Knausgaard returns to the well for a fifth and fertile time

For numerous writers, there’s something extremely satisfying in completing a manuscript of dizzying length. But the relationship between quantity and quality is a tricky one: literary girth doesn’t always translate into literary worth.

Fortunately, that’s not the case in the work of Norwegian writer Karl Ove Knausgaard, who has taken the idea of the autobiographical epic to altogether loftier plains.

After successive instalments of My Struggle (Min Kamp in his native tongue, a ...