In which we stroke the third rail of specious speculation on structure and significance in the “Morning Star” series.
We’d just finished the super-heavy ending of “Saturday Night Fever,” inspired to re-watch after streaming a sweet Bee Gees documentary. Wife lazed on couch, laughing at reels about English language oddities, how “baked” and “naked” aren’t said the same way despite similar spelling, how every “C” in “Pacific Ocean” is pronounced differently. She questioned the concept of doom-scrolling, and even proclaimed herself a joy-scroller. She regularly DMs me reels and, based on sounds that erupt from my face as I watch, I have to admit they’re mostly really actually pretty funny.
But then for some reason I interrupted wife’s joy to ask if I could read aloud the first paragraph of the thing I’ve been working on about Knausgaard’s The Third Realm. She consented and I started reading but didn’t get too many lines into it before she stopped me. It was trying to do too much, she said. It just seemed kinda boring.
To interest readers right away, I’d frontloaded the review’s “big news.” But she didn’t even let me get to the part that reveals the probable structure of Knausgaard’s new series. Wife made it clear I needed to start with something more engaging and simpler, along the lines of “what’s up with Karl Ove’s crazy new series? What do we know about Knausgaard so far, and how does his new Morning Star series and the new volume, The Third Realm, emerge from his previous work?” Good questions, sure, but still it pissed me off that she didn’t even let me get to the end of the first paragraph.
I sat and stewed some, away from her in a chair instead of next to her on the couch, my laptop screen showing the now disparaged opening of the review in progress, pissed but willing to consider the possibility of an enticing new entrance.
Later in bed, almost asleep, I thought the way I’ve written the review makes sense. It’s challenging to show how this single new volume and the new series overall emerge from several thousand pages of previous output. It requires straight-up summarizing information conveyance more than the snazzy sidewinding quippy excerptable hand-wavy point-scorey showy flourishes characteristic of the standard contemporary haute-falutin literaturkritik-grade book report.
The new Morning Star series seems like it will be monumental, with each volume deepening and complicating as much as it clarifies. I now realize that the My Struggle series was comparatively straightforward, thanks to its single narrator, sincere author/narrator overlap, and its stated intention to get as close as it could to the core of the author’s life. The simplicity of its form and focus was essential to its charm, plus it was much easier to write about, or so I now understand, dealing with this new series, which isn’t unengaging and isn’t boring but, like the rest of my review below, seems like the author is letting it take the form it needs to take as it tries to do a lot.
Knausgaard had written about angels and reanimated characters from lines in Genesis, he had written more than three thousand pages about his life, he had written an unconventional observational four-part OULIPO-like/rules-based series of meditative descriptive essayettes on dozens of nouns (eg, apples, plastic bags, frogs, blood, daguerreotype, jellyfish, labia, badgers, vomit, toilet bowls, chimneys, silence, drums), so where could he go from there?
A natural progression would be to write about the fantastic, as in the book involving angels, A Time for Everything, but do so using the quickly/badly “inadvertent”/intuitive technique of My Struggle, with a series of first-person narrators instead of just one, exploring the dominant theme of The Seasons Quartet (interior/exterior, this/that) in an epic, Stephen King-like, HBO/Netflix-ready series concerned with rupturing the membrane between major dialectical oppositions, all while suggesting meta relevance about how one reads so-called serious literature versus how one reads genre novels.
Which is exactly what it seems like he’s doing, and most likely will be doing for at least another decade if my calculations are correct.
The Structure
Consider the third section of the third volume in his third series: it’s narrated by Helge Bråthen, Norway’s “only architect of true international renown.” Humor hardly abounds in The Morning Star series but similarities between architect in novel and author of novel are amusing. Helge has “an impressive mane” (see My Struggle-era author photos) and a similar history of marriages and offspring as the author — consonance enough to consider Helge an authorial avatar, a way for Knausgaard to acknowledge his success and guide understanding of his monumental new series (as its scope comes into view, there’s a chance it nearly triples the size of My Struggle, at least in terms of number of volumes).
In a project committed to dramatization, inclusion of newspaper excerpts lets the author editorialize about the series, describing here for example one of the architect’s projects but suggesting the multi-narrator layering in The Morning Star and The Third Realm:
“The rooms are rectangular boxes stacked on top of each other, each storey displaced in such a way that the overall impression is one of drawers pulled out of an item of furniture. The roof of the box becomes the balcony of the next . . . a space emerges organically, almost like a grotto, and this is where the communal areas are situated . . .”
