As I Lay Dying

The novelist Karl Ove Knausgaard became famous for paying extraordinarily close attention to the texture of everyday experience, yet he has always been attuned to what might lie beyond it. His second novel, A Time for Everything (2004), was about angels. In A Man in Love (2009), the second volume of his autobiographical opus My Struggle, he described the christening of his first daughter, Vanja. After the ceremony the priest offered Communion. To everyone’s surprise, including his own, Karl Ove proceeded to the altar, knelt, drank the wine, and took the wafer on his tongue. “Why had I done it?” he wrote. “Had I become a Christian?”

Then there was what I had been working on over the last year. Not what I wrote, but what I was slowly realizing I wanted to explore: the sacred…. It was about flesh and blood, it was about birth and death, and we were linked to it through our bodies and our blood, those we beget and those we bury, constantly, continually, a storm blew through our world and it always had, and the only place I knew where this was formulated, the most extreme yet simplest things, was in these holy scriptures.

He doesn’t believe—he is clear about that—and yet the ritual exerts its pull: “However, the sacred. Flesh and blood. Everything that changes and is the same.” This desire to be joined with the eternal—a connection involving not disembodied spirit but, as in a Viking cult, the stuff of bone and sacrifice—goes some way toward explaining the power of certain indelible passages from My Struggle, notably the ones concerning the father’s alcoholic demise and the moment when Karl Ove’s wife, Linda, gives birth to Vanja, descending “like an animal” into the pain of repeated, cascading contractions. Critics marveled at Knausgaard’s ability to hold the reader’s attention for hundreds of pages of noodling, to transfigure boredom into fixation, but he didn’t do so simply by stringing together banal observations; there was a primal core pulsing underneath the children’s birthday parties and writerly agita and marital spats. This man so hungry to account for every moment of life was always pointing toward death.

Four years ago Knausgaard—who specializes in novels in series, as if that special relationship of part to whole, or the demands it makes on the reader, holds the key to meaning—published the first book of a new cycle. The Morning Star tracks the appearance of a hitherto unknown star in the sky over Norway and the miraculous and terrifying events that it inaugurates. Next came The Wolves of Eternity (2021), which goes back forty years to tell the story of a Norwegian drifter-turned-funeral-director and his long-lost half-sister, a Russian biologist; near the end of the book, we jump back to the present day, and the star ascends. The newest volume to be translated into English, The Third Realm (2022), covers the days of the star’s reign and ends with its disappearance: “And then it shone no more.”

Each of these (very long!) novels is a kaleidoscope of interconnected lives and voices, told from multiple points of view by first-person narrators. We meet a literature professor, a nurse, a journalist, and a police officer. An architect struggling with creative block. A female minister consulting on the Norwegian translation of the Bible (as Knausgaard himself did in 2011) who is pregnant, though she and her husband haven’t slept together for months. Each book also contains an essay or book excerpt written by one of the characters. One is about various cultural traditions of death and dying; another is a meditation on Nikolai Fyodorov, the Russian philosopher who advocated resurrecting the dead using scientific means.

At first the Morning Star series appears to be an exploration of the sacred and supernatural, a kind of biblical horror story. (In the Bible the “morning star” refers to Lucifer—“O morning star, son of the dawn! You have been cast down to the earth, you who once laid low the nations!”—and also to Christ himself.) Yet the series is just as much an exploration of consciousness, of the habits and syntax of thought. Very often what Knausgaard’s characters think about is thinking itself. A biologist researches forest sentience and the communication networks between trees and mushrooms. A neuroscientist wonders whether people in vegetative states have thoughts or memories that can’t be seen on brain scans.

At other times the events of the plot gesture at the limits of rational cognition. An artist in the throes of psychosis hears a taunting voice that seems to be God or the devil. A teenager has nightmares that may be visitations. The thrashing, chaotic sounds of the black metal band Domen send its listeners into ecstatic, altered states. When a psychiatric patient screams that “the Deevel’s coming,” the staff doesn’t believe him, but the reader should.

At their best, the Morning Star books ask profound and troubling questions about the scope of human knowledge and create a potent climate of trepidation and anxiety. But at their worst, they are bloated and sloppy, overstuffed with theme and burdened by tedious and banal dialogue. Across some two thousand pages—that’s not counting the fourth volume, not yet translated—they generate suspense and defer resolving it, which could be interesting but in practice is simultaneously irritating and enervating. Knausgaard has a hypnotist’s ability to entrance, but The Wolves of Eternity is one of the sloggiest swamps I’ve ever trudged through. I wanted so badly to give up. By the end of The Third Realm I felt smothered by the monstrous bagginess of the enterprise. It was simply too much book. I am all for literature that refuses the demand to entertain, that attends to the useless and leftover, that scoffs at being “taut” or efficient. But there is waste in the sense of glorious excess and extravagance, and then there is wasting someone’s time.

