“I saw life; I thought about death,” reads the morose caption beneath an Instagram photo of a lone Lego man. Brown plastic hair flowing, the Lego man gazes into the distance. He holds a coffee in his left hand and sits on a brown plastic bench. The @LegoKarlOve Instagram account stages scenes from My Struggle, Norwegian author Karl Ove Knausgaard’s six volume, 3000+ page narrative autobiography. Converting what is widely considered to be the most navel-gazing, introspective philosophical meditation since Proust into the boyish medium of toys, @LegoKarlOve sends up the self-seriousness of Knausgaard’s literary project. Scenes from the author’s epically self-absorbed life are depicted in chunky plastic—Knausgaard riding a boat on a slab of blue Lego “water,” his father lying in a brown Lego coffin, his Lego wife getting stuck in a Lego bathroom, trapped inside a grey plastic door. Scenes that eat up thousands of words are depicted in single comical snapshots.

The first five of Knausgaard’s novels have been translated from the Norwegian into English; his most recent volume Some Rain Must Fall was released in English last week. In his books, Knausgaard floats between his adult present, as an introverted father and resentful spouse, and memories of the fraught days of his youth, when fear of his own father defined him. Recognizing fully that he is a largely average man with a normal, upper middle-class European life, Knausgaard jumps into the project of scrubbing banal childhood memories and laying them bare on the page. He turns the quotidian (brushing his teeth, rolling a bag through the airport, hiding a can of beer from his mother) into rigorously reported art.

So the idea of staging this self-important childhood examination, which depends completely on Knausgaard’s epic and tangled prose, into static Lego scenes, is hilarious.  Legos, plastic, pre-made, and only maneuverable into a limited range of postures, present a formal constraint.  A Lego person can’t, for example, emote unless someone draws a new facial expression onto its plastic head. To convert literature to Legos is to leap from nuanced to stark. The creators of @LegoKarlOve have drawn on Knausgaard’s ocean of imagery and pulled out the richest visual nuggets.

The boyishness of Legos, also stands in sharp contrast to mature adult moments depicted on this Instagram page.  In the account’s most recent post, Lego Karl Ove stands at a white Lego sink. He gazes at himself in a brown plastic-trimmed mirror. “I couldn’t hide it. Everyone would see. I was marked, I had marked myself…#mystrugglewithselfloathing” reads the caption. A small blot of red—representing blood— marks his cheek. This image draws from an extended and thorny section in the second novel in which the 20-something Karl Ove struggles with a mental breakdown at a writers’ conference. It’s one of the darkest sections of these unhappy novels, and one in which Knausgaard retreats far into his own head, so to see it in simple Lego form is jarring.

Ironically, the Instagram takes on heavy scenes from Knausgaard’s adult life in first couple novels instead of depicting childhood memories from the third novel, which recalls his boyhood in Norway. Rather than depict simple or comical scenes through Legos, @LegoKarlOve takes on Knausgaard’s most cerebral, abstract sections and extracts expressive images.

As I flip through these Instagram photos of the plastic man and his family, some with dramatic filters, some with hundreds of likes, I can’t help but admire the purity of this quotidian form of Legos, where everything must click together.