Norways most famous self-exile debarks for a new frontier: genre fiction.
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Karl Ove Knausgaardis one of my literary heroes.
Ive gone on a Knausgaard bender with a young gay black man and an Australian grandmother together.
Ive encountered Knausgaard obsessives who work for the government.
Ive met them at a queer separatist compound.
Despite the emphasis on plot, this book is still Knausgaard being Knausgaard.
Its just that this time, hes enjoying himself.
In this book, I wanted the outside to be visible between the voices.
Death, ambulances, masks, and gloves something horrific, terrible.
Early in the pandemic, you couldnt leave the house, so that looming threat was external and unseen.
That inside-outside contrast is part of the novel.
That, like Stephen King, it would be fun.
And it was fun, but even more, I felt like you were having fun writing it.
Were you?Yeah, I definitely had fun.
My favorite novel for many years wasDracula,by Bram Stoker.
But then I have always loved fantastic literature: Garcia Marquez, Borges, Calvino, Cortazar …
I just thought I could never do it myself.
Ive always written about things very close to myself one has ones own rules and ways and restrictions.
Its like that in life, too; you cant see your own restrictions because those restrictions are you.
So this time, at first, I really tried to get out of myself.
Did you allow yourself to write a Stephen Kingstyle novel because youve now had recognition on an international level?
It works the opposite way!
Theres all the pressure of expectation from people who liked the previous books.
They will say, Why should he write like this?
Why cant he just do the same thing as before?
My first novel came out, and I was 29, and I got the validation Id wanted.
I have learned to deal with it, to just say,Fuck it.
Whats expected of me has become the enemy.
When you become conscious about how your books will be received, youre a dead writer.
And yet you had fun this time.
The novel is about death.
I had to have a go at find a way to encounter the reality of death.
And so I gave that essay to a character, Egil.
That was to take out the fun of it!
Then a few years later, I read a new translation, and it was much longer.
Reading it, you cant really say what Tolstoy thinks.
I like that dynamic.
Having an opinion is very different from living or even writing a novel.
In the new book, there is a character who drives drunk.
Someone in my family asked me, Why didnt you tell me that you were out drunk driving?
But I have never done that in my life!
It is like that with all of the characters, really.
If people think its me, I cant do anything about that.
It seemed to me you were playing with that expectation.
For instance, the priest who tells Kathrine, One must fasten ones gaze.
Thats what a priest tells you, Karl Ove, in book six ofMy Struggle.You have a good memory.
Then theres the wife whos struggling with psychosis I use everything I can and throw it in there.
And many, many, many things from my life.
That makes it authentic to me, because I need to believe in the characters.
Isnt that how it is to write a novel, really?
You use stuff you have and put it in.
Which feels also true to the genre.
My editor is a very literary man, and he really admires Stephen King.
Or whether is it possible to have nine people who are similar in voice to the author.
Everybody knows Im writing it anyway, so why should I pretend like Im not?
I spent an enormous amount of time on her.
It didnt work because it all was very stiff and unnatural.
Then I had to just not think about her as a woman.
Just forget about that.
You are on the course to something.
I had to write Solveig the same way I had learned to write myself.
When you write about yourself at age 16, youre not a 16-year-old anymore either.
After I went through that wall, it became easier to write the other characters.
That was the most fun part to write.
Thats a comic book; thats a caricature, but it was fun.
Yeah, Im trans, so gender is all over my own writing.
Do you know the poet Eileen Myles?No.
I want evidence of that interiority on the page.
All Ive ever seen is silence or violence.
When I read that, I was like,But Knausgaard has done that!
He did it for 3,600 pages!
You show the constant work of masculinity, even in petty, mundane ways.
It is exactly like that with gender and manhood and what it is to be a man.
I was so wrong when I was 13, in terms of what others expected of a young man.
I cried a lot.
I liked to read.
I was very much whats considered feminine in the society I grew up in.
And I was aware of it.
I saw both things at once.
And that double consciousness is installed in the book.
I wanted to be free, to become who I already was, but thats impossible.
How I met it in different ways, at different times.
I think that the mechanism to lock in my role got very strong when I first became a father.
The feeling of degrading myself, almost of despair.
I never thought that someone would read it and see it in a new way.
I tried to explore something from within in my own life.
It is an incredibly important theme in the book because its constant and its ongoing.
But in real life, outside of ideologies, everything is floating and there are no borders.
Im happy you felt that.
Have you read much work by queer or trans writers?No, not really.
I have never actively gone for that.
I dont really know much about it at all.
Your native country, Norway, features prominently in this book the landscapes, the culture.
Would you ever want to live there again, to reconnect?No.
At the moment, I would never go back to live there.
Im content living in London.
Ive been away from Norway 19 years now, first in Sweden and then England.
Its the distance that makes it possible.
I do plan to write about London, but I cant do it now … Its just too fresh.
Whereas Norway is in my fictional universe.
Norway, to me, is a fiction.
The landscape is a fiction.
I dont go back and check the details.
Memory and writing are two sides of the same coin.
You have spoken often about your writing method: spontaneous, without a plan, without revisions.
Youve said this book is the first of a new series.
The next book is almost written.
And then the book after that, I just know some.
I cant tell you anything other than there will be another book in Norwegian this fall, a prequel.
Theres going to be one every year.
The new one Im working on, its very weird.
I found 30 pages of a novel I began in 2011 or 2012.
I had thrown it away.
I thought it was so bad I didnt show it to anyone, not even my editor.
You, Karl Ove, have often discussed eating tinned fish in your work.
Is tinned fish as some on Twitter have claimed hot girl food?Oh!
I really dont know about that.
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