The worst idea ever for a podcast – and it’s great: Our Struggle reviewed

Our hosts are Lauren and Drew and they want to talk about Karl Ove Knausgaard. Or rather, they want to talk around Knausgaard. Or to talk through Knausgaard, towards the sense of what the Knausgaard phenomenon means. Or, it sometimes seems, they want to talk about everything but Knausgaard — cigarettes, Constance Garnett, the history of literary criticism, to what extent hotness is a function of tallness, Clarice Lispector, media hype, backlash, cancel culture, sneakers, Gen X, how Geoff Dyer got where he did — until the only territory left uncovered by the conversation is Knausgaard himself, described only through omission, in negative outline, raising yet another cigarette to his smouldering, craggy face.

Lauren and Drew are the hosts of Our Struggle, a paratextual, parasocial and occasionally somewhat parasexual podcast about the experience of reading the Norwegian author’s six-book memoir-cum-novel-cum-lawsuit-magnet, My Struggle. It goes without saying that the show is itself a Knausgaardian enterprise, some 20 hours in now, with no end, or even structure, in sight.