Making one's own life the subject of writing openly, ruthlessly, and radically is the concept that Karl Ove Knausgård has committed to in a furious mammoth project. Radically honest and with incredible linguistic power, he approaches his difficult relationship with his father in "Death," the first novel of a six-volume series, a relationship that has fundamentally shaped him.

When his father dies and he and his brother begin to sort through the estate, they are confronted with a horrifying picture. As they clean the house and prepare for the funeral, memories resurface. Gradually, a portrait of a man emerges, around whom the family's balance was defined in childhood and whom the two sons learned to hate immensely. This father cast such a shadow over the brothers' lives that they ask the undertaker to allow them to see the body. Only then, they agree, will they be able to believe that he is truly dead.

The pull of Knausgård's direct style of storytelling is felt from the very first sentences, making his novel a fascinating and harrowing read. Precisely because he writes so radically personally, his text gains a painful universality. Rarely has literature made so tangible and palpable what every person is: a unique and inexhaustible inner cosmos.