The association of authors and architects has a clear precedent: Stefan Zwieg’s biographical portraits of great writers (Balzac, Dickens, Dostoevsky, Holderlin, Nietzsche, Kleist, Casanova, Stendhal, Tolstoy) were published in a series called Master Builders: A Typology of the Spirit. Helge, a literal master builder, goes on to talk about how “architecture is functionality,” perhaps with “symbolic value”: “The best thing is when nobody pays the building any attention, but uses it without thinking about it . . . Everything works together and is part of the building’s aura.”
It doesn’t feel like a stretch to read this as the author talking about the structure of his novel, its “building,” when the top of the next page refers to Helge as “the star architect.” It’s almost a pun in a series about the appearance of a new star, and it sets meta-fictional interpretational sensors to maximum alert level. And then a few pages later Knausgaard the master builder of the book, in the guise of Helge the master builder in the book, talking about plans for a new school, delivers the following meta-referential revelation of the structure of the series:
“The building was in the form of a star with an auditorium, study space, a library, staffroom and canteen all in the middle, the classrooms located in the five arms as it were. The idea had come from the starfish — the building was right by the sea — and the North Star.” (page 119)
So that’s it. That’s the structure of the series right there. (Mic drop.)
Consider the shape of a typical star, or starfish: a central area, with five arms or, better yet, rays radiating out, consisting of ten sides. In the series, the central area of the star structure consists of multi-narrator “gathering place” or “interior” volumes related to the star (The Morning Star, The Third Realm), with the peripheral (in the sense of “along the sides of the shape”) or “exterior” volumes consisting of lengthy backstory mostly focused on a single character, set decades in the past, radiating away from yet fundamentally connected to the overall shape. So far, peripheral backstory books include The Wolves of Eternity and the forthcoming fourth volume, The Night School, set in 1985, in London and NYC, about a photographer, and the fifth volume, Arendal, set in 1976, about Wolves-narrator Syvert’s father on an island near Bergen.
The pattern of successive backstory books to come (The Night School followed by Arendal), each relating to one of the five-pointed star’s sides, suggests there will probably be ten total volumes of backstory? And since the first volume includes 666 pages and the star’s significance seems somewhat luciferin, the overall structure and story so far pretty much demand that we refer to the series’ “completely original” structure not as a star or starfish but as a pentagram. That suggests that the series overall will be fifteen books: ten volumes of “exterior” backstory books plus five volumes of “interior” central star-related books. (Only if a final volume encompasses everything preceding it could the structure be called a pentacle, essentially an encircled pentagram, not to be confused with a Pentangle, however.)
Or maybe the star structure will ultimately be based on the Star of David and we can expect twelve exterior volumes, one for each side, plus six interior volumes? Seems promising, what with its six points, six equilateral triangles, and interior six-sided hexagon? Regardless, either star-shape comes preinstalled with copious geometric possibility, religious/historical significance, and supernatural resonance. Either star structure is also symmetrical, reinforcing the patterning displayed so far in terms of perspective shifts from one member of a pair to the other (eg, Arne to Tove; Kathrine to Gaute).
Why Not “The Third Reich”?
When I first saw the title of the third volume of The Morning Star series, I figured Karl Ove was up to his old tricks. The original Norwegian title, first published in October 2022, is Det tredje riket. My Struggle of course shares a title with an infamously problematic polemic, so I assumed the eventual English translation would be The Third Reich.
But a precedent has been set for not quite literal title translation. The title of the second volume lost in translation a “forest” (the original title, Ulvene fra evighetens skog, literally translates to The Wolves from the Forest of Eternity). Riket means “the kingdom” but, when paired with det tredje, I believe riket mega-evolves to Reich. Translator Martin Aitken (or higher-ups at Penguin) apparently decided to soften the sensational resonance. Which is fine and reasonable since Realm opens interpretative possibilities whereas Reich limits associations to Nazidom.
Also in favor of the translated title, “The Third Realm” emerges from the following passage about a charismatic young death-metal rocker, a budding “star” in his own right, “a god” the girls say, involved somehow with the new star at the center of the story (evoked it with anti-commercialist low-frequency high-volume distorted droning and maybe some ritual sacrifice?):
“Valdemar wasn’t a Nazi, even if a lot of people thought he was. When he spoke about the Third Realm, it wasn’t the Nazis he was talking about but something people had believed in the Middle Ages, that the First Realm was the age of God, the Second Realm the age of Christ, the Third Realm the age of the Holy Spirit.
