The Third Realm
by karl ove knausgaard,
translated by martin aitken
penguin, 512 pages, $32
Karl Ove Knausgaard treats the stage business of life with gravity, seeking in it, perhaps, some key to the way time slips away from us: “I got up, rinsed my plate at the sink, put it in the dishwasher.” His fiction is almost a photo negative of the traditional realist novel, which strings together its trenchant and telling incidents like Christmas bulbs. In sacralizing the mundane, he flatters the solipsist in all of us, our assumption that our story is the one the world is forever telling. His is a project of recovery or restoration—returning to us those bits of time that make up our lives but quickly fade from memory. He writes with a kind of naivete, a bracing confidence in his reader’s interest. At times he succeeds in creating a rare intimacy, the sense that we are getting the stuff of life itself. There are also long stretches in which his novels are simply boring. One wonders whether the writer himself can tell the difference. Perhaps boredom is part of what we are being asked to take on.
Knausgaard made his international reputation with the autobiographical six-volume novel My Struggle, the 1,200-page final volume of which was published in English in 2018. In My Struggle, the ordinary events of Knausgaard’s life were examined in relentless detail, as though he had published his anguished, adolescent diaries in lieu of a proper novel. Critical opinion was mixed, especially as to the later volumes, but the naysayers were steamrolled by the tireless machineryof a publishing “event.”
Since then, Knausgaard has turned outward, while retaining the same completist aesthetic. The Third Realm is the third in a cycle of novels concerning the appearance of a mysterious star in the skies above an unnamed Scandinavian city and its possible relation to some unsettling local events, including the ritual murder of the members of a death-metal band. Of course, these events may also be random—and the author is not committed to giving us the answer. The star may be meant to invoke the nativity; Knausgaard himself, however, has an ambivalent relation to Christianity—he has called it “a pleasant, sentimental paganism.” Given the murder plot, he may be invoking a less pleasant paganism, too.
The Third Realm is voiced by nine narrators, including Arne, a university professor who stands nearest to Knausgaard. A number of these narrators speak from strong vocational perspectives: a neurologist, an architect, a visual artist, an undertaker, and so on. They are defined by these perspectives, enlivened by them, trapped by them. Sometimes they are assertive in their knowledge; at other times, they lightly ironize it, like good egalitarians. We are getting something like the collective portrait of a society here, at least in its upper-middle-class professional range. These people are decent, competent, dutiful—thoroughly Scandinavian. They are also complacent and spiritually weak. Knausgaard wants desperately to shake them up.
In its brooding tone and dark intimations, The Third Realm has the feel of a genre novel. But what genre are we in, exactly? Science fiction? The supernatural? Knausgaard borrows the energetic potential of these genres, but that potential is not realized in terms of plot. His intention, rather, seems to be to introduce a subtle but pervasive disquiet, which must remain unresolved.
In most obvious ways, Knausgaard is a “bad” writer. Clichés are not only not avoided; they apparently are not even regretted. His prose often seems to need that one more crucial draft, in which the author-editor abandons all pity. Sometimes he’s just keeping his pen moving out of habit: “I poured myself another cognac and drank it standing by the sloshing dishwasher.” Human beings do such things—that much, at least, cannot be denied.
A signature Knausgaard tick is his use of a comma rather than the correct semicolon to join two independent clauses:
“I couldn’t just sit there and not smoke, I’d only think about it then.”
“A fishing boat lay bobbing off the shore of an islet, no doubt the fisherman was checking his nets.”
“She was heavily pregnant, the kittens were due any time now.”
All of these examples are drawn from the first thirty pages of The Third Realm. More than grammar is at stake here. In a long novel—and Knausgaard has tended to write very, very long novels—writerly inattention induces slackness in the reader. The best writers want us wide awake.
Knausgaard sometimes seeks a vicarious intellectual dignity by slipping big ideas into his writing, but these ideas are not always productively engaged. “I dropped the bottle into the bin and ambled over to the lift. As far as I knew, Descartes was the first scientist who wanted one method for everything, a system in which all knowledge was gained in the same way, independently of the object of investigation.” The narrator here is supposed to be a homicide detective, but he sounds more like Saul Bellow’s slightly cracked intellectual, Moses Herzog. (“No, really, Herr Nietzsche, I have great admiration for you.”)