The series starts strong. Since Knausgaard’s form is so relentlessly interior, his challenge is not so much to convince the reader of the truth of the world he has created, as a science fiction writer does; it’s to make her interested in his characters’ reactions to this unbelievable event. Each chapter of The Morning Star quickly establishes a quotidian reality, which is ruptured by the appearance of the strange incandescence in the sky. Many of the characters are coping with compulsions, usually drinking but also eating and abusing prescription drugs. Several have unhappy marriages. Their trains of thought are tangled in rationalizations, which subtly introduces the question of how the miraculous, if it occurred, would be rationalized away. How would we cope if something fell out of the bounds of accepted or predicted experience? Would we be able to recognize a truly unassimilable event, should one occur?

There is a briskness to the sentences, a fractured and fragmented rhythm to how the thoughts of Knausgaard’s narrators move along. Many paragraphs are brief, some lasting only a sentence or two. Thoughts proceed, turn around, double back, and go on in another direction. Some pages resemble someone’s to-do list, but Knausgaard grants most of his characters an aesthetic inner life—they listen to music and have some commentary on it; others are startlingly observant, such as the nurse who locks her car doors and notices that “the wing mirrors slowly open out like the ears of an animal that had suddenly become aware of something,” or the professor who thinks “the two open windows in the kitchen looked like wings…as if the house had just landed and would soon take off and fly away again.” The book vibrates with a sensitivity to the natural world, and it feels right when the narrators metaphorically suffuse inanimate objects with biological life.

Still, images are rarely lingered over. Thoughts tend to be directed toward action, what to do or say next. Objects do not open to flights of reminiscence, as is so typical in literary fiction. At one point an OR nurse named Solveig is on duty when a young girl is brought to the hospital after a terrible bus accident. She is hemorrhaging in the brain and chest, but strangely her heart has not stopped. The nurse observes that “she was wearing a little necklace, it looked like she’d made it herself, plastic beads in all sorts of colors, with little boxy letters in the middle spelling the name ALICE.”

One can imagine, in another novel, Solveig thinking back to her own childhood, or her daughter’s, to a similar necklace one of them made or wore. But here Alice’s necklace is simply Alice’s necklace, a somewhat sentimental sign of innocence, a close-up to make the reader feel some extra urgency and emotion over her condition. And the description is generic; the only specificity is the girl’s name. Or it could be that making the object any more particular would be tactless; this little girl’s life is ebbing away, and Solveig simply doesn’t have time to identify the necklace’s colors. What matters is the type of necklace it is. Being any more specific would risk lyricism. So without any further ado we move on to the more important bits, the blood and bone, the tension of whether Alice will live or die.

The autobiographical first person, which Knausgaard used in My Struggle as well as the seasonal quartet that followed it, can create a nuclear kind of energy in a text. It compounds possibility, creating a character that flickers between art and life, being both and neither at once. Writing a fictional character in the first-person voice is a dilemma of a very different order. The moves an author can make are more limited. At times Knausgaard seems to lose faith in the first person, or to be unsure that it can give the reader everything he wants her to know. In The Wolves of Eternity, when we first meet Alevtina, she looks out the window at the people on the sidewalk below:

From higher up they’d resemble trilobites at the bottom of the sea. It was the kind of thought only someone in my job would have, I thought to myself with a smile, spooning some instant into a mug and adding the boiling water.

Perhaps a scientist, when she has a scientist-like thought, reflects to herself that she is a scientist, but it sounds more like Knausgaard wants to make sure that we’ve noticed Alevtina’s reference and drawn the correct conclusion from it. Yet overall, being locked into the first person allows Knausgaard to generate heaps of suspense, particularly in The Morning Star, where hellish beasts dart around the periphery—scary birdlike things with human faces, a creature like a man with a huge oxlike head and yellow eyes (to say nothing of the ghosts).The reader, who knows more than the characters, feels a mounting fear as she turns the pages.

In one of the final chapters, Jostein, a grizzled journalist and alcoholic, has a stroke and finds himself wandering in a kind of bardo, searching for his dead son in order to bring him back to life. I found those pages agonizing, even panic-inducing to read. Knausgaard, it turns out, is pretty good at playing Stephen King. By the time I finished The Morning Star, the door that it prises open between earth and the hereafter had become an opening in my mind between the fictional world and my own. I had become anxious and obsessed with dying, fearful of the afterlife, and filled with dread that I, too, would hear the kalikalikalikalik call of revelation coming from the woods.

