Ten years on, that lesson has informed my reading of this impressive collection of essays by Norway’s best-known living author, Karl Ove Knausgaard. Given that he is known principally for My Struggle, a six-volume collection of novel-memoirs, his first book of essays to be published in English offers a different perspective on his work and intellectual outlook. As importantly, it demonstrates how ideas on the page can exist in an evolving and dynamic way.

‘I want to see the world the way it is,’ Knausgaard writes, ‘which is something that is forever in the making, chaotic and incomprehensible, steered by laws we know absolutely nothing about and which steer us.’ Similarly, he seems drawn to art and writing that shake him out of his assumptions, make him look at things differently, and accept a degree of uncertainty as a guiding principle. Thus, a writer such as Knut Hamsun, who, in his commentaries, could be ‘ruthless and unsubtle in his opinions’, is redeemed by a writing style that ‘always sought out the shades and nuances’. That is, he was a good writer because he became more open and less certain in his writing.

Knausgaard’s outlook, as it emerges in this collection, is also focused on searching and possibilities rather than on answers. Art is not about perfection or fixed positions; criticism needn’t be, either. This approach can be endearing, such as when he admits, in an essay on Michel Houellebecq, to having not read Houellebecq before having to write about him (the reason, he tells us, is that he doesn’t want to know how brilliant Houellebecq is), or when he is dismayed by the ‘narcissistic’ autobiographic reading he gives in Beirut when the other invited writers offer work that speaks much more directly to events in the region. It is unlikely that the organisers expected anything less personal from a renowned memoirist. Similarly, I imagine that readers of these essays will anticipate very personal works, and it’s true that they often integrate personal experiences and textual analysis. But the Knausgaard, of the memoir–novels, who often seems unable to stop himself saying whatever is on his mind, isn’t present here in quite this way.

Instead, he places his experiences in the service of broader ideas. One reason for this is probably that many of the essays have their origins in introductions to books and collections; they are commissioned pieces with a more direct purpose than his other writing. When he does appear as a character–narrator, his experiences offer a way for him to ground interpretation in specific moments and encounters with art, and to maintain critical closeness, rather than the distance we might usually expect in such works.

His essays on photography, which bracket the whole collection, include extended meditations on the relationship between the constancy of works of art and the changeability of their subjects; on the way great works respond to the world around them; and on the ability of works to defamiliarise even the most familiar environments and situations. There is nothing particularly new or revelatory about these topics; the contribution lies, instead, with the way in which he performs the thinking – alive, as it were, on the page.

An analysis of Francesca Woodman’s photographs, for example, is as much the story of Knausgaard’s changing encounters with the pictures as it is his attempt to understand them. What seems to surprise him most is how Woodman’s work can alter his understanding of other, seemingly unrelated artworks. Impressionist paintings are suddenly ‘dead’ in the face of photographs that now speak more urgently to him. He tries to understand why, but there aren’t clear-cut answers. Instead, we get a list of possibilities that all hinge on the momentary nature of interpretation itself: the playfulness of the pictures, their materiality, his own reaction to seeing the physical realities of the female body.

Only in the title essay does this method falter. Knausgaard takes aim at the various ‘cyclopes’ who’ve criticised him on the basis of the subject matter of his novels. The cyclopes are those who ‘don’t want to know about areas of reality that aren’t as they think they should be’, or commentators who ‘can’t handle ambiguity’. Knausgaard’s début work, Out of the World (1998), won the Norwegian Critics Prize for Literature, but its storyline – a teacher falling in love with a thirteen-year-old pupil – has, Knausgaard tells us, led to accusations of literary paedophilia. While it’s understandable that he wants to counter such views, his explanation of the genesis and writing of the work is out of sync with the rest of the collection, because it puts Knausgaard in the position of defending art rather than accepting the uncertainty of how it will be interpreted, an aspect he usually celebrates.

It is a relief when Knausgaard leaves off explaining and defending his writing and returns to searching for possible meanings in the work of others. The contingent nature of that approach lets readers back in – to make up their own minds. It frees Knausgaard to roam widely, from Dante to Kierkegaard to the medieval Icelandic sagas; from literature to painting and photography. Art, he insists, ‘is as much about searching as it is about creating’. Ultimately, the artfulness of this collection is that it, too, is searching, like a photograph or a watercolour or a novel that responds in immediate ways to the lives that we are living now. In this way, Knausgaard goes some way to suspending his own position of authority as a well-known writer and allows himself to learn.