In the following essay, Elisa Sotgiu considers the career of Karl Ove Knausgaard, a Norwegian novelist long-esteemed for his meandering and verbose repertoire of novels, and equally criticized for his incendiary characters and allusions. Amongst the praise and criticism arises a common belief: that Knausgaard, and by extension his literary works, are global; all-encompassing; beyond borders. Below, Sotgiu examines Knausgaard’s positioning in the literary canon, the critical reception to his novels, and the warped reflection of our world lurking beneath the characteristic mundanity of his oeuvre.
Like all famous authors of the past half century or so, Karl Ove Knausgaard is routinely asked about his creative process. He always replies with characteristic understatement, maintaining that he hardly knows what he’s doing when he sits down to write. He has no plan to speak of and does not make drafts or even sketch a plot; he simply starts with a rough idea of a situation or a character and follows it until it develops into something interesting. To be sure, the method is not conducive to brevity, and since as a rule he does not delete or substantially revise anything, his books tend to leaven into multi-volume series. His new cycle of novels, which started with The Morning Star (published as Morgenstjernen in Norway in 2020, and in English translation in 2021), was supposed to be a trilogy, but as of October 2024 five lengthy volumes have already been completed, with one more in the making.
It is probably this reckless expansiveness, however, that lends Knausgaard’s writing its inherent curiosity, its compelling tension. Anything can happen at any moment on the page; both reader and author are figuring it out together. In a literary world where novels are published on the basis of their polished pitches and synopses, Knausgaard’s liberty to send three pages a day of an undefined project to his editor (Geir Gulliksen at Forlaget Oktober) and have them published as they are is nothing short of miraculous. The resulting impression of open-endedness and unfiltered immediacy prompted some, at the time when Knausgaard’s autobiographical series My Struggle (Min kamp, 2009-2011, translated into the English by Don Bartlett in 2012) was galvanizing United States American and United Kingdom writers of autofiction to declare that the author’s humdrum confessional style was the literary counterpart of social media exposure. Similarly, the sprouting and shifting form of the Morning Star cycle could be considered apt to the era of ever-growing, unmediated Wattpad novels, more so than all the conventional stories that have been plucked from self-publishing platforms, neatly packaged, and endowed with an ISBN.
Knausgaard’s books are original, even ground-breaking, but they do not appear so at first. In fact, it is when Knausgaard becomes aware of their potential novelty, and embraces it, that the best outcomes are achieved. This is what happened in Book Two of My Struggle, when Knausgaard realized that he was not writing a novel with a beginning, climax, and ending, and decided instead to devise his own formal rules. And it has happened again with the third volume of his new series, titled Det tredje riket and now published in Martin Aitken’s English translation as The Third Realm by Penguin Press. What Knausgaard has recognized in The Third Realm is that something unexpected has emerged from his free flow of words. In the first interviews he gave after the publication of The Morning Star, Knausgaard had claimed that his initial idea for the novel was simply to have a gallery of different characters react to the presence of something unknown, a new star. But as in a psychoanalysis session, his unmeditated writing brought to the surface all the things that have been repressed in the polite republic of (global) letters. Within an international literary field where progressive social commentary is the prevalent mode of narration, Knausgaard conjures up hellish creatures, the after-world, religious horror, the politically sinister, and the Devil himself.
After the temporal and spatial detour of the second novel in the series, Ulvene fra evighetens skog (2021, and in English translation as The Wolves of Eternity in 2023), The Third Realm reconnects with the plot line of The Morning Star, often adopting the point of view of the first novel’s secondary characters. The Morning Star opens with the narration of Arne, a literature professor on holiday with his family, continues with the priest Kathrine, and features the young mom Vibeke and the nurse Solveig. Yet it is the voice of Arne’s wife, Tove, that meets us at the beginning of The Third Realm, followed by Kathrine’s husband Gaute, Vibeke’s husband Helge, and Solveig’s daughter Line. Since the third novel is mostly set on the same two days as the first, this complementary structure acts as a constraint on the development of the story, with the same scenes often rehearsed from the other point of view. The writing becomes more deliberate, untangling and developing clusters of ideas that were only implicit in The Morning Star. The fact that the main narrator of The Third Realm is Tove, a painter, also contributes to the self-reflective overtone of the novel. When she muses on the difficulty of representing all that is “hidden in the depths” of culture, because its meaning would often “be squashed” and “appear so flat when brought to the surface,” it is Knausgaard’s dilemma as an author that we are hearing.
