Night School Review by Karl Owe Knausgaard – Can this sprawling saga deliver on its promise? | imaginary

yourArl Ove Knausgård’s Morning Star cycle may turn out to be larger in scope than his six-volume bestseller, My Struggle. Four books deep, this titanic work of supernatural existentialism is an unsettling account of the mysterious phenomena that accompany the appearance of a bright new star in the sky. Mysteries of the first three volumes include: Who killed the musicians in the forest? What’s going on with the local wildlife? Why doesn’t anyone seem to die anymore? By the end of Night School, the most pressing question may seem relatively mundane: Who is he Christian Hadland?

Scattered references appear in the first 2,000 pages of the epic. Christian Hadland was the 67-year-old man buried without mourners by the skeptical priest Katherine Reinhardsen in The Morning Star (2021). In The Third Realm (2024), he is the evil young man riding in the elevator with Katherine’s husband. after The unloved man she buried was supposedly dead.

Night School offers another answer. Here, Christian Hadland is the author of a 500-page suicide note, and the misanthropic narrator of a very bad novel. From the remote Norwegian island where he prepares to end his life, Christian tells the story of how he got there, starting with his time as a photography student in the mid-1980s in London.

Young Christian has a keen eye and self-confidence, even if, as a visiting professor suggests, his pictures are “a bit dull. And without a mood.” Shortly after arriving from Norway, he meets the mysterious Hans, a Dutch artificial intelligence artist, and Vivienne, who is performing in a production of Christopher Marlowe’s Dr. Faustus; He develops an uneasy friendship with the former and a hostile sexual relationship with the latter. Christian is reflexively unpleasant, quick to disdain everyone and everything from the homeless to old women who wear jeans and drink lattes.

When Christian returns home for Christmas, he becomes hostile toward his family as well. After his sister overdosed, he heard his father describe him as a “black hole… a narcissist in every sense of the word.” Angry, he returned to London, withdrawing into himself. He rides his bike in the rain in a cityscape that resembles a cemetery. He steals a dead cat from a vet and plans to photograph its skeleton. Like many Knausgaard men, he drinks a lot. Then a chance encounter with a homeless man sets Christian on the path from near ruin to stunning glory.

The Faustus subplot references Knausgaard’s literary model as well as providing an interpretive lens for the reader. When the story’s central crisis is resolved thanks to the mysterious intervention of Mephistopheles’ Hans, Christian’s abilities as a photographer are miraculously transformed. “Every image seemed to glow, as if I was moving forward with tremendous force,” Christian writes. Twenty-four years later, Christian is putting the finishing touches on a retrospective of his work at New York’s Museum of Modern Art. But then, his life and success began to unravel.

Knausgaard’s assertion that he hardly plans or edits his work may annoy those who have ventured this far, not to mention repel readers who have not yet begun. Each new installment in the Morning Star cycle contributed more to the feeling of creeping entropy than grand design; It’s not clear how “Night School” fits into the bigger picture – if at all He is one. The next two volumes, already released in Norway, appear to focus on the Løyning family first introduced in The Wolves of Eternity (2023). Are the text’s anachronisms and contradictions intentional, features of a superstructure that transcends rationality and whose general outline remains only partially visible? How else, when their birth dates don’t match, could the hero of “Night School” be the man Catherine buried in “The Morning Star”?

Other readers will be drawn to the kabbalistic interpretation. I found myself translating Danish Reddit threads, examining Norwegian ferry schedules to track Christian’s movements, and researching the classics to understand how the story of Faustus could illuminate the world of The Morning Star. When Marlowe’s Faustus asks Mephistopheles: “How then did you get out of hell?” And the devil answers: “Why, this is hell, and I’m not out of it,” which is a good description of the bleak universe Knausgaard created.

As in the first three books, the author’s philosophical preoccupation with death is constant, expressed through the tension between instinctive materialism and the haunting possibility of something beyond understanding. Christian seems to want to ignore this tension, but he is unable to explain Hans’ strange power in his life, let alone the Dutchman’s sudden, demonic appearance at a pivotal moment at the end of Part One: “Suddenly, he threw back his head and stared up at the sky, and the orbs in his sockets turned white. He opened and closed his mouth three successive times like a fish.” Close readers may remember the same convulsion that struck Jesper, the musician suspected of murdering his three bandmates in a demonic bloodbath, in the horrific final pages of The Third Realm. The supernatural allusions give the saga much of its momentum and strange frisson. But can the mystery continue indefinitely?

Some readers will not be persuaded. Sometimes Knausgaard’s prose is not just eccentric but incoherent. Even fans will admit that you don’t read it because of the beauty of its sentences. Moreover, 500 pages in Christian’s Abominable Company is a tough lot to handle—and getting the most out of The School of Night entails thousands of pages of back-reading. (You’ll need to pay close attention to experience the exciting revelation that the house where Christian wrote his last will and testament belongs to Egil Stray, the writer of the essay on death and the dead that concludes The Morning Star and perhaps provides a kind of Rosetta Stone to the saga’s secrets…etc.)

Much depends on Knausgård’s ability to deliver on the enormous promise of this sprawling saga. But for readers who have the courage, patience, and faith to keep going, this work of millennial fiction remains a subject of fascination.