The year by year translation into English of now the first four of Karl Ove Knausgaard’s virtuosic six-volume novel, Min Kamp (My Struggle), has become something of a slow-gathering storm. Ambiguously figured as “autobiographical” by some, the volumes present an absorbing, even gripping, first person narrative of the life of a Norwegian writer living in Stockholm today, an Everyman of sorts, one with the same name as the author.

In its expansiveness, its textures, even in its anti-romanticism, Knausgaard’s is a world at once fully disillusioned and yet thoroughly enchanted. The yield is a weird sort of hieroglyph. It is not full of meaning per se, but—as confession, meditation, psychological self-portrait, and indeed, as ethnography—Knausgaard’s world is certainly full. It presents an irresistible occasion for reflecting on the secular as religion.

This is a closed reading group.  Public programming based on its work will follow in the coming year.