Knausgaard's project is to capture those moments that seem imbued with meaning beyond their contexts, an alignment of thought and happenstance that seems so glancing, so capricious that to explain it to anyone else would be to render it silly, impotent. We all enjoy and suffer from these feelings, the most private and personal experiences of our lives. Their very uncommunicability means they're rarely portrayed in fiction at all, let alone to this persistent level of success.

To get there, Knausgaard doesn't try to stab at the moments directly, instead trying to catalog their surroundings and let the figures emerge from the ground, sort of like the whitespace in the margins of our lives. Other readers and critics have noted his complete, reckless honesty—necessary so that the experience is mediated as little as possible. This is fiction's partnership with empathy, rendered in its truest form. Knausgaard can be a skeptic as a person (and especially as a teenager), but he is never so as a writer. Indeed, he only briefly acknowledges towards the start that this is an explicitly written work; for the rest, it is one long stream of consciousness that seems to pour directly from his head to ours, not even interrupted by chapter or scene breaks.

That's not to say that this is an experimental work; indeed, Knausgaard's writing might be some of the most conventional I've read. Bartlett's translation is superb; while I can't attest to the fidelity, it was wonderful to read and outside of the place names and a few charming idioms, I couldn't have told it was originally written in another language. Even the juvenilia is faithfully rendered in English, with the character at one point getting a "stiffy" from being near a girl.

I've gone this far without mentioning the P word, but that's because I've never actually read any Proust—a crime, I know. Famous for this sort of all-encompassing personal writing, rich with memory and meaning, he's the closest analogue touted by critics. Instead, the closest writer I know of would be Chris Ware, who also does a wonderful job of both capturing ordinary life and the mix of emotions and resonances right below the surface. Of course, both are also deeply concerned with death, especially Knausgaard.

That said, the first half of the book is rather warm and wistful, an account of the author's childhood and teenage years. He's incredibly perceptive about the way events at that age are charged with meaning, as if your entire life will be determined by how your date goes on Friday night, or whether you pass the math test on Tuesday. And yet, there are some relationships with adult complexity, even as a child. His uneven relationship with his father, for example, who can be kind and cruel in equal measure. Knausgaard captures well the detente between two individuals who don't understand each other, and must live in a weary co-existence.

The second half of the book takes place much later, when his father passes away from heart troubles (and no small amount of alcoholism). For the last decade or so, the father had cooped himself up with his own mother (author's grandmother) in a squalid, Hoarders-ish house, which the sons must now thoroughly clean—a physicalized version of them coping with his death, and purging themselves of his legacy. This would seem a bit too on-the-nose if it weren't for Knausgaard's devastating honesty, and utter lack of anything approximating snark. This cleansing (and digressions) is rendered over 100 pages, the sort of micro-detail that would seem grating in any other book, but is necessary to his project and enjoyable in any case. (Given that appeals to me, I guess I should get around to reading Moby Dick one of these days.)

In all, though, the novel works on the reader in the same way as Knausgaard describes the effects on himself. As the events charge events with meaning by recalling personal details, so too do you recall the resonances in your own life. For myself, it was the portrait of his grandmother as someone whose mind and body had withered away, stubbornly refusing to perish, but a shadow of their former selves. In the case of my grandmother, it means living in an Alzheimer's ward, designed almost as if Bentham's panopticon (but without the unknowable vision), each of the apartments radiating out from a central space so the attendants can at a glance tell where any of the inhabitants are, with a locked door sealing off the entire space. Of course, the code is easy to remember and in any case written on the door frame, but the patients are beyond the perception and memory needed to piece those facts together.

For Knausgaard, though, coming to terms with his grandmother's decay is tied up with his own father presiding over her decline, refusing the home-help or letting her leave for a retirement community—even breaking his leg at one point in a drunken stupor and not letting her call the ambulance, instead lying on the floor and pissing and shitting and taking his meals in that one spot, surrounded by his detritus until his brother discovers him days later and finally calls for help. It's this portrait of moral, cognitive, physical decay that the author truly hates, hates in the way that we hate those who resemble those parts in ourself that we fear, want to stamp out by stamping out that one person, trying to blot that out entirely from the world. As a way out of that cycle, Knausgaard disassembles himself, comes to terms with his failings and tries to figure out their true origins, finding himself in the ways others must find him, a mix of inborn personality and personal history, yet documented in a personal and internal way that would be impossible to find in any objective examination, instead in the melange of memories and dreams and regrets.