How to interview a writer whose account of the first 40 years of his life was so infinitely – perhaps I mean infernally – detailed, it ran to 4,000 pages? If I were Karl Ove Knausgaard, the writer in question, this piece would begin with a long description of my exhausted journey to meet him, having finished his new 800-page novel only hours before. It would continue with the walk from the bus stop to the hotel where we’ve arranged to meet, during which I see a writer almost as famous as he is, whose purchase of some little dental brushes in a nearby chemist brings me to consider the rather levelling fact that even great novelists suffer from gum disease. Finally, it would relate my deep anxiety, once inside the hotel, on seeing that the table right next to ours is occupied by a couple who even now are preparing to listen in to our conversation as if to a radio broadcast.
But it’s me, not Knausgaard, who’s writing this piece. So let’s cut to the chase. The most famous Norwegian writer since Henrik Ibsen is folded into a corner of a hotel restaurant somewhere in Bloomsbury. His T-shirt is black, his hair is pewter, and when I arrive, he stands to greet me, offering first a hand, and then a kind of shrug, as if to acknowledge as politely as possible the ludicrousness of the project on which we’re about to embark. Interviews are, he thinks, a bit artificial, though I shouldn’t worry that he’s tired of talking about himself. “I don’t give many,” he says, “so I don’t mind it.” The bigger problems, perhaps, are what I read as his shyness – he’s so much more costive than the Knausgaard on the page – and the discombobulating time-lag that invariably accompanies the publication of his novels. Today, he’ll have to turn his mind back to a novel that was published in its original Norwegian in 2021 – and which has already (in 2022) been superseded there by a new one. He works so fast. The rest of the world is always playing catch up.
