If you made it through the 3,600 pages of Karl Ove Knausgaard’s My Struggle (Min kamp, in the Norwegian), its conclusion could only inspire mixed feelings. Book Six — also known as “the Hitler one” due to its three hundred pages on the life of the dictator whose manifesto gave Knausgaard his title — records the precise moment (7:07 a.m., on September 2, 2011) that Karl Ove brought it to a close. “The novel is finally finished,” he writes. “In two hours Linda will be coming here, I will hug her and tell her I’ve finished, and I will never do anything like this to her and our children again.” They will go to a literature festival, where he will endure an interview and then his wife will, too, since her own book has just come out. “Afterwards we will catch the train to Malmö, where we will get in the car and drive back to our house, and the whole way I will revel in, truly revel in, the thought that I am no longer a writer.”
Beyond the physical relief of putting down the carpal-tunnel-inducing final tome (1,157 pages in all), you might have sighed with despair at the thought of post-Struggle existence. After all, you’d spent countless hours swimming through Karl Ove’s mind, seeing through his eyes as he smoked, chugged coffee, “trudged” through various forms of bad weather, tried to write and then wrote and wrote and wrote, took care of his children, felt ashamed of taking care of his children, painfully recalled his father’s drunken misbehavior and his own, fretted over his sexual imperfections and moral indiscretions, agonized about his overwhelming shyness but also his glaring narcissism, stared at himself in various reflections, and, on two occasions, sliced up his face with broken glass. How will I fill my time, you might have wondered, if not by reading Knausgaard? And if he was renouncing the vocation he struggled so hard to claim, what had it all been for?
But of course Knausgaard didn’t stop writing. In fact, just the opposite. My Struggle was released in Norway between 2009 and 2011; by the time the final installment of this Viking longship of a novel invaded the English-speaking world, in 2018, Knausgaard had already published five more books in his native country. The “Seasons” quartet was Nicorette for Knausgaard addicts: a comparatively svelte 1,120 combined pages of poised reflections on life, nature, and art, framed as a kind of syllabary for his new daughter. The following year, his book-length study of Edvard Munch came out in English (So Much Longing in So Little Space, which could also describe My Struggle if you changed an adjective). And from time to time he made forays into the world of magazine journalism, including for The New York Times Magazine, where he wrote profiles and essays on, for example, the British brain surgeon Henry Marsh and an abortive road trip around North America (which his editors couldn’t resist titling “My Saga”). With a few exceptions — notably his New Yorker essay on the mass shooter Anders Behring Breivik — these pieces tended to read like caricatures of Knausgaardian style, which, in short form, can easily come across as shtick. But Knausgaard soon enough returned to fiction — and to gargantuan proportions — with another series, beginning with The Morning Star (2020, translated 2021), a choral novel narrated by nine different characters, each of whose lives is unsettled by the sudden appearance of a blazing new celestial body. Subsequent volumes in a projected septology have appeared annually in Norwegian, with English translations by the heroic Martin Aitken lagging a few years behind. The Wolves of Eternity (2021/2023) was a “prequel” (Knausgaard’s word), and The Third Realm (2022/2024) revisited much of the same territory as the first book, but from different perspectives. Now the cycle continues with The School of Night (2023/2026), a bildungsroman about a young Norwegian photographer and the Faustian bargain that catapults him to artistic greatness. So far, we’re at 2,512 pages and counting. Two more tomes have already been published in Norway; Knausgaard told a Norwegian newspaper that the seventh will be the last, because, incredibly, “there is so much else I want to write.”
An attentive Struggler will identify bits and pieces that Knausgaard recycles in these novels: the aphrodisiac qualities of prawns, or a grandfather’s antisemitic quip, or the frequent appearance of hospitals and mental institutions. There is typically Knausgaardian attention paid to the precise color of piss (sometimes, like Knausgaard’s father’s, disturbingly dark) and the unevenly shared burdens of domestic life; much Pepsi Max is slurped, significant time is spent brooding on verandas, and the destructive desire for just one more drink is often satisfied. Narrators resemble Karl Ove at various points in My Struggle, like the alcoholic literature professor and aspiring novelist whose mentally unstable wife is hospitalized, as Linda was in Book Two; The School of Night’s young artist maps onto student Karl Ove in Book Five.