‘We’re entering the Third Realm,’ he said.” (page 131)
Third Places
What can you expect when you enter this realm, with Knausgaard as your guide? As in The Morning Star, you’ll encounter spare chapter titles, a single particularly Norwegian first name (Tove, Gurte, Helthe, Line, Jarle, Geir, Syvert, Ramsvik – only the priest Kathrine has a non-exclusively Nordic name), followed by easy straightforward (no elaborate Euro belletrism, no luminous and lapidary stream o’ consciousness, no Beckett or Bernhard influence) first-person narration from that character’s perspective.
The Third Realm is also a third place, beyond home and work or school, like bars, churches, gyms, even social media sites, where people congregate, intermix, socialize. The narrators, we learn over the course of the third installment, are interlinked, often the significant other or family member (Arne’s wife, Kathrine’s husband, Solveig’s daughter/Syvert’s niece) of a narrator in a previous novel, but in at least one instance, there’s a much more significant relationship, the revelation of which brings the focus of the lone-wolf narrative of Wolves into the larger present story about the new star. All these interiorities consider themselves separate but are part of a larger external culture that exists inside something larger that’s out there, mysterious and unknowable.
Assuming you read The Morning Star when the English translation came out in 2022, you may not remember everything at this point. That was my experience on first read. It’s worth it to skim The Morning Star before starting The Third Realm, or at least read a couple reviews heavy on plot summary. Per Nabokov, being a good reader requires “imagination, memory, a dictionary, and some artistic sense.” You probably don’t need a dictionary for this one but the more you can remember the more pleasure you’ll squeeze from the third volume. If you haven’t yet read the second volume, you could read The Third Realm without having read Wolves and you wouldn’t be totally lost. You could even read The Third Realm before The Morning Star, although this third volume advances the overall story. Skip to the next paragraph if you’re worried about potential spoilers: it’s now the third day; no one’s died since the star appeared, not even passengers in a brutal bus crash; people are beginning to realize it, not just in Bergen but all over Europe; there are a pair of most likely significant pregnancies; a man who was pronounced dead returns to life; the last sentence of the book is a major cliffhanger.
Revealing what happens in the third volume of In Search of Lost Time or the third part of 2666 doesn’t matter much because the experience of reading those novels doesn’t depend on narrative drive or resolution of conflict or events. But hearing in advance too much about what happens may undermine this one’s pleasures, which for many readers may be limited to such revelations. In that sense, the series maybe doesn’t quite feel like literature of the capital L variety?
Novels are worlds – third realms in themselves – wherein readers can live for a while, interact with narrators and characters in territories constructed of language arranged by authors who guide the imaginations of readers to create the rest while recognizing themes as they emerge and evolve, connect and resolve. Other than a few canonical biggies like Anna Karenina or Jane Eyre, revealing what happens in novels considered “literature” rarely undermines one’s reading experience because events are secondary to the fabric of the reality presented by the author. So if revealing important plot points would “spoil” this volume, is it “literature”? And if not, what are the pleasures of reading The Third Realm and the first two volumes in this new series? And is that what we read for anyway, pleasure? The textual equivalent of “joy-scrolling” through Reels? Or do we read for something more, something we’re willing to work for, even if it requires the sort of sustained attention and active association that might cause the slightest my brain hurts mental strain, if nothing close to actual “pain”? Or is this “something more” just part of the pleasure in general?
In a piece about a recently published collection of interviews with Knausgaard, the editor says that The Morning Star series feels like Knausgaard’s NBA all-star game, with “the world’s greatest players relaxing and clowning around, amusing themselves, only feinting at playing defense, because there is nothing at stake and nobody wants to get hurt.” That analogy feels true, to a degree. The author of the piece meant that Knausgaard is no longer willing to risk his relationships. But these books also often feel like exhibitions, pitched at a leisurely level of intensity, or like Knausgaard isn’t out to prove anything at this point and he’s simply just enjoying watching the story emerge from his fingertips.
Consider these few lines toward the end in a Tove section, related to her recent paintings:
“This was the series I’d spent my whole life waiting for.
There was no doubt in my mind. I felt it in the depths of me. The source was bottomless.
