There are a great many ruminations on death, loss and immortality, and the human need to get to grips with each as, between them, the siblings riff on God versus science and religion versus doubt. How brilliant to hear again now!”), it eventually, if slowly, grows into matters more existential. Their bond, instantly created, proves indelible.įor a book that opens with some rather guileless writing about a 1977 album by Status Quo (“I had it on cassette, and played it all the time on the black cassette player I’d got for Christmas the year before. When the siblings meet, they recognise in one another the lingering ghost of the father Syvert continues to miss, and whom Alevtina never got to know. The second section takes place in modern-day Russia, and features Løyning’s half-sister Alevtina Kotov, a single mother who lectures at a local university and is fascinated by the natural world, and how trees communicate. When he finds a cache of letters from his late father, written to a secret Russian lover, he discovers that his family line now extends towards the East. The first is Syvert Løyning, a young Norwegian newly home from military service in 1986 and tending to his ailing mother while mulling over the consequences of the Chernobyl nuclear disaster. Now comes The Wolves of Eternity, which – while featuring some of the same characters – doesn’t really pick up from where that book left off, nor obediently follow it. In 2021, he turned to fiction – although in the world of Knausgaard, the novel and the memoir is interchangeable – with The Morning Star, a 666-page monster that told the interconnecting tales of a group of people whose lives are thrown off course by the emergence of a bright star in the sky. My Struggle was merely the first part of his autobiography five further instalments followed. Here was someone who took John Updike’s mantra to “give the mundane its beautiful due”, but to do so in rather quotidian prose. The effect was either hypnotic or galling – literary Marmite. In the first section of his breakout third book (2009’s My Struggle, an autobiography that read like a novel), he recounted the Saturday night preparations of his teenage self getting ready for a party, and elected not to scrimp on detail but rather to magnify it over dozens of pages. Karl Ove Knausgaard, Norway’s biggest writer, set out his stall early on in his career.

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