Yet the Star series is in many ways My Struggle’s opposite. Rather than the unrelenting voice of one man, we get an array of perspectives, and some of the most compelling characters are women. Whereas My Struggle somehow keeps you engaged despite its apparent formlessness, with little plot beyond the shaggy shape of an actual life, the Star series is structured around a series of more or less suspenseful mysteries. But the most obvious difference is the weirdness. While Knausgaard continues to beguile us with his trademark hyperrealist style, predictably observant down to the coffee granules dissolving inside a mug, what happens in these new novels transcends the real. One of the narrators — Egil, a trust-funded documentarian turned religious searcher who composes an essay on death that constitutes the last fifty or so pages of The Morning Star — helpfully informs us that the titular phrase is not just a literal translation of Lucifer, the name of the fallen angel who rebels against God, but also one of the ways Jesus describes himself. And the dark corners of these novels are illuminated by a gleam equal parts demonic and divine: hordes of crabs scuttle their way inland, a Sasquatch-like beast emerges from the woods and seemingly possesses an escaped mental patient, dreams start changing, dead bodies stop arriving at mortuaries, and people who should be dead seem somehow to keep living.
The struggle of My Struggle is, at heart, about what to believe in the face of death when religion is not an option, ideology has failed, and there’s nothing more than the life you’ve got. “Attaching meaning to the world is peculiar only to man,” Knausgaard writes in Book Six. “We are the givers of meaning, and this is not only our own responsibility but also our obligation.” Knausgaard sought a form that would not just describe but enact the process by which meaning is made in secular life. But in the Star books, secular lives — and seemingly mortality itself — are disrupted by the new star; characters and readers alike wonder whether it’s a sign to be interpreted or simply a phenomenon to be explained. Knausgaard widens his frame to encompass not just the banal and everyday, but the cosmic. He tries, in other words, to reenchant the secular world, and the secular novel, dramatizing a search for meaning beyond the self and beyond realism. But like his characters, we’re left wondering what it all means.
It’s hard for a foreigner to comprehend Knausgaard’s notoriety in his native Scandinavia. Sales records suggest that at least ten percent of the Norwegian population may own a copy of My Struggle, and one estimate reckons that in 2010 alone the books were mentioned some 2,500 times in the Norwegian and Swedish media. As he describes in Book Six, the Scandinavian press — which seems to cover cultural matters with the same tabloid zeal the New York Post applied to Hunter Biden’s laptop — salivated over the novels’ personal toll and legal repercussions, tracking down anyone and everyone mentioned in the books and comparing fact to fiction as they fell face-first into Knausgaard’s trap. There simply isn’t a recent literary event of even vaguely similar inescapability in the English-speaking world, though the world-historical fervor around the latter volumes of Harry Potter might come close in scale.
But Knausgaard hit it big in the Anglosphere for altogether different reasons, not least of which was impeccable timing. When My Struggle first arrived on American shores in 2012, the novel seemed tailor-made to sate the latent appetite for sincerity and transparency that critic-provocateur David Shields had famously dubbed “reality hunger” just two years before. Shields’s term usefully labeled the sense that instead of well-wrought realist novels, epitomized by such Oprah Book Club picks as Jonathan Franzen’s The Corrections, readers hungered for something more raw, less fake. A similar frustration had prompted Zadie Smith to ask, in an oft-cited essay from 2008, whether realism was “really the closest model we have to our condition? Or simply the bedtime story that comforts us most?” While Smith’s two paths forward for the novel (traditional and, in Smith’s eyes, nostalgic “lyrical Realism,” and more subversive “metafiction”) did seem to sum up the state of American literary fiction at the time, she didn’t anticipate the mode that would dominate the next decade and more: autofiction, that catchall critical label, borrowed by contemporary critics from the French theorist and novelist Serge Doubrovsky, for the formally loose, often linguistically spare novels in which narrator and author are plausibly identical, and which often reflect upon the process of their own composition. If the postmodern labyrinths of Don DeLillo and David Foster Wallace are all about artifice, autofictions are all about authenticity, or at least the feeling of it.
My Struggle emerges from a frustrated novelist’s longing for a kind of fiction that pretends not to be fiction at all. “Over recent years I had increasingly lost faith in literature,” Knausgaard writes in Book Two. “The only genres I saw value in, which still conferred meaning, were diaries and essays, the types of literature that did not deal with narrative, that were not about anything, but just consisted of a voice, the voice of your own personality, a life, a face, a gaze you could meet.” The whole project began, at the dutifully noted time of 11:43 p.m., on February 27, 2008, when Karl Ove glimpsed a reflection of his now iconic face in a window and asked the question that the novels would go on to explain: “What has engraved itself in my face?”
