Thoughts on Books I’ve Read Recently

           Next came three novels of which The Third Realm is the most recent. I wolfed each of these down as soon as they were shipped to me.  For some reason I thought the third was the last of a trilogy. I don’t know why I thought that because I recently read somewhere there’s more of this series on the way. [Wikipedia says, “A fourth book, Nattskolen (The Night School), was published (in Norwegian) in October 2023. The fifth book, Arendal, was published in Norwegian on October 25, 2024”.] I should have known better. Maybe I had in the back of my mind his final sentence of the last of My Struggle’s sixth, 1152 page, volume (I wonder how many people on Earth made it that far),  the bizarre declaration that, “I will revel in, truly revel in, the thought that I am no longer a writer.” 

But Knausgaard’s never stopping. His prolificacy was apparent as he was churning out the My Struggle series at insane rates. I imagine him pecking away maniacally and around the clock, seated in some cabin glowing orange in the nordic polar night, his hair growing long around him, constant cigarettes and coffee stoking the engine, all the while he’s tormented with guilt for spending all his time writing instead of being with his family. And that's the very kind of thing he's writing about: His Struggle.

The Morning Star, The Wolves of Eternity, and The Third Realm are truly novels, not part of the confusing label of auto-fiction given to My Struggle. Auto-fiction is really just autobiography in the vivid style of a novel. The three novels follow the experiences of multiple people as something uncanny and extraordinary happens to the world. Some characters appear in other books or sometimes we're given another character’s perception of the same events‒maybe that of a spouse or family member. Most of them are Norwegians and most of it takes place in Norway and sure enough we recognize a very Knausgaardian writer character and a woman that seems based on Knausgaard’s ex-wife. Everybody smokes.  What they experience is an eschatological event marked by the rising of a sinister new star in the sky. Take the quotidian world Knausgaard had just detailed in multiple tomes and thrust on it fantastic apocalyptic end-of-days biblical prophecies dismissed as bronze age ramblings by the modern secular-rationalist. The supernatural disrupts the nonbelieving modern characters with whom we relate and who are the kind of people what make up wider Knausgaardian oeuvre, it makes nature unnatural, science dumbstruck, and the mentally ill better equipped to perceive and tune into the new reality. Bit by bit and mostly on the periphery (most of the characters maintain a distanced and rationalizing relationship with the star and news of it), the realms of life and death are becoming upended as people go on with their lives, their obsessions, their delusions. They also make meals and drop the kids off for school and they might have a job they go to. All very Knausgaardian.  

The best parts of these novels are when the everyday world is pierced and somebody gets a peek or full immersion into the ominous realm imposing itself on our world, a visitation by extramundane beings or some version of an afterlife. Most memorable is the extensive journey of the sleazy journalist Jostein when he falls into a coma and finds himself staggering about in a murky limbo world of the Undead. He comes across some ferrymen at the water’s edge, “their faces of crude and brutal appearance, their heads shaved, as big as the heads of oxen, though with long pigtails dangling down between their shoulder blades from the rear of their scalps.” These “Ox-heads” then lay somnambulant shades on litters, ax some horses, beat shields with swords and burn boats like something out of a Viking funeral rite.  (Unfortunately my picture of this other world was tainted by scenes from things like Stranger Things‒another reason to not watch such things. Nothing worse than a second-rate Hollywood hijacking of portrayals that have more potential.) 

Scenes like Jostein in Limbo don’t come often but we’re waiting for them and they’re what keeps us turning the pages. Anticipation of them also imbues all the everyday concerns of the characters with new meaning. It is a timeless tool of art, of the ars poetica: modify or upturn the metaphysics of the world, pull the rug out from under our complacency to put our lives in a completely different light. The result of depicting a Second Coming isn’t what you’d expect. We get as much or more out of seeing the everyday lives of characters through apocalypse-supplied tinted glasses than we do of the fantastic visions themselves, these imaginings of what an alternate world might be like. Knausgaard holds back the goods, gives periodic tasty samplings so we can consider the lives of others and ours from this what if perspective. Consider the popularity of the apocalyptic in our media, from zombies to alien invasion.

Art makes us imagine things from a different perspective or reminds us of important things we fail to keep in mind through the slog of our routine existence. Through the My Struggle series I was riveted by page after page by biographical facts and the daily miscellanea of his life because Knausgaard had framed his life, hence our life, in the existential. Its 1.3 millions words begin with death, his father’s death, and everything that follows is tremors of this seismic event, it casts a greater meaning on his subsequent reevaluation of his own life and on meaning itself. In this Morning Star series everyday lives like Knausgaard’s and ours are roused and put in a light by something extraordinary, by a fundamental shift in the greater world and beyond.  If our world is a haunted house it’s artists like Knausgaard doing the haunting.