At the end of a late-2025 interview about The School of Night, there’s a teaser about I Was Long Dead — Knausgaard called it “real blood spatter and chainsaw kind of stuff” and said it was “the wildest book I’ve ever written.” Published on Halloween 2025 in Norway (no US/UK pub dates yet), Jeg var lenge død is the sixth book in The Morning Star series. I started reading it in the original Bokmål on Feb 1, finished in mid-April (my Norwegian reading speed is improving!), and I’m pleased to report that it certainly includes three gruesome instances of violence, all magnetic, extreme, and well executed, sure, but it also offers an absolutely engaging supernatural interaction and a glimpse of the other world (the sort of thing we’re chasing, if not necessarily expecting, particularly after Arendal).
A small electric chainsaw makes an appearance but the single lingering impression isn’t that I Was Long Dead is “bloody” or “wild,” necessarily. I was more struck by the structure: it feels like a series of — for the most part — linearly proceeding, easy-reading scenes (set in restaurants, cafes, around dining-room tables, home visits, taxi rides) that serve as the host environment for dialogues and synopses (often delivered in one-on-one conversation) that sometimes start to feel like “info dumps,” about, for example, the early 20th-century Russian theologian scientist polymath saint Pavel Florensky and the true nature of reality on the other side of the speed of light, the territory accessed when we die and when we dream, where the laws of astrophysics and the experience/faith of spirituality/mysticism are one, what’s otherwise known as Heaven, Valhalla, or Terrapin.
Can Science Explain the Inexplicable?
The central conflict relates to science versus religion; quantifiable, measurable, known fact versus the unknown, in this the consciousness pervading the universe accounting for dark matter’s mass, responsible for old time relijun, Valhalla and the Viking funeral rites. In the case of those on death’s door, like Joar’s mother in a nursing home or the astrophysicist Goossens (a central figure toward the end of the novel), the conflict between wanting to live forever and wanting to die is a practical, palpable, urgent matter.
This is a natural extension of Knausgaard’s thematic default of interior/exterior, the engine behind The Seasons Quartet and much of the current series. And in a way the relentless exploration of this conflict in dramatization and discussion about the meaning of life when decoupled from death is definitely in its way wild.
The Narrator’s Character
The novel is narrated by the somewhat neurodivergent astrophysicist Joar, brother of Syvert, who we know from The Wolves of Eternity. In the first volume, Joar often appears in TV interviews explaining what’s going on (I’ll need to review those pages to see if descriptions in that one jibe with this one — my sense is that Joar seemed much younger in the first volume than in this one, essentially early middle-aged) and Joar appears in Arendal as a child who sees men in the house who aren’t seen by others.
In this volume, it feels like the author allows his narrator to lead him along, and like in Arendal, the previous novel in the series, you can sense the author groping his way forward, hesitantly almost, or maybe for the sake of narrative drive, teasing his way toward something, approaching and then moving away and then returning, a pattern that develops and feels natural but somewhat frustrates, for example when he visits the Greek Orthodox priest in Arendal and there’s an underwhelming conversation followed by another scene that moves the story forward to Moscow, to a visit to Alvetina, the half-sister who has a friend with access to unpublished Florensky documents that might elucidate everything with the new star (Florensky had mentioned a new star at one point circa 1915).
Knausgaard lets the story naturally evolve, all while looking for opportunities, it seems, to integrate interesting bits from what the author’s been reading. You can really feel some nonfictional narrative grafting going on, not that there’s anything wrong with that, necessarily. Incursions of disbelief and knowledge transfer bordering on lecture are artfully interrupted with analysis of a mannerism or unspoken reaction to make it seem like fictional conversation portrayal instead of straight-up regurgitated reading/essay. But it’s surprising, for example, when Joar professes not to know Rilke, when we know of course the author knows him. Maybe some of this relates to habitual sense of author/narrator overlap after 3500+ pages of it? But in this, these instances of disconnect, make the fiction seem like fiction, which is the exact sort of thing My Struggle so successfully overthrew (ie, it was fiction that felt unlike fiction).
