His fondness for pulverising detail has always been divisive; here it fatally undermines his return to the novel
To me, a passage from Karl Ove Knausgård’s 2004 novel A Time for Everything has always seemed illustrative of his approach:
the fact that the incident is surrounded by obscurity makes each detail in his narrative stand out with unprecedented clarity. The red tinge of the earth he walks on, the green leaves of the riverside trees he’s approaching, the yellow sun, the blue sky … The way the shadows from the trees are splintered by sunbeams into small, quivering lattices of light.
I went into the kitchen again, poured the boiling water into a saucepan, put the eggs in, cut some bread and put it in the toaster […] When the eggs had boiled for exactly four and half minutes, I took the saucepan off the hob, drained the water off, put it down in the sink and filled it up with cold water from the tap before taking the eggs and putting two on his plate, one on mine.
I was pregnant.
That was why I’d felt sick.
I was going to have a baby.
Oh no.