Possibly one of the great books of our time?

Discussions about the title aside, can't we agree that Karl Ove Knausgaard's six-volume My Struggle is a pretty great book? At least based on the first 150 pages or so - it may be one of the great books and definitely a unique novel, sui generis, of our time. The section I'm reading now is about a 100-page account of a New Year's gathering or series of gatherings, ushering in 1985, in a small, orderly Norwegian town on a fjord and backing against the endless forests. Perhaps you have to have spent some time in Scandinavia to understand the kind of town KOK grew up in - although her conveys the town with vivid detail: we get a sense of a place that's pretty remote from the mainstream of cultural and corporate life, but not backward or remote in any way: it's not like the many accounts of growing up on the American prairie and yearning for the big city, the big university; there's a sense of completeness in these small Scandinavian towns: it's safe to walk anywhere, people are well educated and worldly, everything works: KOK and his other 16-year-old friends can get around across pretty great distances by public buses, which all run right on schedule; imagine that in the U.S. I think it's not a stretch to suggest that the long New Year's party section is a homage to and perhaps even a parody of some of the many extremely long dinner-party scenes in Proust, KOK's obvious and declared literary inspiration. In this case, however, we're not among artists and writers and the French aristocracy but among a bunch of Norwegian teens - sometimes with their parents or other relatives - and yet the sense of caste, or cliques, of painful and subtle insults, of gradations of stature, of blurting out exactly the wrong thing at the wrong time, the shame, the petty cruelty, the sense of looking back on these cruelties from a much later perspective in search of absolution or understanding - all very Proustian, but played in a different key so to speak: KOK's blurting out to a girl to whom he gives a New Year's kiss "you're very beautiful" is something, one of the millions of things, he recalls in painful detail and memorializes in this novel. His memory (understood that it's embellished by imagination, as this is a novel and not a memoir) is astounding, and of course many of his memories are of the sort others would repress - or at least not confess. But KOK is driven by his honesty and by his desire to write a great book - he touches on memories, themes, instances that seem painfully familiar to many readers - to me, at least - but that we would never be able to or wish to unearth, reveal.