All I had to do was let it pour out.” (page 423)
Or consider this excerpt from Inadvertent, the 2018 publication in the “Why I Write” series from Yale University, on reading Proust in Norwegian translation and then writing what became Out of the World, his first published novel (publication of the English translation is currently scheduled for January 5, 2027, but I wouldn’t count on this happening — for a decade or so every pub date that’s appeared has been regularly pushed back):
In Search of Lost Time “was like a place, and every morning I longed to be back in it. I didn’t reflect on how it was written, I didn’t consider the author’s intention, I just read and read and read . . . Two years later, I was able to write. . . . It was just like reading, the feeling was exactly the same, I lost sight of myself and entered something at once unknown and familiar . . . It felt as if there were no boundaries in which I was writing, the text could go wherever it wanted, all I had to do was to follow its lead.”
The pleasure of reading (I originally wrote “watching”) these Morning Star volumes may relate to something as simple as not knowing what to expect and then discovering it. The presentation of mystery, a rupture in the every day, evokes a sense of disorientation, followed by pursuit of clarity, understanding, organizing presented elements by theme, noting repetition of images, phrases, creating order by picking up on trails, hints, associating them, leading to identification, questions, maybe a few conclusions, certainly no expectation of clear resolution. This series is not about the language, which is clear and fluid, lightly modified in tone depending on the narrator (the sixty-year-old neurologist Jarle’s section is somewhat more sophisticated and baroque than the prose in Geir’s procedural/detective section, which is more manly, clichéd, and no-nonsense than the spare, conversational, sincere language studded with the occasional exclamation point in the section from the perspective of Line, an infatuated nineteen-year-old girl). The writing, sentence by sentence, page by page, requires no real effort to read. It’s committed to dramatization, dependent on dialogue. The characterization is solid, the supernatural situation blended with details of daily life (everyone’s always firing up Spotify) is intriguing, the world of the story (essentially Bergen, Norway, more or less present day, or in the mid-1980s, or Moscow toward the end of the Wolves, or Sweden for a chapter in The Third Realm) is not a focal point of the story or generously described or anything like that, although swimming at night in a Swedish forest beneath the stars in Odin’s pool is wonderfully evoked. Most of the novel builds intrigue and pressure, and slowly reveals what’s going on, propelled in part by expectation of eerie phenomena related to the star. The sections are modular, fractal maybe, yet the overall narration doesn’t feel excessively fragmentary or intentionally disorienting. As the pieces come together, a sense of the larger interconnected story emerges, as well as thematic complexity and some clarity.
These books could be read passively but space is left for active readers to have some fun putting things together. As in my reading of Wolves, which mostly hinged on the importance of paying attention and interpreting existence instead of simply living, what most pleased me, particularly on second read, was reading the novel as a comment on reading the novel itself, scanning for self-referential clues to structure and significance.
The series could continue for decades and dozens of volumes if the structure in the photo — taken at Earth, Wind, Fire, & Ice in Chadds Ford, PA — is fulfilled.
Three Realms of Lit
Consider the following three hierarchical categories of literature:
The first realm of literature is solely intended to cause an effect. The name of the genre lets you know what it wants to do. Thrillers thrill. Erotica eroticizes. Suspense leaves readers hanging as they wait for something they know may occur to a character who doesn’t yet have that information (young lovers in tent, unaware of approaching crazed killer).
The second realm of literature includes novels that are more like a subgenre of journalism. They’re monothematic, about something or someone, dramatization of what otherwise could survive in the form of a non-fiction book or even an essay.
The third realm of literature includes novels about the search for the meaning of life, presentation and investigation of its mysteries, the solution to which is often the investigation/pursuit itself, the reading of which requires some work (attention, perception, association, recognition of the apparition of theme). Even if satirical or ironic, serious literature of the third realm sort asks more questions than it answers, its polythematics irreducible to one-line summaries on bestseller lists. And the artfulness, intrigue, imaginary experience, and considerable time-commitment of reading a “third realm-level” novel, all would be lost in the process of presenting its “meaning” or “take-away messages” in an efficient essay, article, or listicle.
David Shields in Reality Hunger suggested, possibly semi-satirically, that he reads novels for their gist. He’d prefer Hamlet if reduced to the prince’s riffs on gravekeepers, dumping the secondary characters and dramatic form, which only serve to deliver the famous observations on freewill and fate. But gist conveyance minimizes impact. That’s because third-realm literature is, as Beckett wrote about Joyce’s Finnegan’s Wake, “. . . not about something; it is that something itself.”
Um, excuse me: you’re aware that postmodern literary theory deems these so-called realms equivalent? The whole primacy of reader response idea? Authorial intention/biography is meaningless? This isn’t anything new, right? Barthes’s “Death of the Author” was published fifty-seven years ago, bruh.
