Lee Klein

I Was Long Dead by Karl Ove Knausgaard: The Other Side of the Speed of Light

This sixth installment in The Morning Star series includes three gruesome instances of violence, all magnetic, extreme, and well executed, plus 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), but the single lingering impression relates to structure: I Was Long Dead (Jeg var lenge død, published Oct 31, 2025 in Norway, with no English language pub date announced yet) feels like a series of for the most part linearly proceeding, easy-reading scenes (set at restaurants, cafes, around dining-room tables, home visits, taxi rides, etc) hosting dialogues and synopses (often delivered in one-on-one conversation) that sometimes start to feel like “info dumps,” for example about 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 the unknown, heaven, Valhalla, or Terrapin.

The central conflict relates to science and religion, between quantifiable, measurable, known fact and the unknown, the consciousness pervading the universe accounting for dark matter’s mass, responsible for old time relijun, Valhalla and the Viking funeral rites. 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.

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, letting the story naturally evolve, all the while looking for opportunities 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. 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. Regardless, despite incursions of disbelief and gratuitous knowledge transfer bordering on lecture 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, 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]).

But the autism works well for this narrator and this story, someone who doesn’t behave/react as the typical neurotypical reader might after a demon touches one’s arm. An autistic narrator also makes 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 it. 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 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, the narrative info-dumping makes sense considering the narrator’s on the spectrum. Joar doesn’t monologue or dominate discussions but he does pursue 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 only includes seven volumes instead of 15 or 16 as I’ve previously predicted.)

Joar is a more engaging narrator than his 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.

The ending wasn’t what I expected but it seemed inevitable after the fact, set-up well enough, with descriptions of a Viking funeral earlier on and videos of Russian soldiers dealing with comrades blown to bits in Ukraine who cannot die unless dealt with gruesomely. There’s also probably the funniest moment in the series when Joar, our narrator, younger brother of Syvert, is undergoing an ultrasound on his varicose veins. But like with Arendal, the previous novel in the series, you can sense the author groping his way through the story, hesitantly almost, or maybe for the sake of narrative drive, teasing his way toward something, approaching and then moving away from it and then returning again, 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).

What about the opening of the Second Part, the section with Wiktoria, the Polish radiologist? This section introduces some a-linearity, a little loop-de-loop, or it fast forwards a few clicks so there’s some disorientationat 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?

THIS IS A POST IN PROGRESS — MORE TO COME

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.

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 Third Realm by Karl Ove Knausgaard: Revelation of the Structure and Decategorization in the Age of the Holy Spirit

The Wolves of Eternity: Prequel to an Infinite Arc

New Novels From Knausgaard (The Morning Star) and Franzen (Crossroads): Subtitle Subject to Change Regarding Middle-Aged Male Writers Every Middle-Aged Male Reader Reads

The Seasons Quartet by Karl Ove Knausgaard

The Complete My Struggle Series by Karl Ove Knausgaard

Our Holiday Shopping Guide to the Lesser Knausgaard: The Essays, the Soccer One, the Short Lecture, the Munch One . . . Which Is Right for You?

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)

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).

Arendal by Karl Ove Knausgaard: Deep Cut for a Cold Dark Night

The fifth installment of Karl Ove Knausgaard’s The Morning Star series is an introspective “deep cut” that trades the thriller-like suspense of The School of Night for a haunting, probing exploration of the heart in conflict with itself. Set in the mid-1970s, Arendal is a prequel to The Wolves of Eternity, following Syvert’s father as he navigates a landscape defined by literal and metaphorical darkness. While it may not be a “hit single,” this slower, denser atmospheric meditation on whether to remain devoted to family or to follow the heart is destined to be appreciated by devoted readers.