Coming at the end of a long experimental tradition of essayistic and autobiographical prose, from Montaigne to Witold Gombrowicz by way of Proust and a cadre of Scandinavian writers like Stig Larsson and Lars Norén, My Struggle turned Knausgaard into the literal poster boy for the marketing phenomenon known as the autofiction boom. His ridiculously ambitious project, provocative title, and icy good looks helped stoke demand for a raft of English-language autofictionists, chiefly Sheila Heti, Rachel Cusk, and Ben Lerner, as well as, among others, Tao Lin and Teju Cole. Autofiction performs (and at this point provokes) a kind of exhaustion not just with the conceits and contrivances of fiction, but with the often rather privileged, and rather boring, life of the writer. With a thoroughness an order of magnitude greater than that of his Anglophone peers, Knausgaard captures, and seeks in some way to remedy, the social and existential conditions of that exhaustion.
My Struggle is an experiment in autobiographical fiction. But it is also, almost in spite of itself, a historical novel, capturing the social and cultural effects of Norway’s economic booms in the eighties and nineties. If the novel as a genre sprang from the rich, polluted soil of bourgeois capitalism, then My Struggle sprouted like a giant orchid in the hothouse of Scandinavian social democracy, whose ideal economic conditions, and extensive system of subsidy, let it grow to exorbitant size. (Besides employing both of Knausgaard’s parents, funding his studies, and granting various writing stipends, the Norwegian state guaranteed that copies of the book would be purchased for public libraries.) Yet those same conditions also present Knausgaard with his basic problem. Knausgaard writes about the most normal of lives in social democracies that work hard to erase differences between people. Even on the level of the sentence, Knausgaard’s style performs a kind of flattening, refusing to prioritize one kind of information over another. Book Six has perhaps the greatest extremes. In the lead-up to a long, searching essay on naming and namelessness from the Bible to Paul Celan, which leads, with operatic grandeur, to an even longer, even more searching essay on Mein Kampf, we get a fifteen-page shopping sequence depicting the drama of Karl Ove deciding on the right amount of prawns for supper (just over two and a half kilos) and punching in his PIN (formerly 0000, now 2536). Knausgaard “seems barely to adjudicate significance,” Ben Lerner wrote in the London Review of Books in 2014. In a world, or a novel, in which everything and everyone has value, meaning is a problem. Artists are supposed to be geniuses, not shame-ridden dads living on the dole, “ordinary to the point of self-erasure,” as Karl Ove puts it. “I had nothing special to say about anything, because I was a nobody, with nothing distinctive about me.” Hence the struggle.
Knausgaard has everything he needs to be comfortable materially. But, barring a brief phase of religious feeling as a boy, and a reflexive curiosity at his daughter’s christening in Book Two, he doesn’t have religion, and, except for some clearly reactionary tendencies as a self-identified “man of yesteryear,” he doesn’t have anything like an ideology. On good days, he has love and work and, in fleeting moments, a powerful but vague feeling of significance. One of the curious experiences of reading My Struggle is the sense that, despite the intensity of your immersion in Karl Ove’s world, the membrane between beauty and utter banality is vanishingly thin. For that reason it’s hard to quote him in a useful way: a single sentence or paragraph out of its context can seem laughably pedestrian. Sometimes you have to ask yourself, as Karl Ove changes a nappy or gets hammered, is this all there is?
But, at the same time, Knausgaard’s almost holy attention invites us to say: look at all there is. In This Life (2019), the philosopher and literary theorist Martin Hägglund makes the compelling if rather grand suggestion that My Struggle be read as a secular version of Augustine’s Confessions, in which death — the central preoccupation of the first book of the novel, in which Karl Ove grapples with his father’s ugly alcoholic demise — replaces salvation as the source of all meaning. In Knausgaard’s description of opening himself to a landscape, or a painting by Turner or Munch, or lines of Hölderlin or Heidegger, or even his children’s expressions, he records a kind of “secular conversion.” Here, mortality is not, as in Christianity, the gateway to eternity, but merely where our futures end. Death, Karl Ove observes while visiting his father’s corpse one final time, is “no more than a pipe that springs a leak, a branch that cracks in the wind, a jacket that slips off a clothes hanger and falls to the floor.” It’s nothing in itself. But to a living person, it’s the boundary that defines what life actually is, “the background against which life is lived.” The death of Karl Ove’s father pushes him, and frees him, to embrace the life he’s living, mundane as it is.