Speculating about authorial intention is an essential supplementary aspect of the text presented, especially considering, as mentioned above, how details in the current volume about the “star” architect suggest the author himself. Also if the presented text emerges from a “serious literary writer” instead of a genre writer there’s an expectation that something more is going on than just trying to affect a reader.
The Third Series
We know a lot about Karl Ove Knausgaard. We know he’s a so-called serious literary writer. We know he’s not simply trying to scare us, thrill us, or spook us, even though it’s the end of summer as I write this. Halloween candies are on sale, easing the descent into darkness, heading for the big vote this year. The electorate takes sides as the artificial autumn foliage of yard signs, flags, banners, plastic skeletons, gauzy spider webs, ghosts hanged in effigy replaces fallen leaves. Election-related anxiety will rise as spooky season deepens. The border between here and the hereafter will seem more permeable as politicians speak in oppositional generalizations: us versus them, good versus bad, past versus future. But that’s not the role of literature or of serious literary writers, who, like their poet friends, are, per Percy Bysshe Shelley, “the unacknowledged legislators of the world.”
Confronted with this and that, interior and exterior, awake and asleep, pleasure and pain, good and evil, night and day, war and peace, life and death, serious lit and genre shit, writer-endorsed unacknowledged legislation supports complexities, ambiguities, and the interpenetration of opposites. The only “This versus That” pairing writers support is a preference for blended hybrid duality over straight-up oppositional dualism.
We know that The Third Realm’s author is from Norway, he lived in Sweden, and he now lives in London, but Knausgaard is really actually an ambassador of a territory unbounded by borders, a region that’s nearly a religion, its holy trinity composed of living, reading, and writing.
Thanks to his six-volume autofictional epic we know when he first masturbated, when he first had sex, that time he vomited in Bjork’s toilet, that time he cut up his face. The last line of My Struggle famously declared he’s no longer a writer, and he’s famously published a career’s worth of books since then: The Seasons Quartet; an excellent collection of essays; a, for me, kinda middling book on Munch (the related Louisiana Channel interview is great though); an under-read engaging compendium of correspondence with another writer about soccer, the World Cup in Brazil, and life in general called Home and Away; and most recently the first three volumes of The Morning Star series.
To make sense of the 666, 800, and 493 pages available in English translation so far of the new series, it’s helpful but not necessary to have read the several thousand pages that amount to A Time for Everything, My Struggle, The Seasons Quartet, and even the slim book-length lecture on writing, Inadvertent.
Knausgaard’s second novel A Time for Everything repositioned extended elaboration of the biblical Cain vs. Abel and Noah stories from the Holy Land to Norway, and also presented the time when angels lived among humans. A Time for Everything may also include the strongest example of a technique that’s maybe his trademark move. In A Time for Everything, there’s a long stretch of My Struggle-like abject naturalism around the hut, daily tasks and annoyances and minor observations, that began to frustrate this reader until it started to rain and it became clear that everything apparently meaningless in the preceding pages amounted to the characters’ last hours alive.
This technique charges everything that came before it, revealing that the slower “boring” pages were winding up some restlessness so when that energy releases the pages leap ahead in a way that feels unleashed, refreshing, active, but also complicates and deepens the significance of everything read so far. He does this to a degree in My Struggle, dropping the megatonnage of 400 pages of essay on Hitler onto the final volume, sending shockwaves back through the preceding three thousand plus pages.
In The Morning Star, with each new narrator, in the initial pages before the star appears, there’s an understanding that supernatural intrigue will charge everything they’re doing with significance. Camouflaged among the details of daily existence are possible clues to something about the star’s meaning.
In Wolves, he does it again, with extreme audacity: he takes approximately four-hundred effin’ pages to present a common nineteen-year-old Norwegian dude in the mid-1980s as he plays soccer, pursues a love interest, tries to get a job, and attains some major new information about parents. But without the regular infusion of supernatural elements as in the first volume, the same fully dramatized, single-sentence paragraph/hard-return heavy approach seemed all very readable, sure, but what was being offered beyond readability? That question seemed key.
