Karl Ove Knausgård

Six of his ten planets sit in cardinal signs with only one fixed, and the elements come out three in fire, three in air, two in earth and two in water. Saturn alone was retrograde. The record calls Knausgard a Norwegian novelist and names the six volume My Struggle.

The Sun sits conjunct Mercury at just over a third of a degree, which is the contact that reads as being your own thinking: a sense of self bound up with being articulate or being right, and taking disagreement more personally than the person would admit. Six volumes of autobiography is that aspect at book length, and no contact in this chart fits the record better. It is also the hardest sort of chart to write about from outside, because a self that cannot be separated from the act of stating things leaves a reader nothing to check the stating against.

Both halves of that pairing are then wired to scale. The Sun sits seventy two degrees from Jupiter at three fifths of a degree and Mercury at the same angle to it at just under a degree, which is learning that comes easily: breadth, and an ability to make complicated things sound simple. Jupiter itself sits conjunct Uranus at half a degree, sudden growth and a life that changes shape quickly when it changes at all, and Mars, Jupiter and Uranus fill thirteen degrees of Libra. Venus sits in easy contact with Pluto at nine tenths, depth in relating. His Moon sits on the first degree of Cancer at noon, with the sign before it still possible, Gemini, which costs the chart its tightest contact, so it is left out. Saturn sits alone at nineteen degrees of Aries and was the only planet facing backwards, with Neptune at twenty seven of Scorpio and Pluto at twenty five of Virgo. A novelist writing six volumes about his own life needs scale wired to speech more than he needs anything else, and this chart supplies it twice over.

Jupiter came back to its Libra birth degree on 23 September 2016, at forty seven, and three laps precede it. Libra asks who else was in the room, which for six volumes written about the people around him is the question the whole project turns on and the one it cannot settle. Identity fused with speech and both of them wired to scale is what this chart is, and the record is six volumes long.