The Wolves of Eternity

July 1, 2023
Two half siblings, separated for decades, contemplate their pasts. This bulky novel by the maximalist Knausgaard is mainly composed of two long sections. The first, set in 1986, is narrated by Syvert L�yning, a young Norwegian man who's just completed his military service and has returned home feeling aimless. He plays soccer, minds his younger brother, tends to his ailing mom, and struggles to find work. (To his chagrin, he becomes a local celebrity after talking to a journalist about his plight.) Idly searching through his late father's belongings, he discovers a clutch of letters in Russian; after finding a translator, he learns that they were written by a lover his father had in the Soviet Union. Syvert's narrative is layered with themes of death and loss: He contemplates the threat of the recent Chernobyl meltdown and eventually finds work with an undertaker. The mood persists in the following section narrated by his half sister, Alevtina Kotov, who in the present day is a biology professor with a sideline obsession with research done on immortality; though the plot mainly concerns her tending to her aging stepfather, much of her narrative is devoted to ineffable matters of nature, from the ways trees communicate with each other to the pathways that might let us live forever. As ever, Knausgaard is managing a precarious balance--his overwriting can be deeply immersive or exasperating. But unlike The Morning Star (with which this book shares some plot points), which bounced around a host of characters, this book succeeds by keeping the focus on two main figures, making for an appealing (if still overlong) story of two people with similar obsessions despite the separations of time and distance. A curiously affecting tale about science and spirit, optimistic despite its gloomy themes.

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July 17, 2023
Knausgård (My Struggle) blends a Russian family epic with his familiar rendition of a rural Norwegian boyhood in this inspired if slow-moving novel. Syvert Løyning grew up in Norway and lost his father at 11. As a young man, he returns home from his military service in 1986 and takes care of his ill mother. He also gets into mischief with his old football friends, falls in love, and takes a job as an undertaker. The center of Syvert’s life is his precocious younger brother, Joar, whom he dotes on after his father’s ghost appears to him in a dream and tells him to look out for Joar. In a parallel narrative set in Moscow, Knausgård introduces readers to their father’s other family. There, Syvert’s half sister, Alevtina Kotov, a brilliant biology student, forsakes her dreams to raise her son and witnesses a decade of political upheaval. After Alevtina and Syvert discover each other’s existence (Syvert in shock, Alevtina with benign indifference), they make plans to meet. Though only intermittently propulsive, Knausgård’s book doesn’t shy away from big questions about the substance of his characters’ inner lives, wondering if they’re made from “things that didn’t exist, which we constructed and believed to exist.” Knausgård captures the spirit of a Russian novel in this dense tale. Agent: Andrew Wylie, Wylie Agency.

August 1, 2023
This latest doorstop of a novel by lauded Norwegian writer Knausgaard consists of two lengthy sections. First, a young man named Syvert completes his military service in 1986 and returns home to care for his ailing mother and younger brother. In the second half, situated in the present, Syvert's uncontacted half sister, Alevtina, balances life as a biologist and caretaker for her son and stepfather. The two learn of each other's existence and arrange to meet. In typically Knausgaardian fashion, the action takes a few hundred pages to ramp up, freighted with familiarly fastidious, at times tedious, details (""I opened the fridge and took out the milk. I poured some into my coffee, where it came together in little clumps""), even as it takes on timeless themes of death and immortality. For readers who have managed to avoid Knausgaard's ever-burgeoning oeuvre, this may not be the ideal first title; the best option would be the easily digestible Autumn (2017) and the rest of the Seasons Quartet series. For devoted fans of Knausgaard's trademark verbosity, however, this title will surely satisfy.

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