Much of The Morning Star series manages to suspend disbelief despite the extraordinary central conceit of the series, in part by focusing on the quotidian, on cheap crappy young dude dinners in Kristian’s case in The School of Night or showering before bed in Joar’s case in this one. Joar is a sympathetic character, what with his balding head, the varicose veins in his hairy satyr-like bowed legs, and his suggested autism (the novel opens with a bit about eye contact, how Florensky never made eye contact, and averted eyes is of course a stereotypical if not universal aspect of autism [my daughter has autism and can make and hold eye contact]). Autism as narrative peculiarity works well for this story, especially when the narrator doesn’t behave/react as a neurotypical reader might after a demon touches one’s arm. An autistic narrator also proves convenient, making it possible to write it off when, post-demon interaction, Joar doesn’t spend every subsequent page, paragraph, and sentence talking and thinking and dreaming about WTF just happened! If it weren’t for the narrator’s neurology, it maybe even might’ve felt like the author had forgotten this pivotal, striking, crowd-pleasing scene?
To circle back for a second to the bit up front about so-called “info dumping,” the morning I posted this to this site, my mother DM’d an Instagram reel about how “info dumping” is the love language of the autistic. I suppose, to a degree, with this in mind, it (the narrative info-dumping) makes sense considering that the narrator is on the spectrum (middle-ish maybe). Joar doesn’t monologue or dominate discussions but he pursues his primary interest with a single-mindedness beyond what normies would probably consider reasonable, traveling from Oslo to Arendal, to Moscow, and ultimately to Annecy, “the Venice of the Alps” in France. (See below a seven-sided star sculpture in an Annecy park, an interesting feature of the locale, particularly if the series merely includes seven volumes instead of the 15 or 16 as previously predicted.)
Joar is a more engaging narrator than his older brother Syvert (that is, I liked this volume more than the second one), but the novel really doesn’t get going until Syvert visits Oslo, and it’s a joy to have the two of them together, this odd couple of the normie and the neuroatypical. Syvert improves in a supporting role, as side-character contrast to his peculiar brother narrator, and his presence feels comfortable and stabilizing, like hanging with an old friend after a while apart.
There’s also probably the funniest moment in the series when Joar is undergoing an ultrasound on his varicose veins. But what about the opening of the Second Part, the section with Wiktoria, the Polish radiologist love interest? This section introduces some a-linearity, a little loop-de-loop, or it fast forwards a few clicks so there’s some disorientation at first (I searched the ebook for “Wiktoria,” thinking I’d missed something) before it’s clarified in efficient retrospective summary fashion how Joar and Wiktoria and her son wound up visiting the beach.
A little irregularity like this is something KOK likes, I think, for example consider the breakout section in Spring that returns to autofictional mode or the essays on Celan and Hitler in My Struggle Book Six? This volume breaks away from the precedent of the past two volumes, with a single narrator set in the past (The School of Night in 1985; Arendal in 1975), presenting a single narrator but it’s set in the series’ present, more or less shortly before, during, and after the appearance of the new star. But unlike the first and third volumes with multiple narrators, Joar is the only narrator. Joar visits his half-sister Alvetina in Moscow the way his brother did but unlike in Wolves there are no sections narrated from her perspective. And maybe generally that’s how the whole series is proceeding, evading exactness, precision, uniformity, erring on the side of openness, preferring rhyme to reason?
The Ending
The ending wasn’t what I expected but it seemed inevitable, set-up well enough, with descriptions of a Viking funeral earlier on and videos of Russian soldiers dealing with comrades blown to bits who cannot die unless dealt with gruesomely. I don’t want to spoil the perfectly satisfying ending so I won’t really reveal much about it, although I’m definitely tempted to describe the images that linger in my memory after reading . . .
