A Tale of Two Knausgaards

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.

The problem is that, despite this grand superstructure, readers familiar with Knausgaard’s work will detect that the different literary modules operating inside of the larger novel remain undigested; you can feel the different applied skills—almost like badges in an RPG—being demonstrated throughout rather than integrated. First, Knausgaard does the My Struggle-lite bit with the Syvert section; then he does science journalism and bits about being a parent in the Alevtina section (which, as I’ll get into, contains very strong subsections). The Wolves of Eternity lacks the sublime sense of atmosphere and drive that great long novels require; there are times when Syvert seems to be preparing meals just because that’s what Knausgaard can reliably pad the novel out with. Syvert’s obsession with Chernobyl, for instance, shows promise as a structuring device, but it's largely dropped; Chernobyl seems like it a may be a symbol of something, but by the end of the novel it doesn’t integrate into The Wolves of Eternity’s themes: death and eternity.

Thus, as a cohesive work of fiction, Knausgaard’s grand synthesis of expositional narration and discursive philosophizing largely fails (and at its worst, you almost feel as if ChatGPT had been asked to ‘write a Knausgård novel’). You find yourself just wanting to go back and reread other Knausgaard—where he masters his disparate literary modes—instead. I prefer, for instance, his NYT Magazine cover story on Henry Marsh to the science writing here. I prefer his book on Edvard Munch to the phantasmagoric reactions to the Chernobyl disaster; I prefer My Struggle’s accounts of being a teenager in Norway to those here; and I prefer the Seasons Quartet on early childhood, child-rearing and general, discursive rumination. I even prefer the early A Time for Angels as a (somewhat) traditional novel.

The critic must ask why. Why are the genealogical parts preferable to the whole? My feeling is that Knausgaard is a writer who needs the right stimulus or prompt (whether from his own life, an assignment from a magazine, a work of art or philosophy); his strength is not in building fictional words from scratch. The evidence? His work on a team translating the Bible into Norwegian fed Angels; the translation of Proust into Norwegian fed My Struggle; fame and fatherhood fed The Seasons Quartet; Munch fed So Much Longing in So Little Space: The Art of Edvard Munch; a Times assignment—seeing the human brain directly under the knife—produced the “The Terrible Beauty of Brain Surgery.”

In The Wolves of Eternity, the writings of the Russian philosopher-mystic of science Nikiolai Fyodorov (who argued that the point of science was to resurrect everyone who has ever lived) play a similar role—but not until very late in the novel when we get to Alevtina. The intellectual stimulus Fyodorov’s writings provide feel as if Knausgaard were trying to shock himself–via extreme themes like transhumanism and immortality–into the same state that produced his best work (My Struggle). Because he is so abundantly talented, freebasing with Fyodorov’s thinking almost works: the back half of the novel improves on the front. The long essay on the history of immortality as a field of research—from the perspective of Alevtina—is frankly amazing.

The discussion of transhumanism and its science and its obsessions is ultimately an admirable and fascinating one, and, more importantly, is fresh stimulus for Knausgaard (unlike childhood in Norway in the 1980’s). Broadly, culturally speaking, the mystical science of Fyodorov and later Soviet researchers—who were, as we learn in the novel, looking for ways to basically keep brains alive in robot bodies—and current transhumanist research and movements in Russia—which parallel Ray Kurzweil, Aubrey de Grey, and Bryan Johnson, among others, in the US—is, dare I say, important. I would argue that our collective cultural apparatus represses its awareness of the amount of money and labor time that's flowing into anti-aging and transhumanist research: the ick factor forbids engagement with the topic. The eschatology in religion of the 21st century may very well be transhumanist; the beginning of a new post-human world necessitates the end of the old, corporeal human one.

As a ‘novelist of ideas’, moreover, Knausgaard's insight of 21st century transhumanism is not new, but part of a longer, specifically Russian, genealogy in that the orthodox eschatology of St. Dostoyevsky was influenced by transhumanist eschatology in the late 19th century. It was both a useful historical observation and a relevant framework for approaching transhumanism in the present. That is to say, transhumanism can be historicized and, as such, is more approachable. More importantly, from a literary perspective, Knausgaard is telling us that literature deals with death, and so does transhumanism. And as such, transhumanism is a fundamental topic of literature, even if it's a repressed one.

Where the novel is newest, it is by far the strongest. One wishes for a shorter book set in Moscow, with the Norwegian section excised. While the Norwegian section of the novel is much longer than the Russian section, the latter is far more inspired. We find the most interesting parts of the novel there: the reflections on the symbiotic relationship between trees and human beings; the relationship between Marina Tsvetaeva and Rainer Maria Rilke; Alevtina’s relationship to her stepfather; and of course reflections on the Russian science mystic Nikolai Fyodorov and his followers.  

Alevtina’s mind–meditating on the relationship between part and whole, between holistic systems and subsystems, between cognition and reality–is more interesting than Syvert’s. Alevtina’s slow, hazy, and lazy dialogic philosophizing about the relationship of the human to nature reminds me of the poetry of A. R. Ammons (an American rarely cited by European writers who is nevertheless very Knausgaardian).

The Wolves of Eternity almost feels like a novel that stumbles upon its topic and its source of imaginative energy a bit too late. The parallel between Syvert, the undertaker, and Alevtina, the transhumanism-curious, is clever, but four hundred pages of the regurgitated everydayness of My Struggle isn't necessary to get us there. Post My Struggle, which was an exercise in giganticism, Knausgaard has been at his best as a miniaturist (which is why I think, the Seasons Quartet and Munch are actually very underrated, and why his journalism is, while comparatively rare, also strong). What I'm arguing for here, therefore, is that, at this point in his career, ‘big Knausgaard’–a trust of particular literary talents– should be broken up. My Struggle was a rare miracle of synthesis, where narrative, journalism, philosophy, and memoir could coexist, but there's no need to try to repeat the miracle (as Knausgaard must have sensed when he initially renounced the novel after completing Book 6).

Big novels are big gambles. You're lucky enough to win one, you're lightning struck if you pull off two, and beyond that, you only risk giving up your gains, depending on your preferences. Dostoevsky and Tolstoy wrote at least three a piece; Joyce wrote two, Proust wrote one, or to give a contemporary example, Bolaño wrote two (and Knausgaard was never quite on that level to begin with).

Pragmatically speaking, The Wolves of Eternity is a very good novella, nested inside of a weaker epic novel, by an author anxious over his own influence.

Matthew Gasda is a writer and director.