Norwegian author Karl Ove Knausgaard reminds us, in the style of Proust, that the only subject needed for a life’s work is a life itself. Though so far just half of his six-volume My Struggle cycle has appeared in English (Knausgaard’s translator, Don Bartlett, can’t work fast enough for most of his Anglophone readers), the stretch and the intensity of his project is already clear; reading volumes one and two feels a bit like standing on the cliff’s edge and looking down at the descent. Though Knausgaard’s compulsive confessions lack the careful stylisation of Marcel Proust’s seven-volume novel In Search of Lost Time, both works seek to access the past by re-creating it. An important part of this is the immersive reading experience. It is as though Knausgaard’s art delivers life to the reader wholesale, rather than attempting to imitate it.

‘Come Together’, a short story adapted from the cycle’s third volume, Boyhood Island, appeared in the New Yorker on 17 February, this year, and for me, proved something about the way My Struggle works. Read as a stand-alone work, ‘Come Together’ functions generally as a coming-of-age story, but fails in all of the ways that the books succeed as a series. Removed from the framework of his extended novel, where the obsessive monotony is thrilling, Knausgaard’s self conscious lack of stylisation feels distant. As a short story, ‘Come Together’ doesn’t quite manage to contain the world it describes – I was unable to feel the importance of his experiences, away from the context of the narrator’s life as a whole.

I’ve started thinking of the My Struggle cycle as belonging to the genre of the ‘domestic epic’. Knausgaard’s books sit somewhere between the work of Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights and Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan trilogy (another series that can’t be translated fast enough for me). With such books, the length matters: the extent, in and of itself, brings a necessary scale and weight to the story. Length, as an element of style, is sometimes overlooked. Lydia Davis’s short stories – often only one sentence or several words long – are stylistically innovative exactly in this way (Davis’s new collection, Can’t and Won’t, will be released in June); in their lightness, they are a counterpoint to the heft of My Struggle, though like Knausgaard, Davis works from subjects of quotidian, everyday life. ‘Circular Story’, from Can’t and Won’t, goes like this:

On Wednesday mornings early, there is always a racket out there on the road. It wakes me up and I always wonder what it is. It is always the trash collection picking up the trash … It always wakes me up.

Davis is also a translator of Proust, and her rendition of Swann’s Way, volume one of In Search of Lost Time, is remarkable for its direct and natural language, much more accessible than the previously canonical translation by C.K. Scott Moncrieff. In Davis’s stories, very few words can suggest a large amount of information. In ‘The Sock’, for example, a lost sock comes to represent every melancholy lost pair, and all disorganised laundry piles ever – as well as a whole domestic life that a family has built together. Meanwhile, it’s the specificity and precise detail of the Knausgaard family laundry piles that startle and transport. Scale then, is one of the things that brings us from the general to the specific.

Proust binds both of these authors, Knausgaard and Davis, together, as an exemplary force. The joke about reading Proust is that he is the Everest for the Western reader: daunting and difficult to read, and embarrassing to admit that you haven’t. In the book How To Talk About Books You Haven’t Read, which began as a French literature course at the University of Paris VIII, Pierre Bayard discusses the intimidating nature of Proust, and offers tips for skim-reading his books. But only part of what makes Proust a slog is the length; it’s also his sentences that scare would-be readers – though Proust wouldn’t be Proust without length, just as Davis wouldn’t be Davis without brevity.

Knausgaard’s sentences are short, vernacular, built for transmitting information, often written as if in a hurry. That’s not to say that Knausgaard is Proust-lite. Rather, it feels as though he is rebelling against sentences that challenge the reader to hold multiple clauses in their mind at once, in favour of a more natural, purpose-built model, one that mimics speech and thought. Just as Lydia Davis rebels against the Katherine Mansfield short-story archetype by distilling enormous and complex scopes of feeling into precise sentences. This, in its own way, is the opposite of the Knausgaard project, which omits nothing, not even banality, and seeks expanse over exactitude. Here is one of my favourite Davis stories ever, ‘Double Negative’, which I don’t think I could quote without offering the whole thing:

At a certain point in her life, she realizes it is not so much that she wants to have a child as that she does not want to not have a child, or not to have had a child.

Anna Heyward is a fiction and poetry editor and a former bookseller. She is currently living in New York and working at The Paris Review.