At one point I was thinking about War and Peace, about its lingering images of Prince Andrey looking up at the sky on the battlefield or listening to Natasha on a balcony above him, or Pierre seeing Halley’s Comet or rushing into a house on fire or Ellen’s bosom or Marya’s hairshirt toward the end, and how so far there weren’t equivalent images in The Morning Star series, which in a way could’ve been called Life and Death. Maybe in the first book when Jostein crosses over into Valhalla? In Wolves when Syvert experiences a thunderstorm on the Volga? In The Third Realm, the sex scene with Line and the evil rocker dude? In Arendal, driving drunk on the iced-over fjord to the lighthouse in the middle of the night? And in this one, there’s a scene toward the end with Joar and Goossens that, um, stands out . . .
Regarding Goossens: again, I don’t want to reveal too much about him or discuss the final scenes because, although this novel is very much about its ideas, it does all lead to the ending with Goossens, and to reveal it here would undermine one of the novel’s major pleasures, the setting sun toward which it’s driving all the while. So, instead, I feel like it’s more than fine to mention the following: in a way that seemed thematically in tune with the novel’s discussion of synchronicity and coincidence — ie, slips in the regular proceedings that may amount to supernatural communication et cetera — most if not all of the times that “Goossens” was translated automatically using the function on the Kindle app on my iPad, the words “Mr President, I would like to thank Mr Goossens” appeared:
This is just an AI hallucination, of course, one of the reasons that AI is really just not there yet. For work, I use AI for various tasks and it introduces off-the-wall oddities like this ~2% of the time. If an entry-level underling did anything similar it would most likely cause them to be let go, or at least undergo mandatory psychological counseling. But in the context of the novel I wondered if “Mr President, I would like to thank Mr Goossens” was somehow embedded in the text, the way Led Zeppelin had purportedly embedded satanic messages in “Stairway to Heaven” when you played it backwards. That is, was “Mr President, I would like to thank Mr Goossens” anomalous or significant in some way, a little riddle to puzzle over while reading? The answer is yes, of course. It’s a meaningless technological mistake and a message from the universe. (Feel free to dig through the related Google citations for clues.) But I include this bit toward the end of this review because I think it’s related to the overall theme of the book and to a degree to the series and to a degree to literature.
There’s the first level of experiencing without questioning or wondering or remarking or noticing, which extends to reading passively, experiencing a novel simply as an entertainment. There’s a second level of questioning or wondering or remarking or noticing, which extends to reading actively, making associations, interpreting, experiencing a novel as an abstract response to the question of the meaning of life. And there’s a third level, per the essay in Jon Fosse’s An Angel Walks Through the Stage and Other Essays on anagogic reading, a mystical/spiritual-type interpretation beyond the literal, allegorical, and moral senses. If all goes well, that’s how these books are read, which is surely a convenient way to attend to all the many holes in the plot at this point? That is, the series needs to be read with a sense of devotion to an understanding that the creator’s master plan intended to evoke in readers a sense of the mysterious, a balance between revealed and concealed, the written known and the unwritten unknowable?
Looking Ahead to the Seventh Novel
Apparently the next novel will be the last. I would bet against closure, loose ends tied up. I’m most interested in learning about the priest’s immaculate conception and Line’s pregnancy. But for the most part I have no expectations, other than that it will be more like the first and third volumes, with multiple narrators, presented in the present.
Otherwise, generally, I’m really looking forward to reading something by anyone else, ideally in my native language, even if translated to English. And so of course I just started and am enjoying the Norwegian ebook of Sjelesorg by Dag Johan Haugerud (his Oslo Trilogy, available via the Criterion Channel or Prime Video, is fantastic, especially for Erik Rohmer fans), and I really should re-read The Morning Star and The Third Realm, as well as The School of Night in English translation, before the seventh volume appears. For now, well, I suppose I’ll see you on the other side of the speed of light.
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Note: the image at the top of the screen is a painting by Mamma Andersson, whose work is on the cover of the Norwegian edition of Jeg var lenge død.
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Fulfill all your Knausgaard needs with the following posts:
Arendal by Karl Ove Knausgaard: Deep Cut for a Cold Dark Night
Knausgaard’s The School of Night: This May Be the Place
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 (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 (from New Directions). Or Thanks + Sorry + Good Luck: Rejection Letters From the Eyeshot Outbox (from Barrelhouse). Or The Shimmering Go-Between from me (Atticus, the publisher, is kaput).
