Among the objects of his scrutiny in the final volume, newly translated into English as The End, are the changing colours of prawns when cooked (“alive they looked almost like office workers of the ocean, in death like a company of ballet dancers”), and Adolf Hitler, to whom the author devotes an entire 400-page essay, midway through the narrative. His focus dwells as often on the banal as the sublime.

Knausgaard’s prose is unapologetically plain, written in haste and without much appetite for revision (he dispatched the 600-page fifth book in eight weeks). Published in Norway in six breathless instalments between 20, and subsequently translated into English at a rate of roughly one volume a year, the 3,600 autobiographical pages of My Struggle represent one of the most singular and divisive literary achievements of our time. And I remember thinking: how is it possible to have three beautiful children, to be doing the one thing I had always wanted to do, getting my books published, and yet still not be appreciating life? That was the starting point for My Struggle.” Yet when we meet, at the Tate in London on a late summer’s day, he recalls 2008 as being a moment of imminent crisis in which “everything was grey somehow. With his 1998 debut about a teacher who falls for his teenage pupil, Out of the World, Knausgaard had become the only first-time novelist ever to win the Norwegian Critics’ Prize its angel-themed follow-up, A Time for Everything (2004) had brought further plaudits.

At the time, he was living in an apartment in Malmo, Sweden, with his second wife, the author Linda Bostrom, and their three young children, Vanja, Heidi and John. In 2008, a decade after his father’s death and a few months shy of his 40th birthday, the Norwegian novelist Karl Ove Knausgaard started to write the truth about his life.

Karl ove knausgaard books in order