By Karl Ove Knausgaard, from My Struggle, Book Two: A Man in Love, the second volume of his six-volume autobiographical novel, to be published next month by Archipelago Books. Translated from the Norwegian by Don Bartlett.

The idea was to get as close as possible to my life, so I wrote about Linda and John sleeping in the adjacent room, Vanja and Heidi, who were at the nursery, the view from the window and the music I was listening to. The next day I went to the rented cabin, I wrote more there, some ultramodernistic-style passages about faces and…