These page counts are reminiscent of fantasy or science fiction novels, which also operate at an epic scale and seek to re-create within themselves a cosmic totality ... One feels the potential limitations of the project Knausgaard has set for himself ... The strangest of the novels in the series so far, and there are genuinely scary moments in the book that I will not spoil ... One of the most genuinely suspenseful, alluring books I’ve ever read. Novel by novel, Knausgaard is replenishing some feral charge to the world. This book made me afraid of the dark again.
The people in The Third Realm are as vivid and convincing as Knausgaard’s autobiographical persona ... Knausgaard’s writerly self-discipline is formidable. Most novelists freely pump the gas and the brakes, zipping through the boring bits to get to the good ones, but his pacing is remorselessly steady ... Mixed in with the everyday dross are a few sparkly flecks of strangeness, curious anomalies that might be clues to a larger mystery ... Maddening but enthralling.
Pulling off an exercise like this, in which the extreme engulfs the everyday, requires a tonal and rhetorical tightrope act. Knausgaard avoids one danger, self-defensive irony, but seems to fall prey to the opposite vice: po-faced earnestness, a lack of detachment ... This time he is more actively exploiting the potential of the roman-fleuve, a form with an ability to complicate and comment on its own procedures, to work toward vast cumulative effects, to absorb and absolve its weaker constituent parts.
He deserves credit for venturing into new territories. And yet...the problem may be that he has not ventured far enough—not gone deep enough into the horror that he peeks at before turning away ... Knausgaard seems to be under the impression that a reader will follow him down all highways and byways, willing to travel indefinitely to no clear destination. A writer who expects that kind of faith has gone from being interested in God to playing God.
With breathtaking confidence, Knausgård mirrors The Morning Star, giving us other, richer perspectives on the material ... Transcendent ... In interviews, Knausgård exhibits a heady mixture of grandiosity and humility, and the two come together here revealingly. The book, with its disquisitions on death and eternity, is extremely grandiose ... 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. As a midpoint in a longer work, I find it less promising, though it makes sense that Knausgård wants to undercut any sense of resolution.
As unsettling, disturbing and riveting as the previous instalments, and I was even disappointed that it came in at a mere 500 pages ... There is a lot of dialogue, and Knausgaard’s skill in capturing conversation makes his characters spring vividly from the page ... His books are as accessible and creepy as anything by Stephen King and as addictive as your favourite TV drama series. There’s no writer I would rather devour.
Stands as one more building block—interesting enough to read on its own, but also just a way-station. It's probably not the place to start with in the series—though one certainly could—and most rewarding read in conjunction.
His undeniable gifts for creating sympathetic characters and telling involving stories still define a powerful if slowly diminishing zephyr of the zeitgeist.
Knausgaard’s achievement in this novel is to combine Scandinavian crime fiction with science fiction, while integrating discussions of religion, philosophy, neurobiology, and music. A highly readable and compelling work by a major and prolific novelist.
Readers who come to this book first will find an entertaining story about people sorting through spiritual, domestic, and emotional confusion. But those who’ve read the prior novels will get a deeper sense of just how fascinating, frustrating, and unknowable we can be to each other, and the consequences of that disconnection. Typically contemplative for Knausgaard, but unusually propulsive as well.
