Critics are torn on the merits of this last book: Dwight Garner called it “so dense and so dull that time and light seem to bend around it,” while the Guardian declared it “worth the wait.” But the question undergirding nearly every review of the now-complete series is whether he regrets that his quest for truth upended his entire family. As Ryu Spaeth explained in a new profile of the author for the New Republic: “Knausgaard has built his reputation on a talent for self-obsession.” He also has a reputation for mercilessly dismantling everyone else in his life, extracting from his nearest and dearest what Daniel Mendelsohn describes in The New York Times Book Review as “a gruesomely high price to pay for his lofty literary aims.”īook Six, the concluding volume of this enterprise and Karl Ove Knausgaard’s avowed final work of autofiction, was written in 2011, just as Book One was being published in Norway (Knausgaard can churn out 20 pages a day), and dwells on the wild fame (and infamy) that followed. It shouldn’t be surprising that a man who has written six autobiographical novels - 3,600 pages describing his every coffee refill, kindergarten drop-off, and florid musing, along with the odd bowel movement - might have a predilection for narcissism.
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