The Third Realm by Karl Ove Knausgaard

genre: Literary Fiction

publisher: Penguin Press

2024

The third volume in Knausgaard’s Morning Star series is the best one yet, even if it only nudges the larger story forward.

I wrote a long thing recently about The Wolves of Eternity, the prequel to The Third Realm. Karl Ove Knausgaard is one of my favourite current authors, and this book is the best in the series to date. Note that the review below contains mild spoilers for The Wolves of Eternity.

The first book in the series, The Morning Star, followed nine characters in the weeks, days and hours before a new star emerges in the night sky. It doesn’t do much to describe what else is consequential about the event – each character’s arc ends with the star emerging, teasing something fateful and foreboding.

The Wolves of Eternity advanced the story a few inches while introducing a handful of new characters. I didn’t find Wolves as compelling as the The Morning Star, and it was a bit indulgent of Knausgaard’s tendency to lecture about art and history. It ends on a hell of a reveal and a tremendous cliffhanger: In the days since the star emerges, people seem to have stopped dying in Norway.

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The Third Realm picks up right after Wolves. A bunch of new characters and a few familiar ones continue the story. Unlike Wolves, these are short chapters, following several characters in the moments and days after the star’s appearance.

The writing is predictably engaging, though it’s a pretty large cast to follow. It has been more than three years since I read The Morning Star, and I couldn’t tell if my memory was poor or if these were new characters. NYT had my back:

Knausgaard has said that he views the volumes as autonomous, and it’s certainly the case that the latest installment, “The Third Realm,” would benefit from being read in isolation. It largely takes place over the same two days as “The Morning Star” does, and again uses nine narrators — eight of them new — to fill out the details of Arne’s holiday, the deathbed reincarnation and the Kvitekrist murders, while inching the story forward only a little.

The stories overlap and intersect like a soap opera, and maybe that’s the best comparison: at this point we’re about 2,000 pages into this story, and while we know these characters intimately, there has been little plot development.

There’s a murder mystery involving a black metal band, introduced in the first volume. There are relationships in precarious states, and bigger, metaphysical mysteries. Very little is resolved, and like a soap opera, just as one storyline (like marital infidelity) seems to be wrapping up, another surprising twist ramps up the drama again.

Does it matter that so little happens? Not to me. I’d happily read another 2,000 pages of this starting tomorrow if it was available.

There are at least two more volumes coming. Per The Guardian:

The book read to me as the final part in a trilogy, but it turns out there are at least two more to come. Thinking it was a finale, I found it magisterial. There is both sufficient resolution, brought by the feeling of endlessly proliferating perspectives, and sufficient ambiguity…But Knausgård seems prepared to be a brilliant failure – that may be part of his genius. And on he will go and on some of us will go with him, because even at his most flawed he has such an electrifyingly capacious sense of what the novel can be.

That last part is me. I’ll be there for every word.