Home and Away by Karl Ove Knausgård & Frederik Ekelund

You may remember Thomas Brolin, the chubby Swedish midfielder who dazzled at the World Cup in the USA in '94 and then became a running joke at Leeds United. Brolin looked less like a footballing superstar than an eager Sunday League goalkeeper allowed to play outfield, who belted them in on adrenalin alone until the sugar in his bloodstream rendered the dopamine ineffective.

Contrast that with Micke Nilsson, the former Southampton utility man who got the job done in efficient but unglamorous style. Karl Ove Knausgård and Frederik Ekelund are reminiscent of the two contrasting players, Brolin and Nilsson, even on the pitch. The two friends first met playing amateur football in Malmö, Ekelund the tricksy playmaker and Knausgård as the reliable, more considered defensive man. These are by and large the same positions both assume in Home and Away.

Ekelund is on the move around Brazil, watching football, playing football and reporting back on the 2014 World Cup with an enthusiasm for everything South American. Knausgård on the other hand is left back in semi-rural Sweden with his kids, watching matches shown on TV at odd hours and contemplating a trampoline in his garden that takes him a long time to erect and about which he remains unsure.

Knausgård’s misgivings about his trampoline are part of the wider friction between the roles of highbrow international literary superstar and father with a penchant for gorging on international football. Knausgård often tries to find deeper meaning in watching Robin van Persie, only to realise that there probably is not any. Sat alone in front of a TV late at night, football becomes pure aesthetics.

Ekelund is a servicable author with a string of well-received books in Sweden, but there is an irony to his being abroad as a pure football tourist compared to Knausgård, the globe-trotting literary celebrity. In one of the bleaker passages Knausgård narrates a journey on a flight where he is the only person in business class, pushed around by publishers. Ekelund on the other hand comes across as a free spirit, roaming Brazil and meeting all kinds of people. One of the few notable encounters Knausgård has is with an irate man hidden away on a dilapidated farm who he immediately assumes is a racist, so far is he from Knausgård’s world.

The football aside, the book also reveals Knausgård’s own reflexive relationship to his confessional celebrity. As he toils to write essays commissioned by newspapers, he seems bemused by his role as a public figure. At one point he even signs off a recommendation for a book he hasn’t actually read to the Financial Times. Like international footballers, Karl Ove Knausgård is a brand in itself – no discerning literature bro doesn’t have a copy of the Min Kamp (My Struggle) series sitting on the shelf next to their vinyl.

What you do have to admire about Knausgård is the way he invests himself in his work. By living out his writing, he has made himself into the complete product. He invites you into his life, tells you about his big TV where he sits to watch the game, and we find him hard at work in his home office. Reading Knausgård’s contribution to the two-way exchange is like a particularly highbrow version of MTV Footballer’s Cribs, the low-rent cable TV show where superstars like Shola Ameobi and Leicester City’s Ian Walker invited viewers to look at their oversized kitchens and double garages as a means of articulating some deeper inner loneliness.

What emerges from the exchanges between Knausgård and Ekelund is an uncharacteristically honest friendship, albeit one which is always afraid to admit that it is just two guys chatting. Stripped of the more moping melodramatic tendencies of Knausgård’s autofiction, Ekelund draws out something never seen before in the big Norwegian. Say it quietly, but the Knausgård who writes in Home and Away is actually a relatively normal guy, but not in the mould of Michael Owen.

When the book was released in Sweden it attracted some derision for not being literary enough, with critics saying it added nothing to the body of Knausgård’s work. The truth of the matter is that none of the people viewing it seemed to understand the appeal of four weeks of non-stop international football viewed in nine hour marathons. This is really their loss, not Knausgård or Ekelund’s.

In an interview for the Swedish national team, Micke Nilsson once said of his military service –“It seemed quite hard work, but actually looking back on it it was pretty fun. I mean, we got to play at war.” He may moan about his celebrity, but underneath it all you sense Knausgård too enjoys every second of it.