Picks up right where vol 4 left off, and it’s college time. Young Karl Ove enrolls in a creative writing class, thinking he’s going to become a literary wunderkind, being a writer is all he wants… and he can’t. He writes and reads and reads and writes and gets drunk and gets a girlfriend and writes and gets drunk and fucks around and writes and splits up and writes and drinks and throws up in Björk’s bathroom and writes and gets married and writes and nothing happens. He’s a fraud, he’s useless, he has nothing to say, and he can’t even say it in an original way, he reads Dante and Ellis and Cortázar and all his writer friends who go on to get published and he’s left behind struggling to write more than a single page before his stories die. The only thing that makes him a writer is the way he fetichizes his own self-important suffering and his own depravity.

Vol 5 is a deceptive beast; Knausgård is comfortable in his public literary suicide by now, and continues to put everything about himself into the story of his life – essentially transferring himself (or his image and his memories of himself) to book form; picture that scene in Tron where Jeff Bridges gets scanned and disappears only to reappear inside the computer. For the most part, the story remains mundane, and while it’s all good, it’s rarely as utterly entrancing as some passages in the first two volumes were… until you realise that this is all setup, that he’s working himself up to not only Knausgård the novelist, but also Knausgård the son; the book ends up where the first one did, with the death of his father and the immediate aftermath, this time taking the long way around and hitting even harder for it; after page upon page of wanting to smack the conceited little asshole, I find myself almost crying in the middle of Schiphool Airport reading about his father’s funeral. You could write a book about how he does it (and people have – Knausgårdkoden by Eivind Tjønneland is interesting) but fact remains, this is a remarkable… project, for lack of a better word. Cleaning house. The sixth volume is 1000 pages, supposedly including every idea for a novel he’s ever had. I wonder what will be left of him by then. I hope there’s something, because Knausgård is one of the great writers.