Discussed in this essay:
My Struggle: Book Six, by Karl Ove Knausgaard. Translated from the Norwegian by Dan Bartlett and Martin Aitken. Archipelago Books. 1,160 pages. $33.
A Time for Everything (2009), Karl Ove Knausgaard’s exceedingly strange and intermittently beautiful second novel, concludes with a novella-length coda, written in the first person, about a summer day when the narrator’s father takes him and his older brother crabbing on the Norwegian coast. Along the way, the narrator spots a seagull carcass. “Did you know that seagulls were angels once?” his father asks. Naturally the boy doesn’t…