Toward the close of The Morning Star, Egil’s son Viktor sees a person through the window who is, he hysterically avers, not human. “Had the gates of Hell opened?,” Egil wonders, strangely unperturbed at the thought. Some time later another character looks for Egil and Viktor at their house, and they are nowhere to be seen. What happened to them? In the final chapter we get Egil’s essay, which culminates in a gripping and eerie account of him meeting a grief-wracked father on a train, accompanying the stranger to his daughter’s funeral, and then seeing the bloodied little girl in a park. The novel ends with everyone’s whereabouts unresolved and the reader tense, expectant, on the verge of some terrible knowledge. So why does The Wolves of Eternity jump back forty years and, for eight hundred pages, divert the larger story with a tale about two new characters? Is this sadism or avant-gardism? Or is it merely the misguided belief that more—more characters, more pages, more backstory, more ideas—can make a work more meaningful?

The first half belongs to Syvert. We meet him in the 1980s, a teenager just returned from military service. His father, also named Syvert, died years ago when his car went off a bridge. (The accident, it turns out, was witnessed by a character from The Morning Star named Helge, who was himself a child at the time and too scared to report what he saw.) While living at home, Syvert develops a crush on a girl in town and plays soccer with old friends. He also has strange dreams about his father and discovers a cache of his father’s letters, written in Russian. He has the letters translated (in exchange, the translator asks him to read Crime and Punishment) and learns that his father, at the time he died, was having an affair with a woman in Moscow and was on the brink of leaving his mother. So committed is Knausgaard to deferring readerly satisfaction that when Syvert’s crush finally comes over to his house, she spends the night and he doesn’t even kiss her. (He marries her later, if anyone still cares.)

The second half of the book jumps forward to the present day. We meet Syvert’s half-sister, Alevtina, who is a biologist. She has a friend, a poet who exists in the novel to give Knausgaard an excuse to include her inset essay, “The Wolves of Eternity,” about Fyodorov, cryogenic freezing, and the dream of resurrection. (The title sounds like the name of a teen band but comes from an essay by Marina Tsvetaeva.) The Syvert and Alevtina sections are interrupted by a brief minor plot involving a trucker who delivers canisters used for cryogenic freezing. Toward the end of the book, in the time of the star, we hear thumps coming from inside the canisters.

Interdependent characters whose past actions come to light, fates tied together in a web of consequence—this is the bread and butter of literary realism. But my sense is that Knausgaard is trying to do something a bit different with his web; he seems less interested in the connectedness of lives than in the idea that thinking itself can assume the shape of a collectivity, a kind of organism that supersedes any individual existence.

As a young graduate student, Alevtina wants to study mycorrhiza, the collaborations between trees and fungi. She is drawn to the forest because it feels so separate from human life—“silent and unforthcoming, with a presence I sensed, yet was unable to penetrate.” Alevtina is not religious, but through her Knausgaard offers an alternative to the “flesh and blood” of the divine. On the train to a remote research station where she intends to write a dissertation proposal, she gazes out the window and sees “life upon life, stretching away into the distance.” At the research station she forages and eats hallucinogenic mushrooms. Predictably, she experiences both the high of connection—“Everything that existed was patterns, whirls, streams. I was too”—and dissociated terror.

The most generous way to read The Wolves of Eternity is as Knausgaard’s attempt to create a novelistic structure akin to the forest network that Alevtina studies. If the individual characters are trees whose meaning is greater in a collective, then perhaps this second novel is meant to be a kind of mushroom delivering nutrients—history, backstory—to the literary organism. What matters, then, is not any one character or plotline—with all apologies to Egin and Viktor, lost in the woods with the scary demons—but the system in which they are placed. “Could we even imagine another language?” Alevtina asks. “A non-human language? A non-human thought? Another way of existing in the world than our own?”

Alas, he doesn’t pull it off. At times I found myself wishing I were reading whatever nonfiction books Knausgaard lifted his information about trees from, rather than getting it through Alevtina. Much of her narration feels like paraphrase. Such thoughts may be realistic—researchers do think about research—but the execution is plodding. Novels of ideas can’t just trot out ideas that are, in themselves, interesting. They can’t merely put a good question or provocative thought in the mind of a character. “What are thoughts anyway? They come to us as neither images nor sounds, but as something else, a kind of presence that is partly linguistic, partly—well, what?” asks a neuroscientist in The Third Realm. This sort of stoner fumbling isn’t enough to activate the material. And spread thin over dozens of characters, it is puppetry.

Reviewing A Man in Love in 2014, Sheila Heti noted how Knausgaard nests thoughts within one another, so that the reader loses track of the original point, “as if all thinking were a digression within a digression: even our lives are digressions in a larger story which we have lost sight of, imagining our own story to be the central plot, which it both is and is not.” Such a digressive structure was magnificently effective when a single narrator was in charge. The problem here is that when Knausgaard applies digression beyond the frame of the self, when an entire novel is a digression, the reader’s patience is stretched so far it breaks. The lack of constraint becomes a vortex of the arbitrary.

