I’ve just finished reading A Death in the Family, volume one of Norwegian Karl Ove Knausgaard’s remarkable seven-part novel/memoir My Struggle. The book covers in intense detail several periods of Knausgaard’s life: as a disaffected teenager living in a small Norwegian town; in his thirties dealing with the fallout of his father’s death ; in the ‘present’ as a married father of three living in Sweden. The narrative expands and collapses time, moving back and forth between then and now, or then and then, to reveal and explore the author’s troubled relationship with his father.

There is almost microscopic scrutiny of certain episodes – he devotes seventy pages, with many digressions, to his attempt as a teenager to buy alcohol on New Year’s Eve – while others, such as his father’s last few years of life and descent into alcoholic ruin, are dispatched in a few paragraphs. (Perhaps I’ll learn more from the subsequent volumes.)

I was confused at first by the label ‘novel’ for what is clearly an autobiographical story, told with searing honesty from the point ot view of the writer. (I gather Knausgaard has fallen out with half his family, which is not surprising given the revelatory nature of the writing.) But I get it – the conversations, descriptions, the moment-by-moment narrative that seems to put you right inside the author’s head as it is happening – these are creations rather than memories, but creations of such detail and intensity that they take us right to the emotional truth of the situation and seem completely real. It has been described as “densely ordinary” by one critic, who added “Even when I was bored I was interested”. Slow as it might sound, it is an extremely compelling read.

Though it reminds me most of Virginia Woolf’s stream-of-consciousness in Mrs Dalloway, Knausgaard says he was influenced by Proust’s A La Recherche du Temps Perdu. ( Personally I have never managed to get further than a few pages into this book whose title I once saw translated as “When will I ever find the time to read this?”) Two other memoirs which have left me with the same feeling of having touched an ‘inner truth’ are Dave Eggers’ A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius about his parents’ deaths from cancer, and Martin Amis’ Experience  – the only book by him I have ever wanted to read – which tells, amongst other things, of his cousin’s abduction and murder by Fred and Rosemary West.

A Death in the Family reminded me that I have strong visual memories of certain periods of my life, but whether I could find the words to describe them, or even be bothered, is another question. In writing, and particularly in editing, The Great Below I worked hard to find the emotional truth of a situation without necessarily narrating every last detail of the story. In fact it felt necessary to condense certain anecdotes in order not to lose the overall flow of the main story. I even shifted a particular experience from one country to another, in order not to turn the book into a travelogue. I made a conscious decision not to name the people I wrote about, feeling that they did not ‘belong’ to me as material for the book even though they had played a part in the events.

But if only one person who reads the book feels the kind of gratitude I felt to these other authors, for simply telling me their story, I will be more than happy.