I read the whole of My Struggle and loved it. Frequently hilarious, beautifully written, but I came out of it not sure how his fiction would read in comparison (could a guy this neurotic and weird write speculative fiction well? Wouldn’t his specific neuroses just come up repeatedly in the text anyways?) Yes, they do, and yes, it’s still great!

If you’ve read My Struggle you’ll recognize several events from his life showing up again in his fiction. The discussion of the laws of nature and Wolfram he has with the other parent at the daycare shows up through Egil, there’s a character that experiences the same very funny trials and tribulations at a hospital for the mentally ill, etc. In MS Knausgaard discusses this quite a bit, mixing up things from a personal life into his fiction, and sometimes forgetting where the line is drawn.