Knausgaard’s project — despite its seeming radicalism — represents a continuation of the novel’s centuries-long effort to capture, with ever greater freedom, the way things are. As D.H. Lawrence put it, in a statement not just of his own credo but of a kind of rule of realism, “nothing is important but life.” Characters are creatures of the modern world: they might believe in God, but the novel itself doesn’t. Things happen for reasons and obey the rules of cause and effect, and while psychology and history are inescapable, metaphysics can only really be discussed, not represented. “The novel is the epic of a world that has been abandoned by God,” in Lukács’s famous formulation, a world in which “the immanence of meaning in life” is “no longer directly given.” This is Karl Ove’s world, and his quest, in My Struggle, is to get beyond fiction, even beyond language, to “affirm what existed,” as he writes in Book One, and “revel in the world outside instead of searching for a way out.” Precisely because of its post-fictional aspirations, My Struggle doesn’t break with the novel so much as bring the realist tradition to a new, almost absurd extreme.
With the Star series, Knausgaard is once again timely, particularly in America, where Trump boasts that he’s “bringing back religion” and one archbishop has seen so many Catholic converts he recently admitted that “we’re kind of stymied.” An investigation of the nature of reality suits a moment in which the real is ever more frayed, and the Devil is working overtime. But it’s not Knausgaard’s first foray into religious territory.
His second novel (and his first to be translated into English), A Time for Everything, uses, as a kind of frame narrative, the life of a sixteenth-century man who was the last to record an encounter with angels. With a characteristically gripping close-focus, Knausgaard expands and embroiders a few verses of the Bible into dense psychological fables set in an Edenic Scandinavia and infused with Knausgaardian preoccupations. His novelized versions of Cain and Abel, Noah’s ark, Lot and his wife, and Ezekiel are broken up by essayistic digressions on how our increasingly scientific conception of reality has come to exclude the divine. “Wonders, miracles, supernatural events — all are swept away in the name of the verifiable,” he explains. “The first consequence of this new method of seeing the world was that divine manifestations began to be regarded as historical.” In the modern world, just as in the realist novel, there has to be an explanation for everything.
The Morning Star describes a wonder that seems to defy explanation. “What was going on?” the drunken first narrator, Arne, asks himself when he sees the crabs scuttling across the road. “It was like they were answering the call of some other power. As if they were drawn by a light.” And then he sees the star. He takes it as “a sign that the balance of nature had shifted, that the ecosystem itself was breaking down.” Iselin, a young woman who hasn’t quite figured out what to do with herself since graduating high school, gets off her deadening job at the supermarket and wolfs down dinner at Burger King; there, a well-dressed man says “I am the Lord,” and comes over and passes a hand through her hair. Back at home, a crazed young man bangs on her door. He turns out to be the drummer in a black metal band, recently interviewed by Egil, the documentarian, and his bandmates have just been brutally murdered in what appears to be some sick ritual. Solveig, a nurse, scrubs in to harvest the organs of a dead man who then, on the table, comes back to life. Egil’s ornery son sees the beast: an inhuman creature with a kind of ox’s head, yellow eyes, and a pigtail. “I know what it means,” Egil concludes at the end of his long essay on death that closes the novel. “It means that it has begun.” Whatever “it” is.
The novel seems, at first, to be set in a world as wholly secular as My Struggle. Even the Church of Norway priest Kathrine, the most interesting of the narrators, begins from reason rather than faith. “Meaning was something that came from us,” she reflects early on in Star, sounding a lot like Karl Ove. “Meaning was something we gave to the world, not something we took from it.” But the novel — the best in the series so far — succeeds in giving us an inkling of what it would be like for that secular order to be overturned.