The opening line of the Acknowledgments says even novels about lonely men in nearly empty cities are needed, maybe even especially needed, and it will be interesting to see if readers agree after this installment comes out in English (UK publication seems like it’s currently scheduled for November 5, 2026; US pub date doesn’t seem listed yet). It’s the fifth book in The Morning Star series, and like the fourth, The School of Night, it can be read on its own but would be deepened of course if read in the context of the others, especially the second volume, The Wolves of Eternity, which features Syvert, the son of this one’s narrator (also named Syvert), and Asja, the Russian lover of Arendal’s narrator (Asja’s daughter Alvetina features in Wolves). Like The School of Night, this is a “backstory book,” set in the past and with a single narrator, another line along the periphery of a possible pentacle-like star structure (see my review of The Third Realm for elaboration and textual reference/support related to what I believe may be the overall structure of the series).

Generally, although I don’t expect this installment to generate the same interest and excitement as The School of Night, it definitely adds a welcome, more internal texture to the series. It’s essentially a love story, a story of longing, a subtly wrenching story of the heart in conflict with itself (per Faulkner), but at the same time it doesn’t feel sappy at all, probably because it’s so icy, so dark (literally, it feels like it all takes place at night or otherwise during the day blinded by snow so bright it may as well be darkness), and for the most part solitary, even when among people. It mostly takes place on an iced-over island, and it feels that way.

It’s a cold novel, with a lot going on beneath it out of sight, a novel that extends the series another ten years back in time from the mid-’80s of Wolves and The School of Night, an intriguing addition but not one that I expect most readers will really jump up and down about. If The School of Night was the series’s radio hit, this one is a deep cut, destined for appreciation by KOK heads, those really into the series and the author.

It’s a slower, more internal “cold winter’s night” novel about love, longing, loss, indecision, mystery, not knowing, nosing one’s way slowly but surely toward something, not quite ever sure. At times toward the end it seems like a novel about alcoholism, as though KOK is envisioning his father, putting himself in his father’s shoes, method-acting his way into his history, and similarly, there’s something that feels like an oblique representation of the author’s own experience with leaving his second wife Linda and taking up with another woman in another country. The author’s biography, more than with other writers, generally warps the light of interpretation for obvious reasons. That is, writing in first person, it’s difficult not to feel KOK right there behind his narrator’s mask in this one.

Compared with The School of Night, which was propelled by suspense, almost like a thriller at times, this one has no real engine other than wondering when/if his death will occur (from Wolves, we know his car was found in the water near Arendal), at least at first, before it becomes more about his decision to stay with Evelyn and the boys or leave them for Asja. Other intriguing semi-murky mysteries are in play but almost like their purpose is to externalize the narrator’s sense of confusion — they don’t seem like red herrings really or anything actually solvable. There’s also the narrator’s uncanny extreme sense of deja vu, and at one point a memory of a dream from his youth, I believe, involving the same eerie sound that appeared in the first volume, something like krikkriklatta (I’ll have to page through the ebook to find it).

It’s set in the mid-’70s, mostly in a small coastal town in the middle of winter, after Syvert is forced to spend some time there after his car breaks down outside of town. He spent summers there as a child and his mother still lives there. He runs into an old friend, Bodil, who informs him that their childhood friend Lars recently died of cancer. They have a few drinks, argue a little, say goodnight, Syvert returns to his hotel, reads letters from Asja, gets antsy and walks around town, hits a few bars, sees a weird young guy with long dark hair in a long black coat with a guitar case, a mysterious guy reminiscent of the figure of the devil in first photograph discussed in The School of Night. A Norwegian oil tanker has also gone missing. But mostly Syvert is conflicted, longing for Asja but also feels like his place is with his family, with his wife Evelyn and his two young sons.

I read this slowly over several months so the chronology in the previous paragraph and what follows may not be exactly accurate, but generally, from what I remember, that night staying over in Arendal he drives around, visits his parents briefly, then drives out on the thick ice, ultimately making his way to a church where there’s a middle-of-the-night service for those in grief, who have recently lost loved ones. At this point, more than halfway, maybe two thirds through, it feels like the climax of the novel — this eerie, evocative, extraordinary image of driving drunk in the middle of the night out over the iced-over fjord or whatever to this church, encountering this semi-implausible yet engaging session where the mysterious guitarist appears and Syvert takes in a sermon-like talk about the omnipresence of souls all around.