To reduce its complexity to a line or two, My Struggle fulfilled David Foster Wallace’s prophecy in his essay on American fiction, TV, and Mark Leyner that after the age of post-modern irony there’d come an era of eyeroll-worthy “single-entendre” earnest straightforwardness. On a formal level, it was about throwing off the expectations of high-art Euro literary convention to get as close as he could to the core of his life. This required writing quickly, even “badly,” so he could write truthfully, sincerely, without filtering the sort of thing that shouldn’t be mentioned. From Inadvertent:
“The thought of what others will think, of whether this is any good or not, all criticism, all reflection and judgment must be put aside for trust to develop. In this sense, writing must be open and innocent. But in order for something within this opening and innocence to emerge and become accessible, there have to be limitations, and this is what we call form.”
In the best possible way, Knausgaard, like many writers twenty to fifteen years ago, felt the need to move beyond the formal artificiality, the precision-obsessed preciousness, of “creative” or “belletristic” writing, to something comparatively unfiltered that seemed to emerge when he didn’t attempt to attain laudable high-art quality. Instead of carefully composing prose like Julian Gracq, Lawrence Durrell, or James Salter, every noun modified in triplicate, each adjective strung at the end of a sentence deepening the significance, Knausgaard as a rule, as a writing restriction or limitation, wrote five, ten, twenty pages a day about trying to write while caring for three children in Book Two, or about multiple instances of his underwear filling with semen in Book Four, or in Book Six the four-hundred pages of essay about Hitler, incredibly complexifying everything that had come before it in the five previous volumes.
This is not a review of My Struggle. (I’ve posted 12K words about it elsewhere.) But I think for this consideration of The Third Realm and the overall Morning Star series it’s important to consider the intention of writing quickly and “badly,” and the fact that My Struggle is essentially a six-volume, first-person, fully realistic novel (other than a 30-page essay on Paul Celan and the 400-page essay on Hitler) wholly constructed from the author’s memory, with the author and the narrator understood as essentially one and the same. The author wears the thinnest possible narrative mask. Which is why My Struggle opens with an extended description of a face, the only section in the series that the author has acknowledged was refined and reworked to conform to expectations of readers of “serious literature.”
The Seasons Quartet is not directly or obviously about the author. It’s more about random objects surrounding him, short meditations on something tangible existing in the world, and each volume also includes letters to his fourth child, and one volume (Spring) includes a section that breaks out of the pervasive “writing exercise” vibe of most of the project, returning to the mode of My Struggle, an account of his wife Linda’s mental breakdown, what seems like the real-life source for Tove’s psychiatric concerns in The Morning Star series.
From Inadvertent:
“I set myself some simple rules: each text should have as its subject one word, a thing, or a phenomenon, each should be about one page long, and each should be written in one continuous movement, one sitting. These rules had the effect that certain connections emerged that I hadn’t thought of or seen before. For example, the way we automatically arrange the things around us in hierarchies, assigning more value and significance to some things than to others.”
The important Seasons Quartet-related takeaway in relation to The Morning Star series is how Knausgaard perceives everything in terms of the separation or interpenetration of internal or external worlds. For example, a Thermos is something you bring from your home into the outside world. You take it on a picnic or a day at the beach or a long hike in the woods. It’s natural to bring a Thermos to such places. But it would be strange to bring a Thermos from your home into the home of another person. The function of a Thermos is to go from inside to outside, not inside one enclosure to inside another enclosure.
That’s a variation on an recurring theme in The Seasons Quartet, and it’s developed in The Morning Star series. Consider this from the neurologist Jarle’s section, summarizing his book Maps of the Brain, which describes his brain “as seen from the outside, in the forms of scans I presented and described, and from the inside, in the lived experiences from my own life”:
“But just as consciousness arises in connection and coordination, where no cell acts on its own but comprises a part of the whole, the brain as a complete entity is connected too, the brain too is one node among many in a network it shapes and by which it itself is shaped. Through this network, which is language, which is culture, which is society, Chopin’s piano music streams. Only when these two poles have been established, the mechanically precise functions within and the fluid social domain without, can our discussion about consciousness begin. For consciousness is neither one thing nor the other, but emerges somewhere in between.” (page 182-183)
The new series seems like an elaboration of that dynamic: interior, exterior, and in-between extended to everyday existence and the miraculous; life and death; living an unexamined life and paying attention (The Wolves of Eternity’s primary theme). And this dynamic is further extended along the lines of genre expectations, with the new series feeling not quite like Serious Literature, not quite like a Horror or Sci Fi or Thriller, but “a third realm” in between.
