A national obsession: Karl Ove Knausgaard.

When it comes to the age-old pastime of pissing off your in-laws, Norwegian writer Karl Ove Knausgaard has set a new standard.
Knausgaard, who has a deeply creased face and the outdoorsy good looks of a '70s folk singer, was a highly respected but modest-selling author with two books to his name when, in 2009, he published A Death in the Family, the first in what would become a six-book series called Min Kamp (''My Struggle'').
Written in an unvarnished yet intense style, it explores his teenage obsession with rock music, his sexual awakening and the reconciling of his literary ambitions with fatherhood. Its main focus, however, is his relationship with his father, whose alcoholic breakdown and death is told with scandalising frankness.
A Death in the Family by Karl Ove Knausgaard.

<em>A Death in the Family</em> by Karl Ove Knausgaard.
''I did not think that it would have any appeal at all,'' the 44-year-old author says. ''I simply wrote it for me, because I wanted to understand my father.''
Yet the book has been greeted by a type of literary hysteria, not only in Norway, where it has sold 450,000 copies, but across Europe, where critics have called it a work of ''seething intelligence'' and compared Knausgaard to Celine, Mann and Proust. Knausgaard has become a national obsession in Norway, with the ethics of the project discussed at dinner parties, barbecues and supermarket checkouts. And yet the cost has been enormous. His family remains shattered, especially on his father's side, which initially threatened to sue and no longer talks to him.
''People say I was calculating in what I did,'' he says. ''But I was the opposite. I was naive.''
Asked if the cost has been worth it, he pauses. ''For me, if I was to be honest, I would say yes, it was worth it, even at the cost of losing my family. That's just how it is. But I say this not in terms of simple success, but in terms of an experiment as a writer.''
Knausgaard hit upon the Hitlerian title Min Kamp by accident. ''One day I was discussing Mein Kampf with a friend, and he said, 'There you go! That's your title!''' he says.
''And it seemed right, because the books really are about the struggle of everyday life, not just the big things but the small things.''
Only the first two books of the series have been translated into English; in the second, A Man in Love - published here this month (Harvill Secker, $32.95) - he deals with the tempestuous aftermath of leaving his wife.