Finally, the Paris Review answers the question we’ve all been wondering about Karl Ove Knausgaard and his mega-novel My Struggle: what’s with all the shitting?
That gratuitous attention to detail may explain why these scenes jump out at readers, but it doesn’t explain Knausgaard’s minor obsession with shit. To be sure, the inclusion of these scenes is consistent with Knausgaard’s maximalist approach to the quotidian novel. “The banality of the everyday”—what Knausgaard is after in My Struggle—includes the human experience of basic biological functions. But there’s more to it than that.
