Karl Ove Knausgaard has just picked his daughter up from school when the Straight reaches him at his home in rural Sweden on a late afternoon.

It’s a moment of routine fatherly duty, but when the 45-year-old Norwegian-born author mentions it, you can’t help imagining the scene as vivid and charged, illuminated by potential meaning.

This is one of the uncanny effects of reading Knausgaard’s best-selling and utterly vast autobiographical novel My Struggle. Running an astounding 3,600 pages and divided into six volumes (only three of which have been translated into English so far), it is a world unto itself, Knausgaard’s world, teeming with images of his youth and lovingly rendered details of his daily life as it is now, with all its fears, ambitions, regrets, insights, and frustrations. A trip to the store can take up three pages, a child’s birthday party can take up 30. But even the humblest aspects of existence, captured in Knausgaard’s sharp-cut prose, can fuse into intense meditations on the great themes of family, love, and death.

It’s as if Knausgaard has tipped the entire contents of his often tormented inner life onto the page—and they’ve settled into compelling patterns according to a hidden logic that has little to do with standard storytelling.

“I tried to write without that kind of structure, without that kind of form,” he explains to the Straight in elegantly accented English. “And to do that you have to break or crush the form of the traditional novel. One thing is, if you write 3,600 pages, that’s not a traditional novelistic form, you know? And I don’t think about narration, I don’t think about ‘I have to put a climax here, I have to have a conflict here.’ That could be true in one sense, it could be very false in another. So I try to avoid those kind of structural, formal things, and a lot of what I thought of [has] to do with that—the destruction of the way you see things and the way you form your past.”

My Struggle is in part a challenge to old notions about what is worthy of being recorded, a test of prose’s power not just to describe the mundane, but to fill it with significance. The massive book is not a straightforward memoir, after all, but a novel dramatizing Knausgaard’s life. That much is immediately clear when a cat strolls through the background of a street scene from his boyhood years, or when the contents of a bag of groceries he buys in the 1990s are itemized precisely—things not recalled, because they are impossible to recall, but rather conjured in order to produce a living illusion of his past and present.

In a sense, this reflects Knausgaard’s fascination with visual art’s ability to transform the ordinary, particularly in the work of master painters such as Rembrandt, a subject he turns to more than once in My Struggle.

“When I see some of the stillleben [still lifes] from that time period, the 17th century, it’s stunning because it’s just some small objects and you have seen them a thousand times, and all of a sudden they are magic in a way—an apple could be magic or a glass of water could be magic,” he tells the Straight. “And that’s also a way to create freedom when you write. The kind of—what’s the word?—hierarchy of things, of values, of what’s important and what’s not important controls your gaze or your world-view, and you don’t think of it. It’s just kind of automatic. But if you write, you want to make the automatic unautomatic, and a way of doing that is just to take nothing for granted and try to write about something very, very insignificant and see what happens.”

The experiment that resulted in My Struggle had its risks, of course. There was, to begin with, the risk that a work of this scale, with extended passages about the daily happenings of a single, plain life, “could be really boring and uninteresting,” as Knausgaard observes, “and that was what I was fearing all the time when I was writing.” But there were also the far greater risks of writing with raw candour about the private lives of family members, friends, former lovers, and colleagues. Sure enough, the first volume, titled A Death in the Family and focused in its closing stages on the squalor created by his father’s terminal alcoholism, whipped up a maelstrom of public controversy and anger among relatives when it was released in Norway in 2009.

Yet, according to the author, the stakes were also high if he resisted the magnetic pull of this work, which he completed in an astonishing three years. One of the thematic undercurrents in My Struggle is the deadening effect of familiarity—the way that time seems to pick up speed once the boundaries of our adult lives become set and stable, even the way science can seem to shrink the fluid, constantly unfolding reality around us into fixed and abstract categories of knowledge. Writing the book offered Knausgaard a path out of “the feeling this gives that the world is small, tightly enclosed around itself, without openings to anywhere else”, as he states in Volume 1.

“That’s my view on writing—and on reading,” he says to the Straight. “It’s a way to make the world open again or unpredictable again. There’s so much predictability and routines, at least in my life, and that is necessary to live. But the danger is that you lose kind of a sense of being alive, you lose the sense of appreciating what you have, you know? You don’t see it anymore. And art and literature can help you to see and help you to be present, which I think is absolutely necessary. We have television and Internet and so on, and they are creating a sort of distance to the world by transforming it to images, like we know everything, like we have been everywhere. And that’s a reduction.

“I think that was also something that I really thought a lot about before writing this book—that I wanted to try to get the world back,” he adds with growing emphasis. “And it was a personal and private thing for me, I wanted it back for me. I guess you could say in general that is what literature does. You have to be familiar, you have to recognize things, and you have to connect to them—you have to say, ‘I know this.’ But there has to be an element of ‘I didn’t know this’ or ‘I haven’t seen this before’ or ‘This is new.’ And we live only one life, but we can gain access to a lot of other lives and a lot of other perspectives if you want to bother, if you want to open a book and read.”

Karl Ove Knausgaard makes three appearances on October 21 and 22 at this year’s Vancouver Writers Fest. See the Vancouver Writers Fest website for details.