It is hard to say just why Knausgaard connects with readers, never mind why he has become perhaps the most widely read serious novelist in the world. His reach often exceeds his grasp, a shortcoming that, making a virtue of necessity, he has adopted as an aesthetic principle. Few major novelists seem less interested in form or in the expectations that trail behind the novel as a genre. And yet, I found myself turning the pages of The Third Realm without resentment. Knausgaard’s narration has the formless, recursive quality of psychoanalytic free association. Such apparently guileless recitation may induce in readers the not unpleasant state of “evenly hovering attention” that Freud envisioned for analysts. Knausgaard often succeeds in creating the illusion that he is simply recording events, as though he were a “direct cinema” documentarian and not a man making up stories in a book-lined study. This is not at all easy to do. It follows that there may be more art in his method than meets the eye.
Knausgaard is devoted to family as a fictional subject: the constantly shifting alliances, the anomie of frustrated proximity. And he will not pretend that family life is happier than it is. In The Third Realm, we get a sincere, pained portrait of a married couple, Tove and Arne. They are not without love for each other, but they are traveling through their marriage along parallel paths. Perhaps because he has done long work as a father, an experience he explored at length in My Struggle, Knausgaard makes room for Tove’s and Arne’s children, too. Their moods and preferences are part of the emotional atmosphere. One of Tove’s sorrows is that her bipolar disorder fuels her artistic life but keeps her from becoming the parent she longs to be.
The lean and leonine Knausgaard is a literary pinup, but The Third Realm, like all of his work, is an anti-romance. It holds up the mirror for us, and we register the blemishes. At the same time, in clearing away illusions, it invites us to see ourselves outside familiar formulations and to find something reclaimable—something to build on. Perhaps what he offers readers is dignity in their solitude. In this respect, he may be the ideal novelist for our lonely age. The restless and disenchanted seem to find in this Norwegian seer the beauty of a dauntless integrity.
The Third Realm features a neuroscientist-narrator, Jarle. Knausgaard clearly has been doing some armchair research. And because the author has been reading, his character gets to do some pronouncing. But this cannot be done through ordinary narration, because the way a neuroscientist would talk to himself would not be comprehensible to us. And so Jarle, it turns out, is working on a textbook, which is quoted at length:
If consciousness somehow consists in the very experience of something, then the self is that which claims ownership of the experience. . . . Whether or not this sense of ownership is already in place in the newborn infant is of course impossible to say.
Since we are reading a novel by Karl Ove Knausgaard, Jarle also consumes drinks, takes elevators, registers the weather. (“I went over to the coffee machine and bought myself a cappuccino, drinking it standing while leaning back against the wall, briefcase at my feet.”) From this sort of activity we are meant to infer that a character has been created. But Jarle is merely a treatise that stands on hind legs.
Jarle’s materialist account is counterpointed in The Third Realm by metaphysical gestures whose import never becomes clear. For a period after the appearance of Knausgaard’s mysterious star, no local deaths are recorded by the medical examiner. I confess that I do not know what Knausgaard intends here—perhaps the star is a brief beneficence that suspends the relentless, mechanical march of birth and death? Are we being asked to accept the final insufficiency of scientific explanations? A novelist who wants to suspend the laws of nature better have a purpose in mind. I suspect that Knausgaard does have a purpose, however vague, which is not to say that I would find his explanation resonant. At the end of the novel, the star disappears, which presumably means that deaths will resume. Is catharsis or anti-catharsis intended here? Your guess is as good as mine.
Whether Knausgaard’s art appeals to a given reader may depend largely on where that reader stands in relation to the High Street conventions of literary realism. The scenic method of composition; elegance of prose style; free indirect discourse; the lightly ironic tone—all of these, having become overly familiar, may invoke in some readers a certain impatience. Time is short, and the demands of the world are insistent. So why not just say what happened?
Along comes autofiction, the genre with which Knausgaard is strongly identified, with its apparent lack of artifice—the right narrative strategy for a period of readerly exhaustion. Of course, some of the autofictionists, such as Annie Ernaux, are themselves all artifice, merely of a different kind. Knausgaard is almost unique in his apparent fidelity to just getting it all down. (He claims to have written the later volumes of My Struggle at a rate of fifty pages per week.) The implicit argument of his long, discursive novels is that, in the age of digital reproduction, “realism” is factitious—not now true to life, if it ever was. Our souls have worn thin; we have capacity for only the most direct strategies of address.
Knausgaard asks us to accept that what is true is often not beautiful. His anti-selection principle gives us the world in low relief, rendered mainly as childcare, spousal disconnect, endless cups of tea. Is this purported escape from narrative convention evidence of genius or evidence of absence—of writing that wants to be avant-garde but is merely broodingly, almost risibly, self-serious? Millions of readers around the world give their answers whenever a new Knausgaard novel is published. There were things I liked in The Third Realm, but I remain unconvinced. Genius seldom wears a leather jacket.
Image by editrrix. Image cropped.