Perhaps this detour into Syvert and Alevtina would have worked if The Wolves of Eternity included more of the ruminations that Knausgaard wove so spellbindingly into the early volumes of My Struggle. But here we have the tedium of consciousness without any of the insight. One character is a dullard, the other is a mouthpiece. It seemed to me the book would never end, and for too long it didn’t. What would we lose if the narrative did not track every dead end of Alevtina’s research? Does one need to know quite so much about her relationship with her adoptive father? The multitude of being can shimmer with overwhelming intensity—each of us individual, with our attachments and passions, making our little breakfasts, feeling ourselves so full and large, while each is only a brief and passing blink of existence on our way to a death of which we know nothing and for which we are not prepared—but only if the reader isn’t fighting the desire on every page to close the book and never open it again.

The Third Realm picks up where the The Morning Star left off, like a television show rebooting after a disastrous second season. Also like a television show, this time we get the perspectives of minor characters from the first volume—a spouse, a child, others we met in passing. There are two main through lines. One concerns a man, Ramsvik, who was pronounced dead in The Morning Star and then, as the surgeons were cutting open his chest to donate his organs, showed vital signs. In The Third Realm we also get a chapter from Ramsvik’s point of view, in which he remembers episodes from his life as if on a loop that he can’t escape. The exchanges about consciousness between Ramsvik’s doctors lack dramatic tension—one could get the same jolt from a newspaper article—but being inside his mind is distressing and powerful. It’s as if Knausgaard remembered too late that he’s a fiction writer and can do fiction writer things.

In its best passages, The Third Realm develops a plotline from The Morning Star involving the Norwegian black metal scene and a police investigation into an appallingly gruesome triple murder that a hardened detective comes to believe involved the presence of the actual devil. The victims are three members of a highly secretive, anticapitalist black metal band called Domen. At one point the detective interviews a music historian, which allows Knausgaard to give the reader, somewhat hammily, some cultural background without breaking the strictures of the first person.

Knausgaard introduces us to Domen through the point of view of Line, a naive girl who has gotten romantically involved with the lead singer, Valdemar, a mysterious cultlike figure who speaks in koans, screams onstage, and flirts with national socialism. (Valdemar believes that there are three historical periods—the realm of God, the realm of spirit, and the realm of man—and that we are in, yes, the third realm.) Most of the time Line’s narration is simple, even banal. When she arrives at the concert—an invitation-only happening on a farm in Sweden, where her phone is immediately confiscated—she notices that everyone is dressed in old-fashioned attire: black hats, waistcoats and suspenders, white dresses. Her black Adidas track pants no longer feel appropriate:

Maybe I could borrow a dress off the fine-haired girl?

Ha ha.

I lay back down again and felt like crying.

But there was no reason. Was I supposed to break down just because I didn’t fit in? Maybe they were the misfits, not me.

Domen’s music transforms not just what Line thinks (she “gets” metal) but how she thinks it:

Gradually the music began to alter shape and the boundless noise occasionally and briefly stopped, and this would repeat itself, becoming a rhythm that occurred through swathes of sound, drawn out through lengthy sections, or else descending in sharp, repetitive pinpoint strikes, each musician as if immersed in his own pandemonium, and then, fleetingly, they would come together, elements of some grander system, now meeting, only a moment later to depart from each other once more.

Across this whole series of books, altered states—induced by alcohol, psychedelics, music—provide relief from the one-thing-after-another plod of consciousness. As Line’s mind is blown open by the chaotic intensity of the sound—as she gets plugged into another, less egotistical dimension of feeling—so the style of the prose changes, becoming sinuous. I wish that Knausgaard had written a stand-alone novel just about Domen. His capacity to pay close attention to the grain of experience feels most worthwhile when the experience is a primal one, when it gets close to that sacred “flesh and bone.”

It cannot be easy to write anything after My Struggle. As Tim Parks noted a decade ago in these pages, it wasn’t even easy to finish the series.^* The Knausgaard who wrote the later volumes was a different Knausgaard—fame and the pressures of publishing, speaking, and being hailed as a genius were bound to transform the life of the artist as well as his project. He deserves credit for venturing into new territories. And yet, despite the seeming differences between the Morning Star series and My Struggle, the problem may be that he has not ventured far enough—not gone deep enough into the horror that he peeks at before turning away.

Perhaps all will be revealed in time. I don’t intend to find out. It may be that the Morning Star series is a victim of its early achievement: the first volume was so successful at making me acknowledge my own death that I resented spending my life with what came next. Knausgaard seems to be under the impression that a reader will follow him down all highways and byways, willing to travel indefinitely to no clear destination. A writer who expects that kind of faith has gone from being interested in God to playing God.