With ‘Spring,’ Karl Ove Knausgaard’s Latest Project Comes Into Focus

Parul Sehgal in the New York Times:

The first time Karl Ove Knausgaard saw Linda Bostrom, the Swedish writer he would later marry, he dropped everything he was holding. The first time she turned him down, he sliced his face to ribbons with a piece of broken glass. The first time they kissed, he fainted dead away.

Those would prove to be the good old days.

In his six-volume autobiographical novel, “My Struggle,” Knausgaard documents their stormy marriage in pitiless detail: her rages, his resentments, their ecstasies of mutual recrimination. Their fights could have been scripted by Bergman.

The books are so lavish with family secrets, they seem not shameless so much as an attempt to annihilate the very concept of shame itself.

More here.