In the next book, The Wolves of Eternity, we can follow a clearly marked trail of breadcrumbs to a similar question. Much of the novel takes place decades before the star appeared, during the youths of two half-siblings. Syvert, a rather dull Norwegian, grows up at loose ends in the eighties and falls into the mortuary trade; eventually, he connects with his Russian half-sister, Alevtina, a biologist who studies the ways trees communicate. This is the province of rational certainty: “there was no doubt — what was, was,” she reflects. “Things themselves, in all of their materiality, were real.” After the half-siblings finally meet, in Russia, Syvert checks in with his brother Joar, an astrophysicist, to ask about the star. “There’s no explanation. No one knows what it is. Which leaves only one way to make sense of it,” Joar says, with Spielbergian melodrama. “It’s a miracle.” Just in case you missed the point.
An almost identical exchange occurs in The Third Realm, a book whose title is meant to evoke not the Third Reich but the kingdom of the Holy Spirit. On the phone, Joar tells Syvert that entries in an online dreambank have markedly changed since the star appeared. Joar says he thinks there might be a connection. “It doesn’t sound very scientific, if you ask me,” Syvert says. “To hell with science,” Joar replies. It’s not just the dreams that are off: Syvert notices that no new corpses are coming into his chain of funeral homes. We learn from another narrator that a bunch of kids improbably survive a car accident. As the narrative advances to the third day of the star’s presence, a policeman investigating the black metal murders is so baffled that he pays a visit to Kathrine, the priest, and asks her if the Devil exists. She says no. Her own denial, however, unsettles her; even though she hasn’t had sex in months, she is inexplicably pregnant, and the cop’s question “cast in a doomful light” the world into which she would soon bring a child. This, with its echoes of the immaculate conception, is perhaps the most electrically charged mystery in the novel. In the middle of the night, she prays — and at that moment understands that she doesn’t believe in God. Soon after, the star disappears.
These books aren’t quite science fiction, and, critical comparisons to Stephen King notwithstanding, they’re not really horror, either. They might best be classed as fantastic, a mode the literary theorist Tzvetan Todorov defined as “that hesitation experienced by a person who knows only the laws of nature, confronting an apparently supernatural event.” This isn’t quite the same as magical realism, or sci-fi, or even fantasy, when we expect something other than realism. The fantastic is, rather, the feeling of doubt that characters and readers alike have about whether the typical rules of reality, and realism, apply. Knausgaard’s fantastic is so compelling because of how skillfully he can use realism against reality, sucking us into a verisimilar world only to make us wonder just where the verisimilitude stops. This doesn’t provoke faith so much as uncertainty. Just as Kathrine questions the existence of God, we question what sort of novel we’re reading. “The novel is the locus of ambivalence, par excellence, and in this sense the devil’s form,” Knausgaard said in a 2019 lecture in Tübingen. “The question is not what is good or bad, what is divine or diabolical — the point is not to arrive at an answer. The question is rather: how can everything be activated?”
The actual Devil seems to make an appearance in The School of Night. The novel constitutes an extended suicide note written by a photographer called Kristian Hadeland, who shares a religiously resonant name (Christian Hades-land) with a man Kathrine buries in Star but whose doppelganger keeps showing up, and in The Third Realm hitches a ride with her husband. School tells the story of Kristian’s rise and fall, in what is a bit too obviously a rehashing of the Faust myth. As a petulant young man, Kristian spurns a middle class life in Norway for art school in London. There he meets a group of young “creatives” putting on a production of Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus, including a Dutch artist named Hans, who makes creepy animatronic rats and turtles. Kristian is arrogant but artistically stalled — a bit like Karl Ove at various points in My Struggle — until one night he accidentally kills a homeless man on his way to a kinky tryst with the woman directing Faustus. Soon after, he starts making photographs “on a higher level.” But a grainy picture of him, from a CCTV camera, is printed in the papers, and he lives in fear of discovery until he is caught by the police. Then, after Hans’s mysterious intervention, he is abruptly freed. On his release, Kristian is greeted by the Dutchman, who promptly turns his head up toward the sky and opens and closes his mouth three times in a row, “like a fish’s.” If you’ve been paying attention, you’ll remember that this is the same tic Arne and Tove’s son performs in Star, and Jesper, the death metal drummer, repeats at the end of The Third Realm. “Enjoying your freedom?” Hans asks, confirming his role as Kristian’s Mephistopheles, the satanic figure who brokers a deal to trade his soul for artistic greatness.