Decategorization
Tove, who narrates the first section of The Third Realm, uses an unusual word for this in-betweeness. She’s off her meds, considering some extramarital action with her neighbor, and hearing a voice in her head, or maybe it’s from outside her head, related to a make-believe world she created as a child? Regardless, Tove at one point declares that her husband Arne categorizes, whereas she decategorizes: “That’s the big difference between us. You categorise. I decategorise.” (page 8)
And that may be the novel’s keyword: decategorization.
Decategorization doesn’t appear in online dictionaries but Google shows this snippet from an article published in a 2001 edition of the European Journal of Social Psychology: “Decategorisation implies increased individuation of others (typically outgroup members), i.e., a shift from perceiving them as group members and attributing relevant stereotypic content to them, to perceiving them as individuals.”
This seems connected to the key dynamic in the Paul Celan and Hitler essays in My Struggle Book Six related to the Nazi dehumanization of Jews from “We” to “They” to “It,” a dynamic in play during the Harris/Trump debate that aired while working on this review in which the Orange One dehumanized Haitian immigrants in Ohio, erroneously claiming they were guilty of canine/felinephagia. Instead of being alternate “I”s, livin’ dyin’ individuals just like us, or members of the collective human “We” or even as othered immigrant “They”s, it’s suggested they’re more like predators, like bears eating good ol’ American pets. In the other direction, such categorization can move from It to They to We to I, an understanding that everyone is united and similar in the perception of their unique experience of existence. This can also be extended to questions of genre, mortality, and possibly morality: not this or that but something else unbounded by categorization.
What Else?
In Inadvertent, Knausgaard talks about being immersed as a kid in Ursula K. Le Guin’s Earthsea Cycle — investigating this line of potential influence I’ve only read the first two chapters so far but in the second chapter a demon rises from an ancient book of spells that seems more like whatever Geir thinks he sees on video than a dude with horns and fiery-red skin.
Comparisons between the probable influence of War & Peace and The Morning Star series, especially in terms of the oppositional dualities expressed in the former’s title, are beyond the scope at this point of even this super-freaking-long review, as is anything more than noting the effective characterizing shorthand of the music mentioned in The Third Realm: Jarle the neurologist listens to Schubert’s “Winterrise,” Syvert listens to Van Halen and Metallica, the history of Norwegian death metal is aired, the architect listens to Status Quo and notes that the original 1968 version of “Pictures of Matchstick Men” sounds far ahead of its time, and Tove has the title of Talk Talk’s “Happiness Is Easy” in her head, the lyrics of which are worth a look, as well as the interpretations online (“not just a blanket condemnation of Christianity but a call to turn away from dead religion to true faith”): “Take good care of what the priests say, ‘After death it’s so much fun.’” And later: “Joy be written on the earth / And the sky above / Jesus star that shines so bright / Gather us in love.”
The Third Realm starts with Tove instead of her husband Arne, the scholar who narrates the opening of The Morning Star. There’s a section narrated by Gaute, husband to the priest Kathrine. The famous architect Helge is married to Vibeke from The Morning Star and he meets with Syvert from Wolves to unburden himself of something he’s kept quiet since he was a child. There’s a new character, a neurologist Jarle, who’s most interested in the difference between consciousness and the vegetative state, how we understand the mind, and he’s also interested in getting out of his comfort zone and having his crystals read. Line narrates the central and most engaging section in the book, a trip to Sweden to see her charismatic love interest’s death-metal band. Line’s mother is the nurse Solveig from The Morning Star, and I believe Solveig’s sister is Lisa, wife of Syvert. Solveig the nurse is there to witness the miraculous reanimation of Ramsvik, and there’s a short chapter from Ramsvik’s perspective, in a coma hearing voices from the hospital resound in the sky above him as he encounters his dead father in a shadowy netherworld. The detective Geir questions Kathrine about something related to Valdemar’s band. So it’s all coming together.
In the Jarle section, there’s some dialogue about a strange case of a man in a coma despite “no signs at all of any physical injury,” possibly related to shock from learning of his son’s suicide attempt. That must be Jostein, the “hideous man”-type music journalist who seems most alive in the first volume. And in the detective Geir’s section we see Jostein in a coma, laid out on a hospital bed, but he otherwise hasn’t yet reappeared as a narrator since we last saw him exploring the afterworld.
