What is Carl Ova Canalscar trying to do in his six volume novel, My Struggle? Daniel

Mendelssohn joins us to help make sense of it all. How do you capture the history of America

in one volume? Jillapur will be here to talk about her new book, These Truths. Plus, our

critics' Dwight Garner, Paul Segel, and Jens Eli will join us to talk about the latest

In Literary Criticism. This is the Book Review Podcast from the New York Times. I'm Pamela

Paul. Joining us now is Daniel Mendelssohn. He is the author of among other books, most recently,

an Odyssey, a father, a son, and an epic. And he took on the very epic task this week of

reading, took him longer than a week. But in this week's Book Review, he reviews the sixth volume

of Carl Ova Canalscar's My Struggle, while reading as well the previous five volumes. So, Daniel,

thank you for doing that and thank you for being here. Thanks for having. For those who are

Canalscar novices, just give a bit of a background here. I mean, who is Carl Ova Canalscar? When did

he sort of burst onto the literary scene? Well, he was already a figure, you know, starting about

20 years ago in Norwegian literary published two very good novels early on. And then around 2009,

I believe, started publishing this serial novel, My Struggle, which is the minute reconstruction

every moment of his life from infancy on. And that the sort of boldness and strangeness of that

project is really what made him an international superstar and made this book a kind of a literary

event all over the world. The first book came out here in 2012. And he's been writing these, he also

did this last year, a kind of series of four smaller books on top of it, I guess, just for fun.

You have to keep going. I guess we should say in talking about this that this is 3500 pages worth

of work here. Yes, there are six novels and they run about five to six hundred. Well, most of them

except the last one is 1100 over 1100 pages. So he's clearly interested in making an epic statement.

I mean, when you do that, you want people to know that this is wady in every conceivable sense of the

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