Karl Ove Knausgaard's My Struggle Book Two: A Man in Love

"You can spend twenty pages describing a trip to the bathroom and hold your readers spellbound"
Geir to his friend Karl Ove,  My Struggle Book Two:  A Man in Love, (Archipelago Books, 2013), translated by Don Bartlett.

Why does one find Knausgaard's books so strangely compelling?  For me it is, to some extent, because of his ability to find poetry in the quotidian and mundane by describing it in detail and giving his own complex feelings about it, articulating things that for many of us lie just beneath the surface and often never come out.  Book Two is mostly about Knausgaard's second wife and their three very young children.  It is full of fascinating detail about a child's birthday party, making dinner, changing diapers, taking care of children.  Knausgaard delights in his children but sometimes broods about  how he is perceived as he walks through Stockholm with the children in tow and how taking care of the children interferes with his work.

Perhaps my clearest childhood legacy was that loud voices and aggression frightened me.  I hated fighting and scenes.

There are a number of detailed encounters in Book Two and I think what one finds interesting or amusing depends to some extent on one's own life.  I was fascinated by the details of the running feud Knausgaard and his wife Linda carry on with their downstairs neighbor, at least partly because Susan and I had regular run-ins with our downstairs neighbor in the last place we lived, who would come up and give us a hard time if we dropped a book on the floor or if our children made too much noise, just as Knausgaard's neighbor did.   The difficulties and rewards of having young children is also something with which I identify and, like Knausgaard,  I am not fond of making small talk with other parents.

Referring to Sweden:  The conformity is laid bare by an absence; opinions diverging from the norm do not exist in public.

The details of life in Sweden as seen by a Norwegian are precisely observed, down to the food, the newspapers and restaurants.  As I said in my comments on Book One, Knausgaard simultaneously evokes feelings we all have while relating them to his particular situation and environment.

There is a type of person who consistently says what he means, without adapting it to the situation in which he finds himself, but such individuals are few and far between. 
In person Knausgaard says very little, except to a couple of close friends, while in his books he is able to consistently say what he means

The sky above us was also gray, laden with cold rain that lashed the town at regular intervals.  Gray but with a different light in it from the gray winter sky, for it was March, and March light was so clear and strong that it penetrated the cloud cover, even on a muggy day like this, and somehow opened all the gates of darkness.  There was a gleam in the walls in front of me and in the pavement on the road beneath.  The parked cars glinted, each in their own color.  Red, blue, dark green, white.