The Wolves of Eternity

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A world that after three hundred years of natural science is left without mysteries. Everything is explained, everything is understood, everything lies within humanity’s horizons of comprehension.

The Wolves of Eternity - Penguin Random House

That’s because it was still alive three minutes ago,’ I said. ‘But now it’s not. It’ll never be alive ever again. Do you understand that?’ Two years after The Morning Star, in which Karl Ove Knausgaard left behind the highly autobiographical style of his My Struggle sequence for something more obviously fictional, its sequel arrives. The Morning Star blended Knausgaard’s trademark attendance to the fine grain of daily life (marital squabbles, sorting the recycling, high school parties) and supernatural strangeness, as if My Struggle had been rewritten by Stephen King: an extraordinary heatwave gripped Norway, a new planet appeared in the sky, and the dead started returning to life. There was no one in when I got home. Joar was at school and Mum must have gone somewhere after work. I felt restless and impatient, wanting something to happen, but of course nothing did. The interview had gone all right, so it couldn’t have been that that made it so hard for me to relax. Plötsligt såg jag henne som hon var. Inte som ”mamma” utan som en kvinna mellan fyrtio och femtio. Ansiktet, rynkorna runt munnen och i pannan, mungiporna som hade börjat peka nedåt. Kroppen, ryggen som kutade lite, de långa och smala fingrarna som fortfarande höll om glaset.” (Proust-inspirerat citat.) A book begging to be read on the beach, with the sun warming the sand and salt in the air: pure escapism.

I should have learned not to distrust him by now, this was absolutely brilliant and I was glad to see how the first and second book connects. Truly cannot wait for the next 3 in the series. Novelist Knausgaard (My Struggle: Book Six) lends his voice to the Why I Write series (following Patti Smith’s opening entry, Devotion), grappling with the theme of the series in a Continue reading »

The Wolves of Eternity, by Karl Ove Knausgaard Rising star: The Wolves of Eternity, by Karl Ove Knausgaard

Billions of years ago there was nothing, and out of that nothing the entire universe came into being in an enormous explosion?” the pastor asks Syvert. “Out of nothing?” This incredulity towards scientific materialism is foundational to the book. In similar dialogues with Alevtina, Darwinism is disputed. She professes biological reductionism to unconvinced students, but it masks secret doubts. Earlier in her career Alevtina had ascertained that trees were sentient, conscious, communicating beings; freaked out by their “secret languages, codes, strange forms of cognition”, she buried the project. Soon after his return, Syvert has a dream in which his father, who died some years earlier in a car accident, confides that his marriage was not a happy one. He is more vivid in the dream than in Syvert’s memory. This is the first slight bowing of the bass strings. No, don’t shoot it!’ I said, but it was too late, he squeezed the trigger and the next instant the bird collapsed to the ground. As if in slow motion, it fell over onto its side, its wings still folded against its body. This bulky novel by the maximalist Knausgaard is mainly composed of two long sections. The first, set in 1986, is narrated by Syvert Løyning, a young Norwegian man who’s just completed his military service and has returned home feeling aimless. He plays soccer, minds his younger brother, tends to his ailing mom, and struggles to find work. (To his chagrin, he becomes a local celebrity after talking to a journalist about his plight.) Idly searching through his late father’s belongings, he discovers a clutch of letters in Russian; after finding a translator, he learns that they were written by a lover his father had in the Soviet Union. Syvert’s narrative is layered with themes of death and loss: He contemplates the threat of the recent Chernobyl meltdown and eventually finds work with an undertaker. The mood persists in the following section narrated by his half sister, Alevtina Kotov, who in the present day is a biology professor with a sideline obsession with research done on immortality; though the plot mainly concerns her tending to her aging stepfather, much of her narrative is devoted to ineffable matters of nature, from the ways trees communicate with each other to the pathways that might let us live forever. As ever, Knausgaard is managing a precarious balance—his overwriting can be deeply immersive or exasperating. But unlike The Morning Star (with which this book shares some plot points), which bounced around a host of characters, this book succeeds by keeping the focus on two main figures, making for an appealing (if still overlong) story of two people with similar obsessions despite the separations of time and distance. Remy, who was fishing at Lake Eternity, said she heard a strange noise, like some beast. Try investigating the area near the fishing spot.What about his mother’s side of the family? “I had a very close relationship with my mother when I lived with her as a teenager. I talked about everything to her, and I still do. It was my brother who had to take the punches when it was published, because I wasn’t there. He said to me: ‘One day, I’ll show you what they’re writing about you.’ He was protecting me. But in My Struggle I write that when I’m with my brother, we never look each other in the eye, and we never shake hands – and it was very moving for me because not only did he read it, he looked me in the eye [the next time we met]. It was total acceptance from him, and there were tough things in there. He was so generous to take it, and he didn’t get the payoff that I did.” Did the books make his friends and family wary? Did they worry they’d appear in some future volume? He smiles. “No. Maybe it was the other way round. It was worse not to be in it than to be in it.” Vad var värst, att vara totalt ignorant men i världen, eller att undra över allt och vara utanför den?” Of course I do,’ he said, and threw the bird into the field. ‘Is that good enough, or do you want to bury it too?’