bed again ...”

“... Does​ Karl OveKnausgaard have a style? His sentences, while often long, are not elaborate; they can read like lists. ‘Infamously direct’, is how his English publisher puts it. He has a tendency towards cliché: news is always spreading like wildfire, and so on. The writing, precisely where it aspires to the literary, can be sloppy: ‘The warm, bright September days were summer’s last burst of energy before abruptly crumbling ...”

“... Imight have​ met him once. In September 2015 I flew to Norway for a literary festival. Knausgaard was the headliner, but he cancelled at the last minute and was replaced by an Elvis impersonator. Instead of pictures of Karl Ove smoking the cigarette of the camera down to its smouldering butt-end, the newspaper coverage of the event included photographs of a pastorally beefy Elvis in a white rhinestone jumpsuit, gazing through dark glasses into the bright sun ...”

“... Karl OveKnausgaard’s first two novels, Out of the World (Ute av verden, 1998) and A Time to Every Purpose under Heaven (En tid for alt, 2004), attracted admiring reviews and won prizes. ‘I was discussed,’ he told the Telegraph recently, ‘but as you discuss literature – in a kind of sober way ...”

“... emails. So in fact, if you really want to know what happens in this book, what happens is that Karl Ove writes, or is distracted by his family from writing, or has to get away for a few weeks to write, etc. We know what he wrote, of course, because it is in the other volumes; but here we do not yet know what he is writing, if you see what I ...”

“... but the implied comparison seems to be stylistic rather than thematic.) Edward St Aubyn and Karl OveKnausgaard, with their bad dads, would also have been apt. The critic Sam Sacks has called such books ‘agony novels’, but agony by itself isn’t usually enough. The third volume of ...”

“... he will be conscious of the claims of other Norwegians, including Per Petterson, Dag Solstad and Karl OveKnausgaard, who was a creative writing pupil of his back in the 1980s. (In a Paris Review article Damion Searls depicted them as a literary fab foursome, with Knausgaard the ...”

“... Jest and Underworld and 2666, the multi-volume massifs by Hilary Mantel, Elena Ferrante and Karl OveKnausgaard. Did it matter that Means (with his wife) was the dedicatee of one of the most celebrated megaliths of the past quarter-century, Jonathan Franzen’s The Corrections? Of course not. Or that Means had ...”

“... as a novel comes in for immediate qualification. Not surprisingly, it isn’t autofiction of the Karl OveKnausgaard kind. It isn’t a straight-up autobiographical novel either. Amis uses terms like ‘novelised autobiography’ but says it’s OK to think of the book as ‘a collection of linked short stories, with ...”

“... digital platform, producing a more diffuse cultural logic. This is manifest in the novels of Karl OveKnausgaard, or Richard Linklater’s film Boyhood, where the ‘big data’ mentality of capturing every biographical detail over time is elevated to an artform. This cultural epoch introduces a distinct set of ...”

“... in fiction, or reality versus fiction. Take the many articles about the ‘true’ writings of Karl OveKnausgaard, or the huge amount of attention paid to David Shields’s polemic Reality Hunger. Time and again we hear about a new desire for the real, about a realism which is realistic set against an avant-garde ...”

“... but knew nothing about the writers who were to bewitch me in the future: writers like W.G. Sebald, Karl OveKnausgaard, Elena Ferrante and Rachel Cusk, and many others. These writers respond to a new craving for reality in literature, a new demand for emotional identification and for an immersion in the world proposed ...”

“... Something​ very strange happens in the middle of The End, the sixth and last volume of Karl OveKnausgaard’s titanic work of self-description. At around page 482, the book swerves away from scenes of family and social life, and plunges, like a car crashing through a safety barrier, into a prolonged reflection on Adolf Hitler ...”

“... narratives that appear painstakingly to relate the lived experiences of their authors. Karl OveKnausgaard’s My Struggle, the overweight apogee of the form, is grounded in a realism so thoroughgoing and full of circumstantial actuality that we may as well call it ‘punitive realism’. ...”