Thematically, all this fits with the overall series, which KOK could’ve called Life and Death, echoing War and Peace, the series itself ultimately most likely outnumbering Tolstoy’s epic in terms of page count several times over. The next day Syvert learns that his car needs a new engine and it won’t be ready for a while. He gets a sweet loaner (BMW) and heads home, where he reintegrates into the domestic situation, his forehead bruised from a fall in one of the bars he’d visited in Arendal, his plucky young son Syvert off playing indoor soccer or out with some friends, his younger son Joar seeing strange men in the house. There’s a dinner party with a couple, old friends, who come over and Syvert gets housed on vodka he hides in the basement, blasts Wagner on the hi-fi, says a lot he shouldn’t say, including that he longs for true love, something along those lines, and then he returns to Arendal to retrieve his repaired car, and visits Bodil, his old friend, talks with her, drinks some bad coffee, checks out their farm animals, nearly hooks up with her, reveals his situation with Asja, receives advice from Bodil that he only has one life to live and he should follow his heart. He returns to Arendal, vacillates a ton, and then calls Asja in Russia. The end.

That’s the general gist of the novel, more or less what happens, I’m sure I’m missing a few things of course since I started reading this on the last day of August and finished on the first of February, managing a percentage in the Norwegian ebook per sitting, at least that was the goal, about five pages at a time, until the final 20% or so when I committed to it, reading a few percentages every day.

It’s not nearly as long as The School of Night but it’s denser, at least before it opens up somewhat with easy dialogue-replete scenes, and although shorter than the others it feels slower and more internal. It hovered along at what seemed like a lower gear for the author through the first half but became more interesting, with the surprising, magnificent image of driving drunk out on the ice in the middle of the night, and then the scene at the church providing serious thematic support relevant to the series overall, which I’ll immediately continue — downloaded the next installment, Jeg var lenge død. I intend to read it at a committed pace, as my primary book, not intermixed with several others as I did with this one and The School of Night, so I can finish in early spring instead of in late summer or fall, and then read someone other than Knausgaard (maybe even read something in English).

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 Arendal.

Fulfill all your Knausgaard needs with the following posts:

Knausgaard’s The School of Night: This May Be the Place

The Third Realm by Karl Ove Knausgaard: Revelation of the Structure and Decategorization in the Age of the Holy Spirit

The Wolves of Eternity: Prequel to an Infinite Arc

New Novels From Knausgaard (The Morning Star) and Franzen (Crossroads): Subtitle Subject to Change Regarding Middle-Aged Male Writers Every Middle-Aged Male Reader Reads

The Seasons Quartet by Karl Ove Knausgaard

The Complete My Struggle Series by Karl Ove Knausgaard

Our Holiday Shopping Guide to the Lesser Knausgaard: The Essays, the Soccer One, the Short Lecture, the Munch One . . . Which Is Right for You?

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)

Knausgaard’s The School of Night: This May Be the Place

The School of Night may be Knausgaard’s most accessible, suspenseful, and intriguing novel so far. Whether it’s his “best,” or maybe even a nearly “perfect” novel, despite being the fourth in The Morning Star series, it feels complete on its own, unlike any of his novels since A Time for Everything, and therefore it may be the place to start if you’re KOK curious.

Perfect Backstory Novel Within the Possible “Star Structure” of the Series

My review of The Third Realm presents the possible pentacle-like “star structure” of the series, with interior “meeting place” novels set more or less in the present, populated by a handful of first-person narrators (The Morning Star, The Third Realm, and most likely three others to come) and exterior “peripheral” backstory novels mostly set in the past (The Wolves of Eternity, The School of Night, Arendal, and most likely SEVEN others to come, if the author ultimately fulfills the totally ambitious structure he’s suggested).

The School of Night is really the first of the exterior/peripheral novels (along the sides of the star shape) after the revelation of the structure by “the star architect” in the third section of the third novel to successfully show how the structure works. I’m not sure Knausgaard understood what he was doing, structure-wise, when he wrote The Wolves of Eternity, which is comparatively messy and not really something that can stand alone, or if read out of context of the series it would confound more than satisfy? But The School of Night shows how these backstory novels in the series can operate with great latitude, free from the central story of the interior novels and the present-day supernatural intrigue yet charged by the possibility of a second sun suddenly appearing in the sky or of a character who dies possibly not quite actually dying at all or returning somehow.

