Knausgaard is the kind of person who says anything and everything out loud. One would think all writers do something to that effect, but in his hands the text is brimming with lived experiences as seen through a well-thought out, intensely immersive and richly felt personhood. A deep reading process with Karl Ove is never aimless, but could seldom be purposeless. It invokes a touch with the deep inner sanctuary and rekindles the reader’s long lost connection with it.

Spurred on my like-minded company, I ventured into his writing earlier this winter and have found myself kneeling before the altar of his hieroglyphic work. There is a painfulness at the depth of feeling so much, being so present and yet so grossly misunderstood. Today as I wrapped up the first of his My Struggles novels I found myself enveloped by a strange sensation. I was going to miss this boy and wandering around the towns and cities in Norway along with the commentary of his boyish consciousness. Through this 490-page novel, Knausgaard creates a vast topography of richly felt, deeply agonised and variously lived experiences of a boy who, among other things, cries so very easily.