“I thought it was going to be some kind of dour Scandinavian novel,” he said. Eugenides, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of “Middlesex” and “The Virgin Suicides,” said last week that he understood why some readers approach “My Struggle” with trepidation.

(“My Struggle,” or “Min Kamp” in Norwegian, is “Mein Kampf” in German - the title of Hitler’s notorious manifesto.) Knausgaard or if you have heard of him, you may have put off tackling the books, daunted by their Proustian bulk and uncertain of what that menacing title holds in store. If you are an author, editor or critic, chances are you are lining up for “Boyhood.” If you are a lay reader, you may not have heard of Mr. Knausgaard’s saga about his life as a shame-scourged son, husband, father and writer, comes out in the United States next week from Archipelago Books, translated by Don Bartlett (who has undertaken the entire series and has 2,201 pages of Norwegian to go). “Sometimes a writer appears who just demands that you line up for the next book.” “I read them compulsively I can’t stop,” Jonathan Lethem said. Many of his peers react with similar awe. Knausgaard does is something “nobody’s done before.”

The novelist Jeffrey Eugenides, calling these two elements “auto-fiction” and “rumination,” said that blending them in the way Mr. Direct and unguarded in tone, the books combine a micro-focus on the granular detail of daily life (child care, groceries, quarrels with friends) with earnest meditations on art, death, music and ambition. Karl Ove Knausgaard, a handsome, rangy, brooding Norwegian author (and father of four young children) has held much of the literary establishment in thrall ever since his 3,600-page, six-part autobiographical novel, “My Struggle,” started appearing in English in 2012.

Karl ove knausgaard my struggle