A Devil’s Bargain Novel

The School of Night is a Faustian pact novel. The somewhat overblown, certainly misleading, and potentially AI-generated jacket/flap copy suggests a literal deal with the devil in the guise of a Danish artist named Hans who Kristian meets in a London bar, but Knausgaard is a better writer than that. Instead of offering a straightforward “cautionary tale” on “moral depravity,” he applies plentiful layers of ambiguity. By the end of the novel it’s clear that total fulfillment of Kristian’s artistic ambitions has involved a variety of deal with the devil but when exactly did that deal go down? Possibly when something happened with his sister and he really only thought about himself and his art? Or before that, when he decided to be true to his own nature, to put all his chips in on his artistic self? By the time he meets Hans and is introduced to the director of a staging of Faust, it’s already too late for him, isn’t it? Or maybe when he took the trash bag filled with photos from Hans’s old loft and left behind a special little gift of his own?

The book excels at ambiguity of this sort, very much in large part because it’s also so clear sentence to sentence, page to page. And this ambiguity extends to what some readers call “likability,” the question of whether or not one should root for Kristian as he pursues ends via questionable means, or even more so the fundamental scene of the novel after he generously bestows upon an old decrepit homeless man two cigarettes and a light.

The School of Night also presents and in part rhymes with possible dynamics between Shakespeare and Christopher Marlowe (the author of Doctor Faustus), who was part of a group of atheists known as The School of Night — why the translation is titled as such instead of “The Night School” as expected.

Künstlerroman

If Wolves was in part about a man whose life is committed to death (ie, a mortician) learning to pay attention to life, The School of Night is narrated by a noticer, a young man with eyes wide-open to art and music and physical beauty. But Kristian, the 20-year-old Norwegian narrator studying photography at an art school in London in the mid-’80s, isn’t an innocent despite inexperience. He senses his capabilities and believes in his potential despite not yet having produced much of merit. And wanting to create something great — or at least interesting, unexpected, beguiling, radiating whatever qualities he sees in what he deems admirable art — drives him in part to essentially cut off contact with his family and even take on a different surname after, while home for Christmas, he overhears his father demean him during a fraught time for the family.

(Christmas Knausgaard is flat-out wonderfully fun reading FWIW, and as far as I can remember not something yet to appear in one of his novels, complete with an outing in the snow on a sleigh to find and cut down a Christmas tree. But it’s not all joyous juletid thanks to Kristian’s søster.)

The School of Night is a Künstlerroman showing the development and maturation of a stjernefotograf (a “star photographer” instead of a star architect as in The Third Realm). Just as he associatively orders his records, one area of exploration intuitively leads to another. A focus on structure (the intricate architecture of trees, beams and girders of building’s under construction) leads to the darkly comical process by which he creates his breakthrough image. All of which is interesting and good, thematic jetsam that flows downstream with ease and at pace thanks to a few instances of super-satisfying extended suspense, the first major narrative propulsion benefiting from literary precedence, echoing Raskolnikov, and then the rocket boost propelling the final third or so of the novel comes with contemporary relevance related to so-called cancel culture, echoing the 2022 movie Tár. These larger sections of suspense in turn are driven by smaller, simpler, yet sufficiently suspenseful sections relevant to anyone: will Kristian and his normie downstairs neighbor hook up, and will something bad happen toward the end to the boy?

Whenever a young child is potentially endangered, at least since I became a father twelve years ago, I’ve had massive trouble for example watching movies when an unattended infant wanders too close to the surf at the beach. I issue all-caps accusations of EMOTIONAL MANIPULATION. But Knausgaard, the father of innumerable children at this point (the acknowledgments at the end list a Brady Bunchian number of names) handles all this perfectly well, knowing how lightly he needs to introduce the endangerment among Kristian’s progression through the day with his child. I won’t reveal too much about all this, just that it’s emotionally stirring, absolutely lucid, engaging, page-turning, satisfying reading that seems totally “earned,” as they say in creative writing classes.

