Karl Ove Knausgaard is an unlikely literary celebrity. The Norwegian novelist is the author of the best-selling, six-volume, novelized memoir My Struggle—Min Kamp in Norwegian—a title deliberately borrowed from Adolf Hitler’s autobiography Mein Kampf. As Knausgaard readily acknowledges, they are books without much of a plot, where quotidian events are described with exacting, and sometimes exhausting, detail. In Norway, a country of 5 million people, My Struggle has sold 450,000 copies. English-language critics regularly compare him to Proust and await the translation of each new volume with child-like anticipation. We met Karl Ove in New York, days before the release of My Struggle: Book Four.