The title of the British edition of the sixth and final volume of Karl Ove Knausgaard's “My Struggle” seems self-explanatory. But what exactly is it that is coming to an end in “The End”? A novel? A diary? A memoir? An autobiography posing as a novel or a novel posing as an autobiography? Or the biggest act of self-indulgence in modern literature?
“My Struggle” is a phenomenon. In Mr Knausgaard's native Norway one in ten people owns a copy of one of the volumes, but its popularity is global. “It's completely blown my mind,” said Zadie Smith, likening her yearning for the next book to the crack-addict's hunger for another hit. Rachel Cusk—who like Mr Knausgaard is a practitioner of “autofiction”, in which writers take their own lives as subject matter—dubbed it “perhaps the most significant literary enterprise of our times”.
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