Knausgaard Gave You All the Clues

There’s a strange new star in the sky, so bright that you can see it by day. It brings with it unseasonably hot weather and bizarre phenomena that defy scientific explanation. To some, the star is an astronomical marvel; to others, it’s a portent of doom. This is the premise of The Shooting Star, a comic book starring the plucky young Belgian journalist Tintin, published in 1942. It’s also, more recently, the premise of a series of novels by the celebrated Norwegian writer Karl Ove Knausgaard. The third book in the series, The Third Realm, arrives this month.

I once read a parody of Tintin in which he kept overhearing conversations and finding little scraps of paper—crumbs!—and the joke was that they weren’t clues to anything, just meaningless ephemera. It’s funny because nothing is ever random in Tintin’s world; it’s entirely organized around him, and supersaturated with meaning. At first blush, the world of The Third Realm looks more like the parody world: a jumble of unconnected incidents and coincidences. All noise, no signal. Just like reality! But the truth is more complicated than that, and more interesting. It turns out that meaning, like a stubborn ghost, isn’t so easy to get rid of.

Meaningless ephemera are, of course, Knausgaard’s stock in trade. He’s best known as the author of the six-volume autofictional epic My Struggle, a frame-breaking, obsessively detailed, radically confessional account of his own life that has become a landmark in contemporary literature. Knausgaard’s new series is, on its face, a much more conventional affair. It began—in case you’re just tuning in—in 2020 with The Morning Star, which tells the stories of nine fictional Norwegians as they go about their lives under the enigmatic gaze of the eponymous star. Is it a comet? A supernova? A UFO? An optical illusion? Nobody knows. Book two, The Wolves of Eternity, is about a young undertaker who finds out he has a secret half sister in Russia. Its connection to book one is mostly thematic, though that mystery star does appear at the end.

As if to make up for the digression, The Third Realm (the title can also translate as The Third Reich—very on-brand for Knausgaard) is almost too closely tied to The Morning Star. It features most of the same characters and a lot of the same incidents; the major difference is that Knausgaard is telling them largely from new points of view. For example: In The Morning Star, we met Arne, a handsome but rather dull academic who’s trying to keep his family together while his wife, an artist named Tove, wrestles with delusions. The Third Realm puts us instead in Tove’s head, a blast furnace of creative fury and intrusive hallucinations that compete with her family for her attention. “Hell isn’t the psychosis,” Tove says. “Hell is leaving the psychosis. Hell on earth is what that is.”

After six volumes of My Struggle, an uncharitable reader (like me) might have suspected Knausgaard of being a one-POV pony, but the people in The Third Realm are as vivid and convincing as Knausgaard’s autobiographical persona. In addition to Tove, we get Gaute (a schoolteacher), Kathrine (a pastor married to, and bored of, Gaute), Line (an H&M sales clerk), Helge (an architect), Jarle (a neurologist), Geir (a policeman and philanderer), Ramsvik (a semiconscious stroke victim), and Syvert (the undertaker from book two with the secret half sister). My Struggle has become Their Struggle. We follow them through their days, watching as they text, drive, make small talk, contemplate infidelity, have lunch, brush their teeth, smoke, think about death, drink dismaying quantities of alcohol, and pull it together for the kids. The H&M worker dates a musician. The architect goes to work. The neurologist consults on a case. Some of them meet each other; some of them don’t. They all look up at the star—“It was pale,” Helge thinks, “like the sun’s ill sister.”

Knausgaard’s writerly self-discipline is formidable. Most novelists freely pump the gas and the brakes, zipping through the boring bits to get to the good ones, but his pacing is remorselessly steady, the metronome locked at 60, one second per second. He transcribes every trivial exchange in real time. He doesn’t show off; modernists such as Joyce and Woolf trafficked in mundane details too (“Mrs. Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself”), but they used them as raw material for wild stylistic experiments. The heat of Knausgaard’s prose never exceeds room temperature. Why should it? The world isn’t here to entertain you. Neither is he.