Abschiedsbriefroman?

The School of Night is also a suicide-note novel, something that only clarified for me once I re-read the opening pages (which I had first read eight months earlier) after the book’s perfectly satisfying ending, inevitable in its way since it suggests Marlowe’s death as well. But — spoiler — of course Kristian doesn’t dramatize his own death, it’s left open, and knowing what we know of the series overall, it’s very possible that death is not the end. (Apparently, per something I just read on Reddit, Kristian appears as a corpse in The Morning Star and The Third Realm but I didn’t catch this connection.)

A frame device introduces the suicide note motif, set in a cabin on the water in Norway, a setting that briefly appears three times, but the novel mostly takes place in London and Kristian’s family home in Norway in the mid-1980s, and Manhattan and London again in approximately 2010? The latter section in New York I loved, if just for Knausgaard/Kristian’s descriptions of the city. The bit on the screenshot below surprised and “resonated” — I laughed aloud and posted the image as an IG story seen by maybe two dozen friends, although I do like Lou Reed, The Talking Heads, and Television (and I’m learning to like Patti Smith, listening to Just Kids now and really enjoyin’ it). (Note: the autotranslation thing on Kindle often detected and translated from Danish, which is very similar to Norwegian.)

In Sum

Overall, I’d say there’s something about this one that feels almost perfect in its conception, structure, and execution, including loose ends that open spaces of possibility (for example the friend from Norway who visits or the guy who seemed to be following Kristian around London), almost like storyline nubbins that could be picked up and developed in future volumes or remain as they are, red herrings to enhance the sense that the novel’s reality, despite the supernatural superstructure, pledges allegiance in its details to the natural looseness of life.

I Reserve the Right to be Wrong About the Star Structure However

I just learned of the existence of Jeg Var Lenge Død — I Was Long Dead — scheduled to publish in October 2025 in Norway — seems like it’s about Syvert’s brother, Joar, and takes place in the present era when the star appears. Per my pet theory pentacle structure paradigm, it’s an “interior” novel, I suppose, although since it apparently has a single narrator it’s not a “meeting-place novel,” so maybe the “interior” novels are primarily marked by a contemporary time frame more than the number of narrators? Or maybe Jeg Var Lenge Død intentionally blends the interior- and exterior-type distinction since it apparently involves exploration of the afterworld, that is, a place where distinctions such as past and present, living and dead, are transcended?

Betelgeuse Supernova?

I wonder if Knausgaard got the idea for The Morning Star series from articles on the likelihood of Betelgeuse, one of the shoulders of the constellation Orion, apparently going supernova fairly soon (within 10K years). If this happens during our lives, Knausgaard will seem prophetic for sure. As with DeLillo’s Mao II, something about novel writing sometimes glimpses the future. The first volume of the series was published in 2020, right around the time Betelgeuse started dimming, possibly in advance of an explosion. Anyway, something to think about and the likely culprit if you suddenly see what looks like another sun in the sky.

Where to start with Knausgaard at this point?

If you’re trying to figure out which of his many books to read first, do you start with six volumes of My Struggle? Four volumes of The Seasons Quartet? Two early standalone novels (only one available in English so far), an essay collection, a book on Munch, a book about soccer written with another writer, and a few others? Not to mention six volumes so far of the Morning Star series: The Morning Star, The Wolves of Eternity, The Third Realm, The School of Night, Arendal, and I Was Long Dead those last three unavailable at this point in English?

Seems weird to suggest starting with the fourth novel in a series, but if you’ve never read Knausgaard, this may be the place to start — or a recommended reentry point if you’ve only read My Struggle 1 and maybe 2. You don’t need to have read the first three in the series, although knowing the themes and expectations of the others would definitely thicken and extend (engorge?) your reading experience.

