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The English-speaking world has been enthralled by Scandinavian fiction of late. Crime thrillers and detective novels by Stieg Larsson, Jo Nesbo and Henning Mankell have dominated best-seller lists, their film rights sold to major studios. But there is more to the region’s literature than haggard detectives in hostile urban settings. The Norwegian novelist Karl Ove Knausgaard has gained major publicity in Europe — most of it controversial — with a rather different sort of book.

A Death in the Family is the first volume of six autobiographical novels to be translated into English. It is memoir scantily dressed as fiction, using mostly everyday scenes from Knausgaard’s life — and, just as in real life, there is no clear plot. If there is a précis, it is that his father is alive at the beginning of the novel and dead by the end. The narrator simply adorns this most slender of structures with childhood memories and thoughts on family relationships, musing on any aspect of these that grabs his attention as he goes.

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This introspective, autobiographical quality has led some critics to liken him to Marcel Proust. It sounds like an attractive idea: to be able to claim, in the young 21st century, a writer comparable to the great French master. But it is a parallel that Knausgaard vehemently rejects. “It’s embarrassing,” he says. “Now, come on, who on earth wants to be the Norwegian Proust? First, it’s a contradiction in terms. Second, Proust’s work exists, we don’t need another one.” And don’t go associating him too closely with the recent boom in Scandinavian fiction either. Asked why he thinks literature from the region has become so popular in recent years, he wryly remarks that he has “not the slightest idea.”

The real subject of A Death in the Family is memory. We are given painstaking accounts of dinners in the family home and awkward teenage parties. Nothing is too small or unimportant: every exhalation of cigarette smoke, every click of a car indicator has a place in this rich portrait of the everyday. Knausgaard himself does not make any ambitious claims about the book. It describes, as he tells TIME, “normal lives, normal failures, skewed teeth and calf legs.”

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And yet, pedestrian as all that may seem, there is real drama being played out here. In the opening sequence, 8-year-old Karl Ove goes out into the garden to speak to his father, who is busy working at a rocky outcrop with his hammer. Each time the tool strikes a stone, we know a little more about the man. Between blows of the hammer, as the boy narrator approaches, Knausgaard sketches the emotional distance between himself and his father. A portrait of an intimidating, enigmatic individual emerges. By the time their brief conversation is over — perhaps half a minute in real time — we have walked through a museum’s worth of memories, all of which are nakedly honest.

The book’s climax comes when Karl Ove and his brother must clear out the filthy house in which their father, by then an alcoholic, lived his final days. There are empty bottles everywhere and excrement on the sofa. It’s a quiet catastrophe — powerful and affecting because it creeps up on the reader.

Knausgaard doesn’t always succeed in turning such finely observed moments into something bigger. There isn’t much in the way of metaphysics here, and at times A Death in the Family can be a jumble. But this hasn’t affected the book’s notoriety. The father’s family, appalled, has stopped talking to Knausgaard, and the Norwegian media have created a storm of publicity, contacting almost everyone who ever knew him. Knausgaard is unsure whether it’s all been worth it. Success came as a great surprise to him. “I wrote it alone in a room,” he says, “convinced that not even my friends would bother to read it.” How wrong he has turned out to be.

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