Christopher Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus is about a man of exceeding ambition who makes a deal with the Devil to gain the best of this world and pay for it in the next. This 16th-century play figures in many ways in Karl Ove Knausgaard’s new novel, The School of Night, primarily with regard to its protagonist, Kristian. ... My Struggle was near-defiant in its exclusive focus on the minute and mundane; the Morning Star books disclose a more expansive interest ... His storytelling in these new books is increasingly open to the metaphysical, fused with the macabre ... As much is evident from the opening page of The School of Night, translated into rich and readable English by Martin Aitken. Kristian describes a 'despair that night and day rips and tears at me, the bottomless darkness' that he has decided to put an end to, along with his life. 'But first,' he adds, 'I’m going to write this' ... If Knausgaard is trying to show us what happens when an artist wants it all and actually gets it, he didn’t need Marlowe’s literary-moral framing to do it ... Can you make a deal with the Devil if you don’t know you’re making a deal with the Devil? Knausgaard’s character takes hundreds of pages to deliver a dark yet inconclusive answer, even as he believes 'the powers were on my side.' The triumphs and tragedies of his vaulting, vaunted, voided life prove him right, then wrong.
His at times unwieldy prose, as if written in a frenzy, recalls Dostoevsky’s ... Strangely compelling ... Knausgaard, for all his obsession with death and the final stillness it imposes on us all, has produced yet another extraordinarily vital text. This seems justification enough for any work of art.
Some readers won’t be persuaded. Knausgård’s prose is sometimes not just erratic but incoherent; even fans will concede that you don’t read him for the beauty of his sentences. Besides, 500 pages in Kristian’s hateful company is a lot to handle ... A lot is riding on Knausgård’s ability to deliver on the colossal promise of this sprawling epic. But for readers with the stomach, patience and faith to keep going, this work of millenarian fiction remains an object of fascination.
In Martin Aitken’s translation, the prose is fluent and nimble, the imagery possessed of a steely melancholia ... [The older tale] is the novel’s essence – a realist affair laced with the faintest suggestions of myth, the occult and the perverse operations of fate.
I put down this book only to eat and sleep. Knausgaard has produced another addictive psychological thriller – by turns exciting, entertaining and tragic.
The remainder of the novel is as bland as its protagonist’s new milieu, although occasionally Kristian’s carping about fame is amusing ... 500 pages he needed to write but you needn’t read.
The School of Night, Karl Ove Knausgaard’s latest novel published in English, translated by Martin Aitken, is the fourth volume in a still-unfinished cycle with the overall title The Morning Star. It is the most ambitious endeavor by this extraordinarily ambitious writer since the conclusion of My Struggle, the autofictional series that made him famous. For now, each of these new books is presented as a freestanding narrative, though perhaps they will take on a different weight and significance when the project is complete ... The plot is a variation on one of the most common themes in European literature: the man who gives up everything for the object of his ambition (power, fame, or money—glory in all its forms), leaving a trail of broken relationships and discovering, at the end of his journey, that his accomplishments are insignificant, his trophies pathetic, and his life an immense void ... The narrator of My Struggle also suffers from many of these ills. Some of the series’ best pages are devoted to the conflict triggered by an overgrown artistic ambition that leads the narrator to publish a text doomed to hurt those he loves, knowing they will pay the price for his eventual success ... Indeed, the Karl Ove of My Struggle is considerably more complex than the protagonist of The School of Night, who truly lacks nuance: he is a man with only one face, and this face is horrible in a way that is not difficult to recognize ... Perhaps this was Knausgaard’s intention ... After all, tonal instability, the combination of tragedy and comedy, is characteristic of some of the best versions of the Dr. Faustus myth that the book constantly references ... Knausgaard has repeatedly said that he never plans and hardly ever corrects his books. I suppose this favors the production of the massive amounts of text that he publishes. This method results, in the best cases, as in the pages of My Struggle, in passages of writing whose immediacy and energy are enough to hold the reader’s attention, but it is less effective when it comes to building a lucid and compelling imaginary world. Despite the length of this book, I was left with the impression that it is a barely laid-out sequence of loosely woven scenes featuring nebulous characters seen through the eyes of a narrator whose perspective is desperately narrow, linked through a plot whose overall arc is rather conventional. Perhaps when the Morning Star cycle is complete, this trunk will find the missing parts and the definition that eludes it; the five hundred pages of narrative prose that make up The School of Night have, for now, the feeling of a sketch, a fragment.
Knausgaard’s take on Marlowe’s classic tragedy and his variation on moral and psychological dilemmas is certain to satisfy his loyal fans, while readers new to this Norwegian maestro should begin with his internationally acclaimed My Struggle series.
In many ways this is an ancient story ... In Knausgaard’s hands, doled out a little at a time around the edges before coming due spectacularly at the conclusion, it’s the makings of a work of magisterial literary prowess.
