'Is the novel important? Why and for whom?" Karl Ove Knausgård asks himself in this speech, delivered in London in October 2022. His answer is a complete defense of the novel as the only thing capable of capturing life as it is: as something always open, changing, traversed by multiple conflicting and contradictory energies. In dialogue with the ideas of D. H. Lawrence, Knut Hamsun and other authors, Knausgård achieves here an extraordinary piece of literary essay that can be read as a poetics at the same time, capable of illuminating one of the most outstanding narrative projects of the last decades.