Knausgaard

I have just finished the first part of Karl Ove Knausgaard's My Struggle cycle A Death In The Family. I have to tell you this is the most brilliant book I have read in a long time, and I am about to start the second part without delay! They're around five hundred pages a go,without chapters, and I have been gripped from start to finish, immersed in the interior life of Karl Ove, who begins to feel like an intimate friend. I keep thinking that this is just not like anything else I have ever read, and surely that alone is exciting and inspiring.

Some reviews have dwelt critically on the number of words, lines or pages Knausgaard devotes to the mundane details of life, like making a cup of coffee, lighting or putting out a cigarette, or cleaning a filthy house. This is one of the things I love. Knausgaard knows no fear of showing the mundanity of existence exactly as it is, and devotes page space proportionate to the amount of awareness it takes up in our daily lives. It's almost an exercise in mindfulness at times. Descriptions of cigarette ash falling to the ground, or the colour of tea swirling into the boiling water in a cup become almost meditations in their own right, without being required to serve the narrative or plot development in any special way.

But more so much more than this, Knausgaard lets us inside his mind and his body, the moment by moment impressions, feelings and experiences of an adolescent in love with music, enchanted by alcohol, fascinated and puzzled by girls. Later, the intimate experience of learning of the death of his father in his late twenties, and the process of dealing with the aftermath of the death with his older brother in the following days. I have never read an author so willing to reveal the workings of his mind, his emotional reactions, his idiosyncratic observations, and weird personal associations with what he observes. The only writer who comes to mind at all is WG Sebald, whom I also greatly admire. There's a sort of brooding mood, an awareness of the deep significance apparently ordinary events and impressions can assume in the mind when they touch off memory, emotion and literary or artistic associations.