The Norwegian author on his autofictional epic, moving to London, and the psychopath at the heart of his new novel
Fifteen years ago, discussing the success of his six-volume autofictional work My Struggle on Norwegian radio, Karl Ove Knausgård said he felt as if he had "actually sold my soul to the devil". My Struggle had become a runaway success in Norway - a success that would subsequently be repeated across the world - but the project provoked anger in some quarters for its portrayal of friends and family members. This was a work of art that came at a price. Hence, for its creator, its Faustian aspect.
That experience lies at the root of Knausgård's latest novel, The School of Night, the fourth volume in his Morning Star sequence, in which his typical character studies and fine-grained attention to the minutiae of daily life are married to a compelling supernatural plot involving a mysterious star appearing in the sky and the dead returning to life. Volumes one and three, The Morning Star and The Third Realm, cycled between the same group of interconnected characters, while the second book, The Wolves of Eternity, moved back to the 1980s and told the story of a young Norwegian man and his discovery of a Russian half-sister. Only towards the end of its 800 pages did the novel intersect with the events of The Morning Star. The School of Night, perhaps frustratingly for some, again moves backwards instead of forwards, this time to 1985 London, and follows the art school career of a young Norwegian, Kristian Hadeland, who is pursuing his dream of fame as a photographer. Kristian, events reveal, is someone who will sacrifice anything, and anyone, to succeed. Charting Kristian's rise and fall is an addictive and eerie reading experience.
I meet Knausgård on a perfect autumn day in Deptford, south-east London, the water gulping below us against the river wall. This is the neighbourhood where much of The School of Night takes place. Had he known, since moving to the city nearly a decade ago, he would one day write a London novel? "I think I did," he says. "I was never here in the 80s but growing up I read NME, Sounds, I listened only to British music - some American bands, but it was all Britain, really. And then it was football. Every Saturday, British football. So I grew up as a proper anglophile, you know." And in his 20s, he lived for a few months with a Norwegian friend in Norwich. "It was like the most uncool place in Britain," he says, laughing. "But it was still very cool to me."
In 2018 Knausgård moved from Sweden to London to be with his fiance, now third wife, who had previously been his editor. They have a son, and Knausgård's four children from his previous marriage divide their time between him and his ex-wife. He says life in London is much the same as it was in Sweden: "It's the writer's life. So I'm in the house writing and I've got my family - my kids and my wife. But then you have London outside." When he isn't writing he enjoys record shopping in Rough Trade, going to concerts, watching football matches. "I do really love it here," he says.
Knausgård wanted to have Kristian live in Deptford because of the area's association with one of the most prominent authors of the Faust legend, the Elizabethan playwright Christopher Marlowe. He came to Marlowe via a Borges essay that described "the blasphemy, the murder, the way he was killed, the ruthlessness, the wildness, and I hadn't heard about him [before]. I was instantly incredibly interested in him." The School of Night takes its name from an association of supposedly atheist late 16th-century writers and scientists which included, alongside Marlowe, George Chapman, translator of Homer, and Sir Walter Raleigh. The idea of the School of Night as an actual clandestine group was advanced by the Shakespeare scholar Arthur Acheson in the early years of the 20th century, but the truth is cloaked in mystery. This is entirely appropriate for Knausgård's novel, which is full of strange events and shadowy figures with obscure motives.
Marlowe's version wasn't Knausgård's first encounter with the Faust legend, though. That was Thomas Mann's 1947 novel Doctor Faustus, which sets the story in Wilhelmian - and latterly Nazi - Germany. "I think I was 19 or 20, and I still remember one of the first scenes where Zeitblom [the book's narrator] and Leverkühn are with Leverkühn's father, and he shows them natural wonders, things not alive that behave like they're alive; it has been important for me ever since I read it, that kind of crossroad between life and non-life, and art in between them." I look up the passage after we speak and sure enough, its blend of concrete detail and philosophical musing is distinctly Knausgårdian.
He says he doesn't really do research. In the case of a meticulously detailed episode in which Kristian repeatedly boils and attempts to skin a dead cat for a photography project, this comes as something of a relief. Instead he writes with what sounds like incredible freedom. He has often said that he finds out where a story is heading as he writes, and it was the same for The School of Night. "When I started to write, Kristian was just a normal guy; there wasn't anything unpleasant with him." Only when he wrote the section in which Kristian visits his family did he realise this was a character completely lacking in empathy. "That's always the way I do it," he says. "I just write and then something happens and then you get consequences."
Taking the form of a long suicide note written by Kristian after he has plummeted from the heights of worldwide artistic success, the novel is soaked in death, veined with examples of life's ephemerality. Holed up in a cabin on a remote Norwegian island, Kristian reflects that "death was the rule, life the exception". Looking around a train carriage in London, he thinks, "in a hundred years, everyone in it would be dead". Home for Christmas, he compares our lives to the snow falling outside his window:
Humans descended like snow through the ages. There were billions of us; we danced this way and that until our flight was abruptly over and we settled on the ground. What happened then? Billions more came falling, descending to smother us. I was one such snowflake; I was still falling ... and those whose descent would soon begin—the enormous blizzard of the as-yet unborn—all waiting to descend would completely smother not only us but every sign of our lives—which thereby would become less than meaningless—would become nothing; zilch; nada. They would become snow in snow; darkness in darkness. And so would we.