The second part of the book flashes forward. Kristian is on a trip to New York to open a career-defining retrospective at MoMA. He has developed a reputation for edgy, existentially challenging work, as in a series called “The Dead,” in which corpses are posed as models. In a live-streamed public conversation, Kristian wows the audience with aperçus (“We might consider that the photograph is the moment’s dead body”) before he’s tempted to give the people too much of the self-revelation they seem to want from the Great Artist, and divulges the incident with the homeless man. The mood instantly sours, and, though he avoids legal trouble, Kristian is predictably cancelled. The upside is that he has more time to spend with his family. That’s also the downside. A few months into Kristian’s humiliating new (and Knausgaardian) life as a stay-at-home dad, his son Leo wakes up and declares that he will die that day, an omen Kristian breezily dismisses. While they’re out on a father-son expedition to the Lego store, Kristian’s wife, Yelena, answers the door to find a woman Kristian had slept with in New York. “She said she knew you well and would come back later when you got home. Her name was Sonja. Who is she?” Yelena texts him. As Leo trails behind him through London, Kristian internally debates how exactly to lie to her. Distracted, he darts across the street right as a light changes. His son runs to follow him — and gets hit by a bus.
When Yelena refuses to have another child, Kristian flees in shame and anger to a house on a remote Norwegian island (owned by Egil, from The Morning Star) to write his life story before killing himself. That’s when Hans shows up, seemingly unaged. Kristian wonders if his old friend is going to carry him off to the underworld, but, in a morality play register that, thankfully, Knausgaard has spared us until the end, Hans tells him that “Hell is here” — an echo of Marlowe’s Faustus. He brings Kristian into the cottage’s bathroom and shows him Leo through the mirror. Kristian tries to apologize, but Leo can’t hear him. “You got everything you asked for, Kristian,” Hans says. “But there’s always a price.” As the epigraph to The Morning Star reads, from the Book of Revelation, “And in those days shall men seek death, and shall not find it; and shall desire to die, and death shall flee from them.”
This novel, propulsive in spite of its flaws, is something of a parenthesis in the Star series, at least as it has unfolded so far. If The Third Realm, as the critic Leo Robson pointed out, was concerned with questions of how unities are always composite — parts of the brain, aspects of the human personality, and implicitly the sections of the novel, and the novels in the series — The School of Night has a clearer preoccupation: the social and moral price of being an artist. It almost seems like an allegory for what Knausgaard himself accomplished with My Struggle by subordinating his life to his art, and his art to his life, and leaving a trail of emotional destruction in his wake. Is it a coincidence, then, that in the final scene of The School of Night, Kristian is staring in the mirror, trying to break through it to access his child beyond? My Struggle began when, instead of looking out of a window, Karl Ove used it as a mirror. For better or for worse, it seems that he can’t stop looking in.
In Summer, the last of the “Seasons” quartet, Knausgaard reflects on a conversation he had with his editor about “how one can tell a story about something one has experienced personally without giving one’s own version of it,” Knausgaard writes. “It was as if a whole new realm of possibilities opened up around what I wanted to narrate.” His self, despite its many articulations, had become a “crab-like carapace,” whose blinkering fixity “is the very opposite of literature.” You can only play the My Struggle card once. A few pages later, he resolves “to change the content of ‘I’ completely,” and begins to interweave his own diary-like entries with first-person fictions told from the perspective of an old Norwegian woman who had an affair with a Nazi at the bitter end of the Second World War. This new, variable first-person pronoun pointed the way toward the Star books, where Knausgaard gives us a multitude of I’s — 21, to be precise.
Knausgaard seems in this series to be attempting what he called, in an introduction to a new edition of Dostoevsky’s Brothers Karamazov, “a collective novel,” “about the profusion of voices, how they are intertwined and, though they themselves are unable to see it, how they form one whole, one connection, one chorus.” (Though he doesn’t acknowledge it, Knausgaard is parroting Russian critic Mikhail Bakhtin, who described Dostoevsky’s narrative as “a plurality of independent and unmerged voices and consciousnesses, a genuine polyphony of fully valid voices.”) In Brothers, we sense that Ivan, Alyosha, and Zosima aren’t just mouthpieces for Dostoevsky, but autonomous voices who might surprise not just readers, but their author. That is one reason the novel’s debates are so vivid, why their stakes are so high.
