Norwegian author Karl ove Knausgaard erupted onto the international literary stage upon the release of My Struggle, a series of six autobiographical novels which chronicle the peaks and valleys of the author’s life. Fluid in form, My Struggle is a concatenation of memories, self-reflections and existential musings which drift and fade into another in free-floating fashion, yet nevertheless revolve around a pivotal moment in Knausgaard’s life: the death of his alcoholic father, his childhood and adolescence, the trials and tribulations of fatherhood, as well as, in the final volume, the release of My Struggle and the fallout resulting from its publication. What is remarkable about My Struggle, however, is Knausgaard’s unique ability to render the seemingly insignificant and quotidian details of day-to-day life utterly engaging and, in doing so, transform the intensely personal into something grandly universal. When reading the series, Knausgaard’s struggle becomes our own, and it is in his neurotic detailing of the mundane where the universal struggle (and beauty) of daily existence becomes vividly apparent. In this regard, it might seem strange that Knausgaard’s latest project turns away from autobiography and wades into the world of genre, specifically Weird Fiction.
This latest series, which is unnamed at this point, began with the release of The Morning Star in 2021. Told through nine different viewpoints over a few August nights, the plot of The Morning Star revolves around the sudden appearance of an unknown star and the uncanny effect it has on the world at large. Throughout the book, an army of crabs scuttle across a darkened forest floor and onto the roads, a patient is awakened just as his organs are about to be harvested, a terrifying human-headed bird is glimpsed flying through the night and a man supposedly dead is seen alive. The novel was deliciously creepy and expertly refused to ascribe any obvious meaning to any of the horrors experienced by the book’s nine narrators. The Star, and the terror resulting from its advent, remains mysterious and alien throughout. The Wolves of Eternity, freshly published this year in its English translation, is the latest instalment in this growing series, and like its predecessor, the novel poses more questions than it answers. But whereas The Morning Star begins with the ominous and unexpected arrival of the star, The Wolves of Eternity concludes with it, thereby making the novel a loose prequel of sorts.
The book opens with a character named Helge who recalls a childhood memory where, on a dark fog bound night, she stumbled across a car submerged in the black and freezing waters of an inlet. Judging by the fresh tire marks left on the inlet’s bank, she deduces that the driver had only just recently crashed into the water. Her first impulse is to alert the authorities and tell her parents but she is compelled by a fearful anxiety to repress it and keep what she saw a secret. The next day she sees a crane fishing the car and its dead driver out of the inlet’s coal-black waters. She confides to the reader that she will take this memory, with all the horror, guilt and shame she associates with it, to her grave. Despite its brevity, the opening is highly effective in establishing a foreboding and chilling ambience which comes to haunt the rest of The Wolves of Eternity, suggesting that the coming events of the narrative will inexorably lead to catastrophe and doom.
After this short opening, we meet Syvert, a cocky nineteen-year-old who is returning to his small hometown in regional Norway after a year of military service. The year is 1986. Aimless and unemployed, Syvert lives with his mother and younger brother Joar, who is exceptionally bright. His father passed away when he was boy, leaving his mother to be the sole carer and provider. Like any nineteen-year-old, Syvert shirks his immediate responsibilities and familial promises in order to party with his mates, concentrate on football practice and chase girls. Indeed, the four hundred pages told entirely from Syvert’s point of view is where Knausgaard primarily exhibits his singular ability to render the mundane magically engrossing. Great swathes of Syvert’s narration describe the intricacies of football, catching up with old school friends, getting drunk at bars and clubs, listening to the latest bands, the nuances of cooking, as well as the uncertainties involved in fledging romance. These lengthy passages, however, are intercut with brief supernatural occurrences – the most important being Syvert encountering the ghost of his father, who urges him to take care of his mother and younger brother. From this spectral visitation, Syvert unearths a hidden cache of letters addressed to his father from an unknown Russian woman which, once translated, detail their passionate, long-standing love affair. More explosively, however, from these letters Syvert discovers that he and Joar have a long-lost half-sister living in Russia. Syvert’s narration concludes with this life-altering realisation, which happens concurrently with his mother’s cancer diagnosis and sudden hospitalisation, leaving the reader uncertain about what the future holds for Syvert.
