Karl Ove Knausgaard, both progenitor and zenith of so-called autofiction, is one of the most important writers of the last 15 years. With hindsight, we can see that Knausgaard does a few things very well. He's excellent on the quotidian (making meals, going grocery shopping, cleaning up diapers), and excellent on the relationship between parents and children, especially moments of mutual rage and misunderstanding; he's a strong ekphrastic writer and close reader of cultural artifacts; finally, he's a fluent, willing, and sensitive science writer, as his 2016 NYT magazine cover story (“The Terrible Beauty of Brain Surgery”) demonstrated.
The Wolves of Eternity, Knausgaard's new novel, simultaneously engages all of his writerly talents. It is an attempted synthesis: different technical strands braid together in a polyphonic so-called novel of ideas. While Wolves is a (too) long novel, its basic structure is simple: the first and longer section of the novel–told from the perspective of Syvert Løyning, a 19 year old Norwegian who dreams of his dead father–is set in 1980s Norway just after the Chernobyl disaster; the second major section is set in modern day Moscow, and is mostly told from the perspective of Alevtina, a Russian biologist with an interest in transhumanism (though towards the end we hear from Alevtina’s friend, Vasilisa, a poet). Alevtina, as we learn, is Syvert’s half-sister (they share a father), and their meeting at the end of the novel brings together not only our protagonists, but two ways of looking at death. Syvert grows up to run a successful funeral home business; Alevtina is fascinated by the promise of transhumanism and cryogenic freezing.
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