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Karl Ove Knausgaard’s My Struggle has an oddly medieval form: a cycle, composed of six auto-biographical books about the Norwegian author’s life The project was born of abandon, as he has it: ‘I was looking for something and at the end I was so frustrated I thought I would just write it as it was, no tricks, no nothing… I just wanted to tell a story, which is the story of my life, basically [sic]’   There’s a shrug of false modesty here Some way into the enterprise he must have envisioned a work of literary greatness taking shape; the hints lie in the colossal scale of the work, its dark and knowing title, the decision to call the volumes novels Yet, on a structural and stylistic level, the fed-up beginnings and pared-down motives reflect the true character of the writing In his magnum opus, Knausgaard has dispensed with most of the narrative conventions inscribed in realist fiction – no plot, no genre, no varnish At first, the books read as exercises in self-scrutiny without aesthetic agenda, an uncut abundance of descriptive detail, where the absence of any clear hierarchy of interest makes for peculiarly flat prose   A passage on smuggling out beer for a New Year’s Eve party when a teenager is as vividly evoked as falling in love as an adult It’s a weird effect, disappointing for those who crave the relief of a fictive superstructure, but it gives the reader a sense of living at the level of first-hand experience, where the longing for a drink can be as strong to a boy as feelings for his wife are to a man Life is, of course, flatter than fiction makes it, without recourse to the teleological depth of a plot or the broader understanding of an omniscient narrator But it’s also closer to the written word than the more aloof products of postmodern experiment would lead you to believe Knausgaard’s achievement is not so much to tell the truth about his life, but to write it in a way that reflects that honesty, a veracious style, if you will