The second installment in Knausgaard’s third series (after My Struggle and The Seasons Quartet) is a prequel to the first book, The Morning Star, and it introduces a dynamic that suggests the possibility of an infinite arc, looping back to explore quotidian situations in the past more than moving the eerie post-mortality supernatural story forward in the present.
This installment doesn’t quite read like so-called “serious lit” but it also doesn’t meet the expectations of horror or supernatural fiction. The quick, one-sentence paragraph, hard-return happy, totally committed to dramatization formal approach returns but The Wolves of Eternity mostly lacks the supernatural intrigue that propelled The Morning Star. Relaying the story of a not particularly interesting nineteen-year-old Norwegian man-boy playing soccer, looking for love, trying to get a job, dealing with major revelations about his mother and father — all sans eerie, spooky, supernatural scenes, no more than a few stray images — the same approach isn’t as compelling. Which is maybe the point?
The opening “Syvert” section is 400 pages, set in the mid-’80s. The next proper section (“Alvetina”) is ~200 pages. On page 243 (¨30.3% through the book) there’s a long paragraph describing Syvert taking a shower. I’m Knausgaard’s #1 fan and a completist, but I turned on the book at this point. I even posted this update to Goodreads: “Totally irritated and accelerating reading through long paragraphs of abject naturalism for example cooking or taking a shower. It worked in My Struggle but just reads like unnecessary padding in this. Author is known for this sort of thing but in this one at this point without sufficient supernatural stuff it’s way too much and boring.”
The “abject naturalism” of My Struggle worked because it was clearly part of the project, to describe those under-aired moments, to get to the core of life, but in this, without supernatural intrigue, without interesting or beautiful or compelling language and insight, the single lingering impression was that these pages of prose relaying a life in the ’80s could be read, they were readable, it was all very readable while not offering much else beyond its readability.
Which again is maybe the point?
I’ve been here before with the author. In A Time for Everything I became frustrated with minute descriptions of a family in their hut, going about their day, and then a few dozen pages later it turned out the Flood had begun and they’d all ultimately drown, so those movements minutely described were crucial, their last breaths. (Not to mention reading a few thousand pages of My Struggle before the four-hundred page essay on Hitler crashes into the series overall in Book 6 and drastically yet naturally refracts/intensifies the theme.)
So in this one I gave KOK the benefit of the doubt, accelerated my reading pace, “watched” the scenes as though watching a Netflix series because there wasn’t really much available in terms of descriptions, insight, theme, etc, to savor or play with, to “read”/interpret, as one does when reading lit.
After so much time with Syvert it was somehow equally refreshing and irritating to move on to other narrators, and then when the narration shifts to Alvetina, the female biologist (she studies life, as opposed to Syvert who works with death at a mortuary) in Russia, all the stuff about mycelium etc all felt tacked on, integrated from the author’s reading into the text instead of emerging out of the character. And then the mushroom segment just seemed kinda dubious/implausible — she’d clearly know more about mushrooms, for example that you don’t just gobble ’em up when out in the woods, particularly brown ones, even if you saw someone gathering them. The trip too just didn’t seem all that believable, as though the author himself didn’t do the research and had never eaten them.
But there are some payoffs and pleasures, some good scenes of course, in a nearly 800-page novel. The bits with the Russian translator, the ending in Russia when the two major narrators meet, essayistic stretches about Fedorov, Tolstoy, and resurrecting the dead, although the narrator who supposedly wrote the essayistic bits seemed wholly animated by the author and not really existent as a character in the world of the novel.
Generously, only after the final thirty pages or so do I understand or can see that the book is about perception, opening eyes, seeing life/reality as it is, being honest as the two narrators are with each other toward the end, as Syvert is after his baptism by thunderstorm on the Volga and suddenly sees the world anew. But I’m not sure this justifies those first 400 pages or hundreds of other stray pages narrated in such a way that seems not exactly “turned on,” that compels a sort of passive/TV-watching reading style.
In a way, it’s totally admirably audacious to present four-hundred pages of normie narration so that after another four-hundred pages that narrator can learn that he wasn’t fully perceiving the world around him, and by extension how this relates to reading, to how readers read genre fiction, particularly horror, compared with readers of literature? There’s something interesting there but it also feels like a stretch, the sort of thing “literary readers” do when presented a text that doesn’t seem to require or merit interpretation: go meta — interpret everything read as a comment on reading itself.
The book also could’ve been sequenced differently, with the sections layered somewhat instead of presented in long blocks, with the essayistic bits up front, or even with the meeting at the end placed toward the beginning and then the backstory introduced in somewhat shorter form? There was a way for this book to have fewer long stretches wherein I became really restless. But I suppose they were intentionally eternal. We were supposed to feel lost in the forest (the Norwegian title is “The Wolves of Eternity’s Forest”), but that doesn’t mean I had to enjoy it. Also I never really felt lost because the formal approach is so consistently dramatized and straightforward.
I also thought about my reading experience of the second and third installments of In Search of Lost Time, how I often wrote in my GR reviews something like “four stars for this volume but five stars for the overall project,” how if I had read them when they came out I may have been more against them than I was reading them nearly a hundred years after they were written, knowing the overall scope before I read a word and respecting its canonical status. There’s also something interesting about finishing the second book of this series, not knowing its extent and ultimate reception/importance. I immediately deemed Book Two of My Struggle a mega-masterpiece, more so than Book One — and it amped excitement for the whole series. This second volume, however, undermines/complicates my enthusiasm, although I have hopes for the series thanks to apparent monumental scale and major themes (life and death, immortality, also the formal merging of literary and genre expectations).
Two more of these long Morning Star books are completed so it’s possible that all these scenes of playing soccer and punching that one kid in the stomach and everything else will be important or return in some way down the road, not that I’ll remember them by the time those books make their way to English. Looks like the third book (The Third Reich) will return in part to Syvert and the fourth book (The Night School) will be like this one, mostly set in the mid-’80s, focused on art. Would almost be better to wait to read the remaining novels in a burst when the series is completed. But I don’t think I’ll do that. Loved the cliffhanger ending, and will continue reading the series as the new books arrive in Martin Aitken’s admirable (sometimes somewhat excessively British?) translations. I’m still intrigued about what the star means and what’s going on with the dead, what happens in a world without death etc, but I’m not quite as enthusiastic about the series as I was.
Also, just read the front cover flap copy this morning after finishing the book last night — all of the minor payoffs and pleasures I experienced are revealed. Knowing this stuff from the start I can’t imagine what my reading experience would’ve been like. But thankfully I removed the dust jacket before starting and, as a rule, never read flaps etc until I’ve finished a book.
Now will re-submerge in 19th-century English lit for a while. Bring on the Brontes!