Offhand, I don’t quite remember the particulars of the concluding scene of Jostein’s section in the first volume, just that it seemed like leveling-up in a video game to the mesmerizing spectacular finale of a Valhalla dreamscape. The Third Realm ends with intriguing cliffhangers involving Kathrine and Tove but do they deliver enough of a charge to propel two subsequent volumes of backstory? I had honestly forgotten the concluding line’s plot propulsion only a couple months after my first read. By the time the Wolves-like fourth and fifth volumes appear in English translation, will readers remember most of the first and third volumes? Extreme length therefore puts another dynamic in play related to recall of basic plot points, let alone subtleties, across thousands of pages, evoking the sensation of time passing even if it’s only been a few days in the present story, as in In Search of Lost Time or War and Peace. With time, the episodes in all these volumes will seem like half-forgotten dreams, an effect that in part is maybe the point?
If volumes four and five of the series are wholly set in the past, that suggests at least another thousand pages without return to the supernatural intrigue and emerging post-mortality situation of the story’s present. All of which will tax a reader’s ability to keep the story somewhat straight, but also to appreciate the overlap and connections among its parts. Like the ~400 pages about young Syvert in Wolves, which seemed like an elaborate extended exercise in paying attention, inducing fuzzy memories may be intentional — a feature more than a bug, in that the natural openness of the structure, character interconnectedness, and layering of story in long volumes released over time will inspire obsessive committed fans to actively take notes and surely post them in comments on Reddit or wherever to keep it all straight.
It seems like another opposition the series is engaging is narrative cohesion versus disorientation/fragmentation, or wanting to understand how the pieces of the puzzle fit versus accepting that not quite understanding the grand scheme of things is more in line with how one experiences existence, at least when it comes to questions of mega-macro-significance about the continuation of consciousness or the preservation of the soul/spirit after death, that is, mysteries dark and vast.
It may be smart to wait until the series is complete before starting it, in part because it seems like subsequent volumes will return to extended exploration of characters in the mid-1980s and mid-1970s, all of which may have some resonance and relevance to the three days in the present time frame described so far, but to what degree?
Based on the pentagram shape, I anticipate five volumes of central story about the star, ten volumes of backstory, and a possible final encompassing volume to form a pentacle. But I also reserve the right to be wrong: the series could continue forever, with every character open to a volume of backstory, compelled by eventuality of the new star appearing in the sky, what seems to be the end of death, and maybe something related to artificial intelligence (unless those threads are red herrings)?
So why bother reading these books?
I wasn’t exactly jumping up and down about this new series after The Wolves of Eternity, but now, after reading and re-reading The Third Realm and thinking about it while writing this review, even if my calculations about the overall structure and scope turn out totally off, I’m hyped/psyched to return to immersion in these worlds as I read the rest of these volumes. I haven’t quite joy-scrolled through the pages but the books have been generally enjoyable so far, not at all difficult, major themes are in play, and the author seems to be proceeding with the sort of limited or restricted freedom, within the formal environment, required for his writing to produce organic/seemingly self-directed narrative growth. Some sections of The Third Realm, in particular the teenage Line’s trip to Sweden to see her love interest’s death-metal band, are as vivid and page-turnery as Knausgaard has written. A scene with Valdemar and Line echoes a weird scene in Dracula, which Knausgaard has acknowledged he’s read multiple times, in which the Count slices open his chest so Mina Harker can feed on his blood like a sicko mother feeding its child milk. A few passages in the series deliver a similar sort of supernatural charge, like when Tove envisions the gates of hell thrown open or when Geir thinks he glimpses on video a wraith-like demonic form, but I wouldn’t say they’re the primary attraction. More so, there’s the simple pleasure of watching our favorite Norwegian master builder, impressive mane intact or not, bring into existence this monumental, uniquely conceived, extraordinarily ambitious yet seemingly effortless series.
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Maybe you’re interested in one of these posts?
The Wolves of Eternity: Prequel to an Infinite Arc
The Seasons Quartet by Karl Ove Knausgaard
The Complete My Struggle Series by Karl Ove Knausgaard
Angels & Demons at Play: A Time for Everything by Karl Ove Knausgaard
October Child by Linda Boström Knausgaard, translated by Saskia Vogel (scroll about a quarter of the way down the page)
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To support the publishers who have supported my writing, please acquire a copy of Like It Matters, Chaotic Good, Neutral Evil ))), and/or JRZDVLZ (all from Sagging Meniscus). Or my translation of Horacio Castellanos Moya’s Revulsion: Thomas Bernhard in San Salvador. Or Thanks + Sorry + Good Luck: Rejection Letters From the Eyeshot Outbox directly from the publisher. Or even a copy of The Shimmering Go-Between directly from me (the publisher is kaput).