Knausgaard seeks both to preserve the mystery of “the depths” and to plunge his story into them. Dark ponds and fjords abound in the three novels. From the black water under a bridge shine the headlights of a sinking car in which a man is drowning at the beginning of The Wolves of Eternity; unwelcome memories and dreams surface in the conscience like dead bodies “rising up from the bottom of a pond”; Line and her possibly Satanist lover plunge in a perfectly circular, volcanic pond in the forest at night. The architect Helge, hunted by repressed feelings of guilt, toys with the idea of having a deep black pond at the center of a building, digging a circular pond in the woods and “somehow build[ing] downwards around it.” In the same way, the novels of the Morning Star cycle are not straightforward thrillers nor horror stories. They are not “the pond.” They are novels of mundane realism on the brink of an irrational and dangerous territory; they build the everyday “downwards” around a well of darkness.
That balance between the familiar and the uncanny—the balance that prevents the building from collapsing into the pond—is maintained through an alternation of narrators. Many of the characters are in couples, with one spouse usually materialistic, rational, and grounded, and the other more instinctual and attuned to the possibility of the supernatural. There are creatures from folk tales, Black Metal rituals, and inhuman murders in these novels, but also annoying colleagues and barbecues with friends. For every obsessive thought of genitals, blood, death, and blasphemous eroticism, there is a reflection on meals to prepare or outfits to wear; for every person who sees ghosts of dead people or malevolent spirits, there is one who cares about their children and elderly family members.
The secular, predictable, and unmysterious world that we think we understand is for Knausgaard only a thin screen between us and the unsaid, the unthought, the vast unknown. (And how ironic that an author with such a desperate longing for the great beyond has become known as the poet of the ordinary!) This intuition already underlays the second novel Knausgaard published, En tid for alt (2004, and in English translation as A Time for Everything by James Anderson in 2009), which is normally referred to by critics as the book “about angels” or the one with Bible retellings in a Norwegian setting. The protagonist of the frame narrative in the novel is a sixteenth-century Italian thinker, Antinous Bellori, who is similar to Descartes, Newton, and Copernicus in his approach to knowledge but devotes his studies to an object that is quickly becoming anachronistic: the angels, which he saw in the flesh as a young boy. His treatise on the nature of the divine is masterful, but it is published in a world where the foundations of the Enlightenment have already been laid. But “what if,” asks Knausgaard, “Bellori’s ideas had won through, and Newton’s had sunk into oblivion? We’d now be living in a different world.”
At the time in which he was writing these words, Knausgaard himself was experiencing the despondence that comes with finding oneself on the wrong side of history. He had just moved to Stockholm, where, as he recounts in Book Two of My Struggle, his artistic tastes and political opinions were considered outdated in cultural circles. Instead of trying to adjust to his new environment, he doubled down on his contrarianism, and the result was a book series that was provocatively titled after Hitler’s Mein Kampf and that in Sweden gave rise to accusations of misogyny, xenophobia, and Nazi sympathies. He made a name for himself as a transgressive writer who wields literature’s freedom against a conformist society.
Few of the heated Scandinavian debates around My Struggle trickled into its Anglophone reception, which was overwhelmingly positive and mostly focused on the novel’s formal uniqueness. As a consequence, Knausgaard himself adopted a much more agreeable persona for his North American and British readers. His Norwegian identity—which he polemically brandished in Sweden, where pride in national belonging is seen as politically suspicious—became a more innocent mark of distinction in the context of the representational logic of world literature. For international audiences, a writer from Norway ought to act Norwegian and explain all things Norwegian, and that’s what Knausgaard has been so far willing to do.