For some, Syvert’s portion of the novel will no doubt frustrate: the pace is languorous and unhurried, the events themselves seem unimportant and without stakes, and the verbose descriptions of the quotidian appear overly excessive and unnecessary. Yet these elements serve two primary functions. Firstly, it paints a deeply comprehensive portrait of Syvert’s interiority, in the sense that the motivations and inner workings of Syvert’s mind are illuminated through the novel’s protracted descriptions of the everyday. When Syvert is recounting football practice or describing how he cooked his evening meal, the reader is not only given a snapshot of his day-to-day life, but also insight into all the thoughts and feelings our young narrator has about the people around him and the world at large. Indeed, this intense focus on Syvert’s interior life comes to overwhelm the reader, wholly absorbing us into Syvert’s point of view, which the novel achieves through its slow, meandering pace and first-person narration. However, by fully immersing the reader into Syvert’s worldview and grounding his world in the mundane, the brief flashes of weird supernaturalism appear, by contrast, strikingly otherworldly – which brings us to its second function.
In his book The Weird and The Eerie, the cultural critic Mark Fisher recognised that Weird Fiction requires the identifiably human world in order to successfully generate the otherworldliness characteristic of the genre. As Fisher himself states, “to capture the boundless and the hideous unknown without any reference to the human world at all is to risk banality.” A similar dynamic is at play in The Wolves of Eternity, wherein the humdrum realism of Knausgaard’s characters give way to sudden bursts of weirdness, which, by sheer contrast, imbue the weird and uncanny events of the novel with an impactful sense of abnormality. Thus, the realism of The Wolves of Eternity serves to not only absorb the reader into the mindset of the characters and make us totally identify with them, but also operates as a means of producing a powerful sense of difference when the narrative turns strange and uncanny.
Moving on from Syvert, the next major section of the novel is told from the point of view of Alevtina, who is a Russian biologist working at Moscow State University in the present-day. Without the novel stating it, we are immediately aware that she is Syvert’s long lost half-sister. And like Syvert, she feels adrift and alone. On a trip she takes with her young adult son back to her hometown to celebrate her father’s birthday, she begins to reflect on her life thus far. In a brutally honest fashion, Alvetina describes her strained relationship with her now-deceased mother, the judgements and hardships she endured as a young single mother, her initial studies in literature before turning to biology, as well as the growing sense of disconnection she feels towards her son. Yet the most pivotal point in her long-running rumination is when she reflects on the initial ideas she had for a potential PhD thesis.
In this segment of Alvetina’s narration, she begins by asserting that human consciousness is, by its very nature, limited in scope, entrapping all human subjects within a restrictive bubble of knowledge and possible experience. After this brief critique of the human mind and its capabilities, she starts to loosely speculate on the topic of bio-semantics, an esoteric field of research focused on studying the language of plants, fungi and other forms of non-human life. Here, the novel turns densely theoretical, wherein questions concerning the nature of science, language, art, philosophy and religion are posed and rigorously interrogated, with Alvetina contemplating whether the cosmos can be truly captured and systemised by human means. To be more precise, Alevtina’s musings display a yearning to overcome our tendency to anthropomorphise reality, to turn the external world into a mirror image of our all-too-human selves. As she explains:
“The problem with language was that it anthropomorphised everything. All we had to do was say the word communication and what we thought about was human communication.”
