The Wolves of Eternity

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Status Quo, Slade, Mud, Gary Glitter, they were the bands we listened to. Those a bit older than us added in Rory Gallagher, Thin Lizzy, Queen and Rainbow. Then everything upended, at least it did for me, and all of a sudden it was Sham 69, the Clash, the Police, the Specials, nothing else would do. But they're bands I've kept listening to, on and off. That's never been the case with Status Quo. That's why it hit me the way it did, like an explosion. And it's why suddenly I cried when I heard the chorus of the title song. I stood behind the stairs and heard Hilde say I wasn't in and that she didn't know where I was. I could see Trude trudge off home through the snow. From internationally bestselling author Karl Ove Knausgaard, The Wolves of Eternity is the new book in a visionary series that begins with The Morning Star. Expansive, searching and deeply human, it questions the responsibilities we have toward one another and ourselves - and the limits of what we can understand about life itself. I said nothing to Mum about what had happened. I knew what she’d think. It’d be my fault for letting him try.

The Wolves of Eternity by Karl Ove Knausgård review – cosmic

Hello! We are publishing the English translation of Karl Ove Knausgaard's newest novel, The Wolves of Eternity, on September 19th. It wasn't as if there was much good happening that year, 1977, certainly not in my own life, it was more the feeling that something was happening, and not least that something existed. I fired a few shots from the wall of the barn, first standing, then lying down. It would have been an understatement to say I wasn’t very good; half my shots missed completely, the rest were nowhere near the bull’s eye. I decided to keep at it at least until I got a bit closer. Then, just as I was changing targets, I heard a car come up from the road and went round to the front of the barn to let Mum know where I was. In present-day Russia, Alevtina Kotov, a biologist working at Moscow University, is traveling with her young son to the home of her stepfather, to celebrate his eightieth birthday. As a student, Alevtina was bright, curious and ambitious, asking the big questions about life and human consciousness. But as she approaches middle-age, most of that drive has gone, and she finds herself in a place she doesn’t want to be, without really understanding how she got there. Her stepfather, a musician, raised her as his own daughter, and she was never interested in learning about her biological father; when she finally starts looking into him, she learns that he died many years ago and left two sons, Joar and Syvert.

In present-day Russia, Alevtina is trying to balance work and family. She has always sought the answers to life's big questions, but is preoccupied with care of her young son. Her friend Vasilisa offers some nourishment: she is writing a book about an ancient feature of Russian culture, the belief in eternal life. Meantime, Alevtina is heading towards a meeting that will redraw the contours of her world. Hvorvidt denne lange begynnelsen om Terje passer inn i totalhistorien om morgenstjernen, er en helt annen sak. Plot wise - lots of stuff here to evoke some series nostalgia for the Struggle heads. This thing moves like a slower, very successful Stephen King novel (as the Translator Max Lawton has noted Stephen King is kind of an apt comparison for KOK). Also the way that this ties into the Morning Star is handled maybe in the best way possible, so mazel tov for that. Several decades later, in present-day Russia, he will meet her - just as a mysterious new star appears in the sky... I came to our house and went in, took off my coat and my boots. Dad poked his head out of his office as soon as he heard me.

‘I learned to lower the threshold’: Karl Ove Knausgaard on

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.Of course not, a person consists of memories that can only ever be affirmative, they're what that person is. An] enormously compelling book… The range of subjects The Wolves of Eternity explores is fascinating Sunday Times 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. But then... the book got so profoundly good that after reading the whole thing, I have to give it five stars. 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.)

Karl Ove Knausgaard’s Novel for Our Precarious Times – DNyuz

Magnitudes better than The Morning Star. Less of a focus here on building an archipelago of characters (who all sound exactly the same, that is, like Knausgaard himself), and much more successfully conceptual. Is this world shot through with meaning or not? That’s always been of some concern to Karl Ove, and this novel might move at a glacial pace at times, but his intentions are clear. Of course like Kundera (RIP) said it isn’t the novel’s job to assert anything. So by that definition Knausgaard achieves what the novel is all about: posing questions, not necessarily answering them. Rundt s. 420 kommer det heldigvis et vendepunkt. Plutselig befinner vi oss i Russland, i hodet til en småkriminell lastebilsjåfør. Hoppet i rom og tid er så voldsomt at man nesten blir litt lammet, hva skjedde egentlig nå? Men nå kommer endelig de 400 sidene med livløs prosa til sin rette, for her, inne i hodet til en erfaren lastebilsjåfør ute på en forblåst og hvitkledd russisk motorvei, fortsetter Knausgård i nøyaktig samme stil og tone. Dette skaper en uventet nærhet til et menneske som i utgangspunktet er så langt borte fra meg og mitt. Litteraturens magiske potensial blir med andre ord virkelig realisert. Endelig lever teksten, lettelsen og gleden er enorm og følger meg utover kvelden. What about his children? Wouldn’t reading My Struggle be excruciating if he was your father? But he’s sanguine. “They very much have their own life, and I’m very much the father, not the writer. But one day, when I’m gone, I hope they’ll see there’s love in it.” I take this as a reference to the many accounts of childcare in the books, work he often finds exasperating and boring. But no, this isn’t what he means. “It’s to do with being honest about things,” he says. Is honesty always best? Does he still believe this after all the he has been through? “No, I don’t think so. In a lot of social circumstances, you have to be considerate and decent. It wouldn’t be a better society if everyone told the truth. On the contrary, in fact. But yes, I do think that in certain other ways, honesty is an act of love.” His voice, soft at the best of times, is now so gentle, the couple next to us finally concede defeat, and at last ask for their bill. Casts an existential spell… captivating… Big themes — the cosmos, death and resurrection — are amplified through ghostly visitations, doppelgänger lives and the question of what, if anything, lies beyond human existence Financial Times Den nesten delen av boken utspiller seg i Russland, vekslende mellom ulike karakterer og stemmer, men hovedsakelig befinner vi oss i hodet til en middelaldrende biologiprofessor i Moskva. Hennes refleksjoner og menneskemøter åpner opp boken, slipper inn lys fra både evolusjonsteorien og den russiske kulturhistorien. Mange spennende tanker og situasjoner, formidlet gjennom en karakter jeg har langt mer sympati og forståelse for - til tross for at hun befinner seg i en helt annen verden enn min egen.

All right, you’ve seen it now,’ I said. ‘Put it down and come inside.’ The little head was a mess of bloody goo and splintered bone. He nodded. I strung up another target and stood beside him as he loaded and took aim. He was really enjoying himself, a picture of concentration. Knausgaard, who was born in 1968, grew up on Tromøy, the largest island in southern Norway, and after university in Bergen, did various jobs as he tried to become a writer, among them working on an oil platform and in a psychiatric hospital. In 1998 and in 2004, he published two novels, Out of the World and A Time for Everything, both of which won prizes in Norway. But then, as we’ve heard, he fell silent, the result largely of his battle to fictionalise his relationship with his father. (Every sentence, he once said, “was met with the thought: ‘But you’re just making this up. It has no value.’”) This quiet lasted until he began work on My Struggle, the series of books that would change his life.