The Everyday Life of a European Man: Knausgård’s Literary Project as Social Imagination

Between 2009 and 2011, Norwegian author Karl Ove Knausgård published a monumental novel project in six parts (over 3,500 pages) in which he described the minutiae of daily life: family troubles, ordinary routines, everyday discourse, drinking, strolling through town and so on. The literary project became a media sensation with translations in many languages, readers all over the Western world, and a lot of interviews and reviews to be found online. Why were the books so successful; what is it in them that engages readers? Drawing on theories of sociologist C. Wright Mills and philosopher Henri Lefebvre, this article argues that this ambitious as well as paradoxical literary project sheds light on the social and cultural position of the late modern subject in a European middle class. Knausgård in his self-narration creates an Everyman, while at the same time fashioning a self as an obsessed artist that is everything but ordinary. In a crucial part of the final book, Knausgård shows us Adolf Hitler as a bitter young man, but also as someone ‘whose youth resembles my own’. Here the self-positioning relates to ongoing European history as well as to the lack of historical perspective in our current age.