A not so secret diary of Anders Mole, 18½

Dancing In the Dark — My Struggle 4 by Karl Ove Knausgaard, trans Don Bartlett (Harvill Secker, £17.99)

In 2010 a book-length manifesto by David Shields called Reality Hunger predicted that literature would be at its sharpest when it was most real, when its genres were most blurred and, one might add, its authors, their ex-partners and relatives most embarrassed. Realism, with its good-mannered conventions, was to be replaced by the exciting and dangerous process of incorporating raw life into literature.

It was a prophecy for the coming of Karl Ove Knausgaard, the modern patron saint of self-cannibalising writers. His six-volume confessional autobiography, outrageously titled My Struggle (Min Kamp), is still being translated into English from Norwegian. In Scandinavia it proved such a talking point — fuelled by unfolding dramas such as his ex-wife confronting him live on radio — that a “Knausgaard-free” day was declared in workplaces.

But My Struggle is not only notorious, it is also great literature, Proustian in its particular, and sometimes relentless, attention to the texture of lived experience. James Wood declared its significance over many pages of The New Yorker, while Zadie Smith said she needed the next instalment “like crack”.

Here, finally, is volume 4: a portrait of the author as an 18-year-old virgin, set to a soundtrack of Prince, David Byrne, Sting and, yes, Bruce Springsteen. Karl Ove is in the dark, the almost perpetual dark of wintry northern Norway — and sure enough, he’s dancing. “It was impossible not to move, impossible, it ignited every part of my body, me, the world’s least rhythmic 18-year-old, sitting there squirming like a snake, and I had to have it louder… full blast and then, already up on my feet, yes, then I had to dance, at that moment, even if I was alone.”

We find Karl Ove working all his spare hours as an (unpaid) music critic, then as a teacher to pupils barely younger than him. When he wears his black jeans, white basketball trainers and black beret, he feels he “could pass for someone in a band”. Asked to go on a walk he declines, saying, “I don’t believe in nature. It’s a cliché.” At times it reads like the secret diary of a Norwegian, 18½-year-old Anders Mole. He doesn’t spare himself — or us. His problem of premature ejaculation is a major plotline. At least he doesn’t suffer from Portnoy’s complaint, which would have been truly shaming — on account of its unoriginality.

There is, sadly, a narrowing of Knausgaard’s vision here. The first two books in My Struggle straddled his late 30s, with all the predicaments and preoccupations of maturity. They had more philosophy, more light and shade. This book and its predecessor, Boyhood Island, represent a remarkable ability to regress but he inhabits his teenage self perhaps too completely. There is less philosophy and digression, and he avoids material that might implicate others (his father’s side of the family still refuses to talk to him) in favour of a more limited vein of self-humiliation. The white heat of popular attention rarely focuses on something as great as this literary project. But it has created a deforming feedback loop.

“I stood gazing at the black water and the waves that rolled into the shore again and again, without much power, they were more like thoughtless little slaps.” In Boyhood Island the waves were “meaningless, meaningful, meaningless, meaningful”. There is a loss of tone here. Knausgaard devotees will be sustained by the pungent comedy and wonderful intensity: fortunately, even glancing in the mirror still fills Knausgaard “to the hilt” with an intense sense “of being both inside and outside” his own soul.

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