I'd badgered Knausgaard's London editor for early copies, dispatched them in a few long sittings. 'It was really one of the most sublime reading experiences of my adult life – almost equal to the kind I remember from childhood.' 'His arguments remind me why I got into this game in the first place,' added another. 'I just finished the second volume of Karl Ove while high above the clouds in a plane,' emailed one acclaimed novelist. So far only the first three volumes of My Struggle have been translated, so it's hard for a non-Norwegian speaker to give a definitive answer to this question, but Knausgaard's reputation is already soaring in the English-speaking world, not least among writers. What face was this man revealing? What kind of gaze did he want his readers to meet? And what about the title – Min Kamp or My Struggle, a reference to Hitler's notorious autobiography? The final book (yet to appear in English) contains a 400-page essay on the Nazis and ends with a discussion of the anti-immigrant mass murderer Anders Breivik. One Swede took the extreme critical step of setting fire to the K section of a Malmö bookstore, telling police that he did it because Knausgaard was 'the worst author in the world'. Was Knausgaard brave or shameless? Was it ethical to reveal so many other people's private lives along with his own? He received hate mail, death threats. Commentators obsessed over the new literary sensation. Knausgaard's unflinching descriptions of his marriages, his father's alcoholism, his second wife's bipolar disorder and his conflicted feelings about fatherhood were profoundly shocking to the Lutheran sensibilities of a country that is less comfortable with public confessions than the Oprah-soaked anglophone world. By 2012, the books had sold 458,000 copies – a staggering figure in a country of 5 million people.

The reaction in Norway was unprecedented.

He wrote at a feverish pace, publishing three books in 2009, two more the following year and a 1,000-page finale in 2011. His solution was to embark on a massive project, a first-person narrative about his life that eventually ran to six volumes and 3,600 pages. 'Just the thought of a fabricated character in a fabricated plot made me nauseous.' The only genres of writing he still found valuable were diaries and essays, 'the types of literature that just consisted of a voice, the voice of your own personality, a life, a face, a gaze you could meet'. S ometime in 2006 or 2007, Karl Ove Knausgaard, an acclaimed novelist in his native Norway, discovered that he was sick of fiction.

Karl ove knausgaard books