The Morning Star cycle is especially steeped in the writer’s national culture. All the characters, apart from those in the second half of The Wolves of Eternity, are Norwegians living in Norway, and the country’s most distinctive literary and musical exports—folk tales, Nordic noir, and Black Metal—all feature prominently in the series. There is no contradiction between this thematic focus and the fact that for the past six years Knausgaard has been living in London, where he conceived and wrote his new novels at the height of his international fame. Being a global novelist also means becoming an ambassador for one’s country, and Knausgaard is certainly aware of that. When he was commissioned by The New York Times Magazine to write a Tocqueville-style report of a trip through Canada and the United States in 2015, he was asked to begin at a Viking settlement in Newfoundland and drive southwards to visit the Norwegian-American community in Minnesota. Naturally, the two-part piece he ended up writing (titled My Saga) is heavy in cultural comparisons and stereotypes about the differences between Scandinavians and United States Americans.
As a Norwegian, however, Knausgaard can also represent the point of view of “the West” as a whole. This becomes evident in another travelogue he wrote for The New York Times Magazine three years later, this time about a trip to Russia (A Literary Road Trip Into the Heart of Russia, 2018). There, people referred to him as a “Westerner” and he straightforwardly answered questions like “What do people in the West think about Russians?” (Interestingly, a few anecdotes from that article reappear unchanged in the second part of The Wolves of Eternity, which is set in Russia.) It is the broader worldview of Western civilization that Knausgaard aims to express (and challenge) in the Morning Star series. The novels depict the way of life and values that most of Knausgaard’s European and North American readers share, while systematically confronting those readers with the Other: the supernatural, the regressive, the reactionary.
The transgressiveness that had characterized Knausgaard in his Swedish years, therefore, has not been lost in his return to fiction. The idea that truth lies in the seedy underbelly of reality, and that the best art needs to pierce the surface of what is socially acceptable, continues to be foundational to Knausgaard’s thinking. But in the Morning Star cycle—which Knausgaard writes not as a marginalized provincial bumpkin in Sweden but as an acclaimed global novelist in London—artistic transgression does not need to be polemical or aggressive. It is instead contained within a larger representation of the world that justifies its presence and defuses its violence.
Knausgaard is no longer interested in replicating the contrarian outbursts that peppered My Struggle. The new novels include characters who espouse politically controversial opinions, such as Jostein, who perfectly embodies toxic masculinity in The Morning Star, or Syvert, the 19-year-old narrator of the first half of The Wolves of Eternity who in 1986 is a supporter of the insurgent far-right Progress Party (FrP). These characters’ beliefs are neither endorsed nor discredited; they are simply one of the many valid points of view on reality. Any reader would sympathize with Syvert’s level-headedness and optimism, and Jostein ends up as the designated hero traversing the world of the dead in the first volume. The title of the new volume, The Third Realm, could have also been translated as “The Third Reich” (in Norwegian the title is Det Tredje Riket), and in fact the only character in the novel who mentions the “Third Realm/Reich” is Valdemar, a legendary Black Metal frontman who sports swastikas and SS uniforms from time to time. But Valdemar is not a Nazi and, we’re told, when he talks about “det Tredje Riket,” “it wasn’t the Nazis he was talking about but something people had believed in the Middle Ages”: the coming of the kingdom of the Holy Spirit.
Our political and spiritual shadows are strictly connected in the Morning Star series. Beliefs that now belong to religious sects and extremist minorities are depicted with the awareness that they were once preponderant. The populations of entire countries once cheered on Hitler and believed in the Devil. Different political and philosophical systems ended up winning the battle of ideas, but, as in the case of Antinous Bellori in A Time for Everything, their victory is only attributable to historical chance. The world we live in is not the product of the inevitable triumph of progress; Knausgaard summons the Devil to remind us of its dark face. He aims to represent the whole of reality, even the side we no longer believe in. It is this all-embracing portrayal of the world that for Knausgaard is the true task of a global novelist.
Elisa Sotgiu completed her PhD in Comparative Literature at Harvard last year. In her research, she focuses on the contemporary global novel from a sociological perspective, and she is currently revising her dissertation, Counter-Republics of Letters: Politics, Publishing, and the Global Novel, into a book. She published on Elena Ferrante, Roberto Bolaño, Henry James, and Edoardo Sanguineti.
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