It’s a decent ambition, and its implications dribble over intermittently into the present tome.

It was in that capacity that he was asked to curate a Munch exhibition in Oslo in 2017, called Towards the Forest, in which he wanted to “exhibit unknown pictures on the premise that I believe it is possible for us to experience Munch as if viewing him for the first time”. He has, therefore, taken on the occasional role of defender of Munch’s late work. Putting it all in numbers, Knausgaard reckons that Munch’s posthumous reputation rests on 10 to 15 famous symbolist images from the 1890s, out of a lifetime ouevre of 1,789 paintings. Scrappy landscapes, messy portraits, slapdash nudes - anyone assigning themselves the rehabilitation of Munch’s late work has a battle on their hands. The received wisdom is that after the fruitful decade of The Scream, his art fell into a repetitive decline and that the final 40 years of his contribution consisted mostly of what another of his Norwegian biographers, Stian Grogaard, describes on these pages as “basement drudges”. Best known for the sequence of doomy symbolist paintings he produced in the 1890s, notably The Scream, one of the most famous images in the whole of art, Munch - born 1863, died 1944 - actually had a notably long career. A more accurate blurb would read: “Knausgaard follows his nose wherever he fancies, which is sometimes to Munch.” The publisher of So Much Longing in So Little Space describes this effort as “art history, biography and memoir”, but even that jumbled shopping bag makes it sound more coherent than it is.

In any useful monograph about a great artist there is sprawling room for only one ego, and when an author is as determined as Knausgaard to force his own kamp into the spotlight, everything becomes a jostle for the microphone. The international versions followed suit, with Zadie Smith insisting that she needed “the next instalment like crack”.

So popular was Min Kamp in Norway that 450,000 readers out of a population of 5m bought a copy. Begun in his late thirties, when he hadn’t actually done much yet, the sprawling Min Kamp was packed instead with harsh and unusually intimate portrayals of his wife and family, and it was their complaints about the betrayal of personal trusts that earned the series its notoriety. Knausgaard’s notoriety stems from the weighty six-volume autobiography he published between 20, which he self-effacingly entitled Min Kamp (Norwegian for My Struggle) and was, of course, an immediate auricular cousin of Hitler’s Mein Kampf. If you are interested in Munch, look him up on Wikipedia. If you are interested in him, you might find things in here to savour. Supposedly an exploration of the art of Edvard Munch, it is predominantly a ramble through the many aesthetic confusions of its notorious author. It is difficult to imagine a less helpful art book than this.

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