Like the characters of all weird stories, Alevtina is possessed by a desire to go beyond the strictures of human reason and wade into the alien waters of The Outside. Yet, on one fateful night, alone and deep in the heart of a secluded forest, she ingests hallucinogenic mushrooms in an effort to comprehend the “secret languages, codes, strange forms of cognition” of the trees and plants that currently surround her. The experience disturbs her greatly, so much so that she buries the PhD project in order to forget the terrifying visions that plagued her that night. The scene is brilliant in the way it slowly generates an atmosphere of ghoulish strangeness, which is made all the more real by the straightforward and unadorned style of prose. Indeed, Alevtina’s ‘trip’ into the abyssal heart of reality recalls H.P Lovecraft’s fabulously nihilistic opening of his famous short story The Call of Cthulhu, where he states that the human mind exists “on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it is not meant that we should voyage far.”
These metaphysical questions are pursued further in the next portion of the novel, which takes the form of an essay about Nikolai Fyodorov, an eccentric 19th century philosopher obsessed with eternal life and the “undoing of death”. Despite the heaviness of these ideas, Knausgaard expounds upon them in a manner that is simultaneously playful yet serious, rendering the philosophical deliberations both accessible and compellingly dramatic – which is a remarkable feat given that most philosophical texts are off-puttingly clotted with impenetrable academic jargon. In fact, Fyodorov’s ideas around eternal life feel unsettlingly contemporary, in that they resemble the trans-humanist ideologies espoused by the likes of Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg. Even in our secular age, the Christian belief of resurrection persists, except now it is cloaked under the guise of big-tech corporations and their enthusiasms for artificial intelligence. As the novel cannily puts it, “It’s no longer just the Church that talks about eternal life, Science does too.”
All these parallel story lines and free-floating ideas, however, start to intermingle and cohere in the novel’s concluding chapter, where Syvert and Alevtina, now middle-aged, finally meet one another in person. By happenstance or not, their meeting coincides with the ominous dawning of The Star. It is here where the uncanny elements hinted at throughout the novel are emphasised and the story becomes overtly supernatural and weird. Without giving anything away, it’s as though the concepts abstractly explored in the preceding chapters are solidified and made terrifyingly real, manifesting as an array of strange and unnerving phenomena throughout the concluding arc of the novel. Indeed, one of the pleasures of The Wolves of Eternity is seeing how it builds up to this climatic explosion of weirdness, wherein the realism so meticulously constructed by Knausgaard is suddenly ruptured, giving way to whole new vision of the world that is frighteningly alien, dissonant, and otherworldly.
At 789 pages long, The Wolves of Eternity is impossible to fully summarise. It is a book of fractured forms, shifting voices, and splintered ideas. All these disparate elements, however, revolve around a central thematic, which is the ineffable nature of the cosmos itself, as embodied by The Star and all the preternatural events which herald and result from its presence. In this regard, The Wolves of Eternity is a “novel of ideas”, in that it poses a series of philosophical questions to the reader without providing any of the answers. And yet, The Wolves of Eternity is also piece of Weird Fiction, in the sense that the novel attempts to break down our anthropic assumptions about the world in order to confront us with the alien reality of the cosmos. With this in mind, the book could thus be viewed as a form of Pulp Modernism, as coined by the author China Mieville, in the way Knausgaard combines the techniques of literary modernism with the traditions of pulp stories. Indeed, with its sprawling stream of consciousness style of prose, fragmented perspective and use of involuntary memories, coupled with its focus on conveying a sense of weird supernaturalism, The Wolves of Eternity reads like the unholy offspring of Swann’s Way and The Colour Out of Space. This, of course, will frustrate readers from both camps, to those solely dedicated to either the experimental ethos of modernism or to the visceral thrills offered by pulp. Nevertheless, for those seeking a unique and puzzlingly weird reading experience, where the quotidian and the otherworldly collide and amalgamate into unsettling yet thought-provoking reconfigurations, The Wolves of Eternity will undoubtedly intrigue and satisfy.
Patrick Zaia is an artist, writer and musician based in Queensland, Australia. He has previously written a review of Bret Easton Ellis’s The Shards, a review of B.R. Yeager’s hallucinatory novel Negative Space, and a discussion of sound in the film Mandy for Horror Homeroom.