I know how this sounds. And it is a lot—The Third Realm, at 512 pages, is the shortest book in the series. There’s definitely some conventional plot in there: Is Kathrine cheating on Gaute? Could Helge have saved the victim of that car crash he witnessed as a child? What should Jarle title his monograph on neuroscience (it’s not a Knausgaard novel without an embedded monograph)? Still, I’ll own that some of the suspense for me was the meta-suspense of whether I would crack under the strain of paying attention.

[From the November 2018 issue: How writing My Struggle undid Knausgaard]

But Knausgaard is playing a subtly different game here than he was in My Struggle. Mixed in with the everyday dross are a few sparkly flecks of strangeness, curious anomalies that might be clues to a larger mystery. Murders, for instance: Just as the star appears, three members of a death-metal band have been found dead in the woods, and not just dead but skinned. Also, unnatural herds of crabs roam the land, and a brain-dead patient who’s about to have his organs harvested suddenly revives on the operating table. If this were a Tintin comic, these things would eventually lead us to a Moroccan opium-smuggling operation. In The Third Realm, they don’t—but it’s weirder than that. They’re not connected, but they’re not not connected either. As readers, we’re all conspiracy theorists, searching for patterns, trying to put together a bigger picture. But Knausgaard keeps refusing to confirm or deny the existence of any larger mystery or meaning behind the oddities, the result being that you start hallucinating connections to fill in the gaps. Soon you’re seeing them all over the place. Everything in The Third Realm exists in a kind of Schrödingerian superposition, clue and not-clue at the same time.

The characters experience their own stories this way. They’re always looking at the star and projecting their fervent but totally unsubstantiated theories onto it. “People wanted excitement,” scoffs Jarle, who fancies himself a man of science. “They wanted mysteries, they wanted the unknown.” Everybody in The Third Realm is obsessed with coincidences and what they might or might not signify. One of Gaute’s students mutters in her sleep, and it sounds like she’s saying the words heavenly star, except that the words are in Hindi, a language the student doesn’t speak. “Could it be coincidence?” Gaute asks himself. “It had to be, there was no other explanation.” Syvert, the undertaker, finds his business drying up because there have been no deaths since the mystery star appeared. “It was coincidence, of course. But how many coincidences did it take for something to no longer be coincidence?” Is it noise, or signal? And if it’s signal, what is it signaling?

The effect is maddening but enthralling. It’s like you’re trapped in an endless line at the DMV, but at the same time you’re inside a police procedural that is in turn stuck inside a horror movie. The entire book seems to flip back and forth, like an optical illusion, from literary novel to genre thriller and back again. The world is drab and pedestrian, but always just behind it trembles some apocalypse or ecstatic revelation that could break through at any moment! Or not! Either way, you can’t stop reading. Early on in the book, there’s a title drop:

When [Line’s metalhead boyfriend] spoke about the Third Realm, it wasn’t the Nazis he was talking about but something people had believed in the Middle Ages, that the First Realm was the age of God, the Second Realm the age of Christ, the Third Realm the age of the Holy Spirit.

I’m not sure exactly what he means—Line isn’t quite sure either—but if the Holy Spirit is something transcendent and omnipresent but also diffuse and really hard to explain, he might be onto something. It’s not much of a spoiler to say that The Third Realm does not tidy up all its tangled threads, but hope springs eternal. Knausgaard has already published book four in Norway, Nattskolen (“The Night School”), with one or two more expected after that.

You can see why this kind of writing would be a logical next step for Knausgaard, after the strenuous naturalism of My Struggle and the mostly autobiographical Seasons Quartet that followed it. He’s always had something of a mystical streak, but without the consolation of any conventional religious faith, so it’s no wonder that after so many pages spent wandering in the desert of the real, he’s started seeing oases, or mirages, or possibly both at once. It’s a concession, maybe, that there are realms of human experience better served by something other than orthodox realism, and also by genres other than literary fiction—thrillers, mysteries, science fiction, fantasy, horror. Knausgaard’s characters like to think of themselves as dwelling in respectable reality, but they’re constantly besieged by the fantastical; it seethes at the corners of their vision, as madness, dream, memory, love, drunkenness, jealousy, neurological disaster (at least three people in The Third Realm have strokes), or holy ecstasy. Like plucky journalists, they suspect the world of harboring some hidden meaning, something wonderful and terrible, and they won’t rest until they find out what it is.