I ask Knausgård if he feels art is a way of battling against this, of leaving a mark against the darkness. "No," he says after a period of silence (he often pauses like this, thinking for as long as required before answering). "No, that's not important at all. It's more the perspective. If you take one step back and see life that way then everything is meaningless, you know? And then you go one step in, and it’s completely full: brimmed with meaning. And that is, I think, almost like how it is to write a book, really; when you go into something and it’s very much about the present; being in the moment; and it’s incredibly meaningful."
This speaks directly to the methods Knausgård employs—a distinctive synthesis of the epic (multi-volume cycles of novels; few of which clock in under 500 pages) and the intimate (stuffed as they are with minutiae: changing nappies; making coffee; getting drunk; snogging; ideal consistency of cornflakes). Here is another divergence between Knausgård and Kristian—who at one point sneers at his mother: “I can’t believe you’re actually talking about the weather.” Sticking up for herself—and for Knausgård’s project—she replies: “Life is in the everyday; Kristian.”
Kristian’s everyday—at least in the novel’s early stretches—is mostly about failing. The School of Night is extremely good on the difficulty of finding one’s way creatively—that sense; artistically speaking; of falling short but maintaining belief required to keep going. It’s territory Knausgård explored at length in Some Rain Must Fall; the fifth volume of My Struggle; which describes his time as a creative writing student in Bergen. “Yeah,” he says; “that is basically taken straight from my experience with trying to be a writer. All those kind of huge ambitions; and belief that gets completely crushed; and then,” he laughs; “up again and try again; you know.”
Knausgård lived on the island of Tromøy in southern Norway until he was 13 when his family moved to Kristiansand. His mother was a nurse; his father a schoolteacher. His troubled relationship with his father—who latterly became an alcoholic and a virtual shut-in—is vividly and painfully described in My Struggle. Knausgård originally went to university in Bergen with the idea of being a poet but—as he describes in Some Rain Must Fall—he was hopelessly bad. “You understand nothing about yourself and you have no idea what you’re doing,” a classmate tells him. Kristian’s early work is also repeatedly written off—by his sister; his artist friend Hans; and a visiting tutor at his art school.
That apprentice phase is so painful, Knausgård says now, because you have no idea whether or not it will ever change. “Because there’s so much you don’t know when you’re at that age and when you want to do something—and what there is to know is only accessible through experience—you know? You don’t know that you have to fail because it’s so painful to fail at that stage—but it is the only way. But you never know if you’re continually going to fail. There’s no guarantee for anything.”
In some ways Kristian gave Knausgård the opportunity to experiment with a shadow self. When the first volume of My Struggle was published in 2009—giving an explicit account of the squalor into which Knausgård’s father and grandmother descended in their final years—his father’s family threatened a lawsuit. Others also complained about their portrayal—which made Knausgård alter his approach in later volumes. Kristian,on the other hand,barely contemplates others’ feelings—or the ethics of his artistic decisions.
Knausgård admits that when he was writing My Struggle he knew “actually I was doing something I probably shouldn’t have done”. How then did he decide where to draw the line? “My own rule was that if it was too physically painful I didn’t go there.” You experienced physical pain? “Yeah. It was in my body. But when I wrote as Kristian he doesn’t care. That freedom you know comes for him in the end. That to me is the Faust story.”
In the book’s acknowledgments Knausgård says of his family: “Without their light I would never have been able to withstand the darkness of this novel.” Was it difficult to spend so much time in Kristian’s head? “It wasn’t pleasant. Because it wasn’t like I found him outside myself. I took him from within. It’s not that I’m like him but there are some elements of myself that I magnified and put in him. That was not fun at all. But interesting.”
The School of Night is Knausgård’s 21st book. He speaks very matter-of-factly about his productivity—which is one thing he undoubtedly shares with Kristian. “It doesn’t have to be many hours but if you do it every day five days a week it’s a novel in a year.” His 22nd volume five in the Morning Star sequence is called Arendal and was published in Norway last autumn. When I say that the Morning Star sequence could run and run he agrees: “I can extend it for the rest of my life really.” But as soon as he’s spoken these words he clarifies with an edge of determination to his voice that volume seven which he is about to begin writing “will be the last. I want to do other stuff.”
That doesn’t mean however his enthusiasm for the series has waned. Just the day before he tells me he made final changes to manuscript for volume six I Was Long Dead due in Norwegian bookshops few weeks. It returns Syvert Alevtina from The Wolves Eternity its climax he says with a laugh “real blood spatter chainsaw kind stuff. It’s wildest book I’ve ever written.”