The Below Relates More to My Reading Experience (What I Call “Words Without Friends”) Than to the Book Itself

My reading experience was engorged by the eggplant of novelty. Unlike every other novel I’ve ever read (other than a short Tomas Espedal book earlier this year), I read the original Norwegian/Bokmål edition of Nattskolen in ebook format (consistently referring to the automatically generated English translation via Kindle to confirm my understanding after I read a third of a page). Also, unlike every novel I’ve ever read, I read Nattskolen over the course of eight months, from January to August 2025, at first trying to cover a single ebook page a day and then aiming to accomplish the reasonably achievable goal of a single ebook percentage per day (1% of ~584 pages was about six or seven pages).

Over the months of making my way through the ebook, my reading speed and comprehension improved as I looked up words multiple times until I finally knew what they meant without necessarily translating them. Uforvarende simply meant uforvarende, for example. Notably, I learned the word faen in this, which for some reason didn’t come up in the Duolingo course I completed, and which the translation feature sometimes refused to translate, at most offering “damn.” And generally after a while I didn’t feel like I was dealing with a “foreign” language. Toward the end I felt comfortable with the process of reading a language that a few years ago would have been daunting/impossible, and I just downloaded Arendal, the fifth volume in the series, to ensure that the progress I’ve made in the language doesn’t degrade. (And I just learned of the existence of I Was Long Dead.)

Over the past few years, achieving a degree of reading facility in Norwegian and French, and this year in Italian, I’ve come to realize that I enjoy settling or at least mapping in my mind a territory that at first seems disorientating and wild. In the modern era, I first noticed this about 10 years ago when I rediscovered electric guitar and started exploring the endless world of effect pedals (see Neutral Evil ))) ), and again six years ago when we moved from the South Philadelphia city grid to the wild winding hills 15 miles west of Philly (see Chaotic Good). Streets in the new area aren’t numbered, their undulations determined by topographical irregularities, creeks, ravines, really old trees. It felt like a maze at first, and I loved not quite knowing where I was, that feeling of being turned around. But now I drive without really even thinking about how to get where I’m going. I enjoyed that process of learning our new area, just as I enjoy encountering a page of incomprehensible text and over time making sense of it, if not totally settling it. To put it simply: I’ve realized fairly recently that I really like learning.

But sometimes I wonder why I intuitively decided to learn Norwegian when first presented the options on Duolingo? At first I intended to “do” German or French (my Spanish is already pretty good) but then seeing that they offered Norwegian, because I’d read so much Hamsun, Knausgaard, Solstad, Vesaas, Bjornboe, Espedal, et al, I tried Norwegian and figured it would be easier than German or French for a native English speaker. I definitely didn’t intentionally decide to learn Norwegian just to get a jump on reviewers who have to wait to receive Advanced Reading Copies of Knausgaard’s new novels in translation.

And I definitely look forward to reading the official English translation by Martin Aitken in part to revisit this world: mid-’80s art school in London soundtracked by post-punk on vinyl (I made a playlist of more or less everything Kristian mentions or puts on his turntable — loved seeing that he listened to The Fall and Neu), a Christmas break in scenic snowy Norway, relatively contemporary NYC, and back to London and then a cabin on the fjords in sunny nocturnal Norway.

I’ll surely update this page once I read the English translation in 2026 (will probably finish Arendal and read Jeg Var Lenge Død before returning to The School of Night).

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 Nattskolen and The School of Night.

Fulfill all your Knausgaard needs with the following posts:

Arendal by Karl Ove Knausgaard: Deep Cut for a Cold Dark Night

The Third Realm by Karl Ove Knausgaard: Revelation of the Structure and Decategorization in the Age of the Holy Spirit

The Wolves of Eternity by Karl Ove Knausgaard: Prequel to an Infinite Arc

New Novels From Knausgaard (The Morning Star) and Franzen (Crossroads): Subtitle Subject to Change Regarding Middle-Aged Male Writers Every Middle-Aged Male Reader Reads

The Seasons Quartet by Karl Ove Knausgaard

The Complete My Struggle Series by Karl Ove Knausgaard

Our Holiday Shopping Guide to the Lesser Knausgaard: The Essays, the Soccer One, the Short Lecture, the Munch One . . . Which Is Right for You?

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)

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).