Hi, I'm Jason Gots and you're listening to Think Again, a Big Think podcast.

Wherever you are right now, take a look around you. Let your eyes rest on the first thing that

catches your attention. For me, while writing this, it's a bowl in big things offices. Highly polished,

assembled, it seems, from curved, stained strips of wood. If I kept going, I might get to a particular

wooden coffee table of my childhood. It's reassuring warmth and sturdiness, how I turned it into

a fort and camped out under there watching

Saturday Night Live. All the abuse it took over the years from me and my sister without complaint

and how unaware and ungrateful we were for its patient suffering. My guest today, Norwegian author

Karl Ove Nauscar, has taken this kind of unflinching observation, association, and insight

to a level few of us can imagine doing, writing first a six-volume series about his life and world

called My Struggle, which he followed with a seasonal series of vignettes.

The newest book, Winter, has short meditations on everything

from toothbrushes to owls to alcoholism, and it's one of the wisest, saddest, and most

beautiful things I've ever had the pleasure of reading. Welcome to think again, Karl Lover.

Oh, thank you. So for, you know, American readers, I mean, our audience is all over the world, I guess,

but largely in America, Australia, English-speaking countries, they may mostly be familiar with my struggle.

And so I thought we might start by talking about

what are some of the differences for you

between the writing of my struggle

and the kind of writing that you're doing here

in the seasonal series,

which I guess you've finished at this point,

...