Kristian Hadeland, young and ambitious, has moved to London to study photography; he knows that he and his art are destined for more. His family never understood him, and his fellow photography students bore him. But when he meets Hans, an eccentric Dutch artist, the future he yearns for becomes possible—as long as he is willing to sacrifice everything and stop at nothing. Twenty-four years later, Kristian sees his dreams come to fruition when a major retrospective of his work is held in New York City. As his past catches up to him, Kristian’s world begins to crumble. Success comes at a price, but is he prepared to pay it?
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.