Knausgaard is working not only in Dostoevsky’s shadow — Crime and Punishment gets an extended mention in The Wolves of Eternity, and in The School of Night Kristian Hadeland’s paranoia recalls Raskolnikov’s — but also in Thomas Mann’s, and Doctor Faustus gets name-checked in the latest book. But, unlike the Old Masters he seems keenest to invoke, Knausgaard tends to be weakest on ideas. Stumbling through the overgrown thicket of Wolves, with its discussions of woodland biology, or the ruminations on neuroscience in The Third Realm, or the Wikipedia-level discussion of Renaissance esotericism or computers in The School of Night, you’re more likely to think of The Overstory than of Notes from the Underground. (I’d rather read Knausgaard on defecation than predestination, let alone whether machines can think or trees can feel.) The contrast is clearest in dialogue. Dostoevsky and Mann draw us into crackling debates, but discussion in Knausgaard often feels more Platonic than polyphonic, with one character simply teeing up the other. “Pockets of consciousness?” a doctor asks another in The Third Realm. “It doesn’t sound particularly scientific if you ask me. You’ve not got caught up in some New Age rubbish, I hope?” “New Age rubbish?” the other snaps back. “Yes. Postmodernist relativism or whatever you want to call it.” This exchange is shaded with irony, of course, but nonetheless representative: concepts are named and poked at but rarely unfolded. In a portentous scene in The School of Night, Hans and Kristian discuss an early photograph by Daguerre that shows a shadowy human figure — the first, we learn, captured in the history of photography. At Hans’s prompting, Kristian asks if it is the Devil. “Exactly,” Hans replies. “The fallen angel. You can smile, but people have believed in the Divine for as long as people have existed. There have been sightings, too.” Hans suggests that “it’s no coincidence that the Devil is present when the first photograph is taken,” then winks and takes a sip of his beer; soon the conversation is finished before it’s really begun. Later, Hans’s words echo in Kristian’s head, and ours. But the characters’ exchange is a mere delivery mechanism for information. It begins to seem as if Knausgaard’s chorality is an attempt to compensate for an inability, or unwillingness, to write decent dialogue. Every narrator in these novels is a round character, to borrow E.M. Forster’s term for one that seems to be more than the author’s puppet. But too often the people they interact with are as flat as the page they’re written on. The reader is left to do the work of integrating the various monologues into something resembling a truly dialogic novel.
In My Struggle, formless, even sloppy rumination over thousands of pages is part of the whole aesthetic of the project, a kind of full-disclosure that shows how a single life can feel like the whole world; here, though, it smacks of self-indulgence. But for Knausgaard sheer scale almost becomes a justification in itself. In the unrelenting volume of the Star books he makes tens of lives feel both big and small at the same time. The cumulative effect of the slowly rising tide of this series, less roman-fleuve than roman-flood, is an uneasy and not unpleasurable uncertainty, both within the novels themselves and at the level of the whole project. How much farther can he go? And will we have the patience to follow him? There is much to resolve in the remaining three novels: a narrator in The Morning Star lets a baby drop from a changing table at a daycare and doesn’t tell the parents; a character in Wolves drives a semitruck filled with cryogenically frozen corpses around Russia, and, when the star appears, starts hearing movement in the freezers. We still don’t really understand why the black metal band has been murdered. Answering these questions would inevitably sap the books of the uncertainty that gives them their charge, particularly if, as the publisher’s descriptions of future volumes suggest, Knausgaard plans to veer further into the realm of science fiction.
If the series begins to sink under its own weight, though, it almost doesn’t matter, because in some sense Knausgaard himself remains the main character, and even when we skim over another few pages on, say, the neuroscience of consciousness, we’re still addicted to Knausgaard’s details, to the minutiae he makes meaningful. And there — in the crabs, in the birds, in the impossibly positive pregnancy test, in the strange feeling you get when the plausibly divine stranger runs his hand through your hair — we sense flickers of the supernatural, just as, in My Struggle, we felt the force of things as they are. But the only divinity a novel can really accommodate is its author, and the closest thing to faith a novelist can convincingly evoke is doubt. That might be because realism has so fully colonized the form as to put the supernatural at a permanent disadvantage. Or the inescapable pull of the worldly may have more to do with the fact — Knausgaard’s blessing, and his curse, the Faustian bargain he struck with My Struggle — that none of his characters is more interesting than Karl Ove, and the fantastic is nowhere near as transcendent as the real. Knausgaard might seek something beyond himself. But it flees from him.
