The End
by Karl Ove Knausgaard,
Harvill Secker, 1,153pp, £25/$49.95
The English translation of The End, the final volume of the celebrated Norwegian author Karl Ove Knausgaard’s epic six-novel sequence My Struggle, confirms something Norwegian critics and readers have told us for some time but British and American critics have struggled to believe: the scope of the series is far smaller than it seemed at the beginning. Indeed, while the first novel of the sequence, A Death in the Family, seemed like a wall of a house, the subsequent novels haven’t added more walls to the building but, instead, demolished the wall brick-by-brick until we are left with nothing. But it has to be said, it’s a very impressive nothing.
