The Third Realm

 The Third Realm by my boy Karl Ove Knausgaard is the third in his Morning Star series. I have not yet located online how many books are expected to be in this series, nor am I sure that Knausgaard himself knows. They are translated from Norwegian and appear every year and a half or so. The first, The Morning Star, was a dazzling read: apocalyptic references, horrific events, preternatural characters, and everyday life twisting into persistent dread. The second, The Wolves of Eternity, was a far-too-long prequel that explored lived experience to the point of mundanity. This book was somewhere in between the two of those. It went back to some of the main characters of the first book--with some good suspense and horror mixed in--though it intentionally never achieved a payoff or answered any of the many questions posed.

Knausgaard's novels are long, strange reads. There truly is no formula. I never really know what to expect with a character, a scene, a meditation. He's never followed conventional structures, and he blends genre frequently. While at times this is frustrating (you'll be almost done with a book and still not have an idea what it's about), ultimately I enjoy the experience. It's like a literary answer to the digital age. He plays with time and attention, stretching our limits of engagement, ignoring a dopamine-dependent audience, wandering around theme and plot and tone and form to the very limits of their expression.