The latest multivolume project from the Norwegian writer Karl Ove Knausgaard — author of the six-part novel “My Struggle” and a nonfiction quartet with a seasonal theme — is concerned with the inhabitants of an unnamed town during a recent August, when a new heavenly body appears in the sky.
In the opening volume, “The Morning Star,” he approaches this phenomenon head-on, using nine narrators to explore the star’s possible relationship to unusual local events, including the apparent resurrection of a dead neurosurgery patient and the ritualistic killings of three members of a death metal band, Kvitekrist.
The result, published in 2021 in a British English rendering by the translator Martin Aitken, is an exceptional piece of work, poignant, wry, at times ridiculously compelling, drawing on Knausgaard’s gifts for animating the mundane while also revealing something like the opposite of his autofiction-behemoth self — a writer with uncanny access to a broad range of experiences and impressions. There is a Karl Ove stand-in of sorts, the academic Arne, who’s come to the town for a summer break. But five of the other narrators are women, most notably the Church of Norway pastor Kathrine.
The go-to comparison for Knausgaard’s new direction is Stephen King, but a closer precedent — and more likely influence — is Lars von Trier’s film “Melancholia” (2011), which portrays two sisters (played by Charlotte Gainsbourg and Kirsten Dunst) reacting to the emergence of a rogue planet hurtling Earthward. Writing in the Book Review in 2015, Knausgaard claimed that von Trier’s films were a “crushing” reminder of “how far beneath that level my own work is” — to the degree that he could not bring himself to watch “Antichrist,” despite owning a copy of the DVD. But in “The Morning Star,” he invited the comparison — and survived it.
The problem now is self-comparison — maintaining the level he has set. As if to mitigate this risk, Knausgaard has said that he views the volumes as autonomous, and the latest installment, “The Third Realm,” would benefit from being read in isolation. It largely takes place over the same two days as “The Morning Star” does, and again uses nine narrators — eight of them new — to fill out the details of Arne’s holiday, the deathbed reincarnation and the Kvitekrist murders, while inching the story forward only a little. (A second book, “The Wolves of Eternity,” which appeared in translation last year, functions more like a prequel.) The first narrators we encounter are the depressive painter Tove (Arne’s wife) and the teacher Gaute (Kathrine’s husband), and both sections contain exchanges depicted in “The Morning Star,” with little gained from the return visit beyond a mild frisson of dramatic irony.
A certain amount of repetition occurs within the book itself. Two of the 12 sections begin with middle-aged men observing natural beauty from a landing airplane. One of these characters, the neurologist Jarle, describes his reflection in the mirror twice. (We are left in no doubt whatever about his baldness.)
In larger ways, too, “The Third Realm” is a wildly over-insistent piece of work, with a succession of ultra-pertinent symbols and reference points undermining the realist plausibility that was so central to “The Morning Star.” Take Kathrine, for example. She is invited by Arne to speak to his students about representations of the underworld. Then she receives a visit from Geir, the detective investigating the murders, and is asked about whether “the Devil exists.” Her best friend’s husband, Martin, attends a screening of Carl Dreyer’s film “The Word,” which culminates in a resurrection scene, while her daughter, Line, goes to see Jean Cocteau’s 1950 film “Orpheus,” a retelling of the Greek hero’s journey to the underworld. When Line comes home, her housemates are watching a Sandra Bullock movie with a nudging title: “Premonition.”
Pulling off an exercise like this, in which the extreme engulfs the everyday, requires a tonal and rhetorical tightrope act. Knausgaard avoids one danger, self-defensive irony, but seems to fall prey to the opposite vice: po-faced earnestness, a lack of detachment. “Everything had been so good,” Line reflects about her sinister new boyfriend, Valdemar. “And then he had to go and be a madman.” When Kathrine’s sister tells her she is writing an article about doomsday visions, Kathrine responds: “What on earth prompted you to write about that? Oh, of course — the new star.” D’oh!
There’s a moment of unintended bathos when the undertaker Syvert, the central figure of “The Wolves of Eternity,” informs his wife of what he calls “a weird situation at work”: He hasn’t received a single corpse for three days. She is convinced “something like” that had happened before. It turns out she was thinking of “when the website was down.”
The central theme — more overt than in “The Morning Star” — is the limit of the human mind. The book’s title refers to a mystical theory espoused by Valdemar, but it also denotes the conceptual space that Knausgaard aspires to occupy, somewhere that eludes the man-made dichotomies to which the characters make repeated appeal: inner and outer, past and present, heart and head, life and death, science and superstition.
The novel is intended to serve as what Jarle, in a book he is writing on the brain, calls an “explanans,” or explanatory framework. But Knausgaard’s approach is too reliant on the sort of rationalist directness used by his cast — his chosen “explanandum” — to achieve the altitude that Jarle’s passage describes. The method is at odds with the message.
One idea that recurs throughout the book is that unity is always a composite. It’s explored with reference to the “regions” of the brain (which form the structure of Jarle’s manuscript); human personality; the poet Fernando Pessoa’s personas, or “heteronyms”; Descartes’s belief in segmenting tasks; and the biblical paintings on which Tove is working — the series, she says, “I’ve been waiting my whole life for.”
As a writer of sequences — by this point, a sequence specialist — Knausgaard has reason to be invested in this vision of the fragment. And while the division of “My Struggle” into volumes was essentially commercial and practical — a 4,000-page book is as difficult to sell as it is to hold — this time he is more actively exploiting the potential of the roman-fleuve, a form with an ability to complicate and comment on its own procedures, to work toward vast cumulative effects, to absorb and absolve its weaker constituent parts.
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