Karl Ove Knausgaards new book The Wolves of Eternity, reviewed.

Smoke from wildfires in Canada lent skies across the northern United States an infernal hue this past June. Masks were dug out; the Air Quality Index had its moment; Times Square looked briefly like the Los Angeles of “Blade Runner.” For readers of Karl Ove Knausgaard’s apocalyptic 2021 novel, “The Morning Star,” the situation might have seemed ominously familiar. Knausgaard’s epic — the first in a projected series — is narrated by nine characters, each undergoing a crisis during a heat wave in present-day Norway when a mysterious new star appears suddenly in the sky. The book is a literary hybrid of the neurotic mundane realism that made Knausgaard famous and something more fiendish: strange happenings in the woods, reanimated corpses, a world bewitched. Its hallucinatory climax only hints at what the star might portend — and it ends on a terrific cliffhanger. What does it all mean?

The good news, at least for hardcore Knausgaard fans, is that the second book in the series, “The Wolves of Eternity,” poses more questions than it answers. Indeed, for hundreds of pages the morning star is nowhere to be seen. Reviews from Norway of the third volume, “Det tredje riket” — in English “The Third Kingdom” or, intriguingly, “The Third Reich” — suggest that its import may become clearer there. But while some light is cast in “Wolves” on the nature of the coming apocalypse, it’s less like we’re rushing than slouching toward Revelation.

“Wolves” begins in the past. Its first half takes place in the spring of 1986 and follows a young Norwegian returning from military service to live with his mother and brother. It’s a time of millenarian angst: A thousand miles away, fallout from the Chernobyl disaster is irradiating much of Eastern Europe. For Syvert, our narrator, “it was as if the accident had opened a gateway to the other side and something had got out. … That was why I was feeling so unsettled. An invisible gateway into an invisible place. And now it was all flooding in to where we were.” His dreams become more vivid; his long-dead father fills his thoughts. His little brother becomes convinced their mother will die.

Though there are supernatural touches — notably in the peculiar behavior of the local fauna — this long first section is primarily driven by the intrigues of realist fiction: romance, sickness, family mystery. As Knausgaard fans may expect, our narrator’s existential musings are the soundtrack to his everyday activities: shopping, cooking, drinking, sulking, playing football, thinking about girls. If Knausgaard is your thing, it reads as compulsively as anything he’s written.

Halfway through, though, the novel shifts gears, and we find ourselves following instead a middle-aged evolutionary biologist called Alevtina in 21st-century Russia. The change in perspective — from adolescent to academic — allows Knausgaard to expand the novel’s philosophical ambit to encompass evolution, the conjectural sentience of trees and the narrow scope of human comprehension. “Like animals, we possessed a horizon of understanding within which our thoughts could freely move, and the space in which they moved was our reality,” Alevtina notes. “The nature of the mind was something that lay beyond our horizon of understanding. The nature of the universe and the atoms: beyond. Time: beyond. Death: beyond.”

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Death is of course central to Knausgaard’s work. It’s what structures and gives meaning to his six-volume autobiographical novel, “My Struggle.” “The Morning Star” ends with a long disquisitive epilogue on the meaning of death in different cultures. “Wolves” also contains long essayistic stretches, quite unlike the rest of the narrative, that probe both eschatology and death itself. In these passages, Knausgaard once again proves a thoughtful and wide reader. Dostoevsky, Tolstoy and Rilke are referenced alongside Marina Tsvetaeva, the poet who gives the book its title, and Nikolai Fyodorov, a pre-revolutionary Russian futurist who believed that all human effort should be directed toward resurrecting the dead. There are forays into shamanism, cryogenics and medical rejuvenation (think of tech entrepreneur Bryan Johnson, recently much in the news), as well as attempts to reverse death (if you’ve ever wanted to see a decollated dog licking its chops, know that Sergei Brukhonenko’s “Experiments in the Revival of Organisms” is available to view in its entirety on Wikipedia). The breadth of Knausgaard’s research, from Virgil and Heidegger to “The Penguin Book of the Undead,” is captured in a bibliography he’s published on a flickering, elliptical website that also includes Spotify playlists for 10 of his characters. At times, the book’s conceptual weight and narrative sprawl feel unsustainably massive.

But despite his preoccupation with death and loftier philosophical purpose, Knausgaard remains one of the great chroniclers of the moment-by-moment experience of life. Alevtina will be thinking deep thoughts about evolution one minute and contemplating meatballs the next. Knausgaard is acutely in tune with the simultaneity of life’s majesty and banality. In “This Life,” the philosopher Martin Hägglund suggests that the power of Knausgaard’s work lies precisely in the dogged cataloguing of the meaningless details and transient sensations of existence. In writing this way, Hägglund suggests, Knausgaard evinces a kind of “secular faith,” directing our attention “not toward eternity but toward our finite lives as the site where everything is at stake. … If we want our lives to matter, we want to have something that we can lose.”

While “This Life” offers a convincing exegesis of Knausgaard’s technique in relation to “My Struggle,” the new series poses fresh conundrums. In a secular world death might provide structure and meaning to life, but what happens if that certainty comes into doubt? Suggestively, both “The Morning Star” and “Wolves” begin with lines from the Book of Revelation. The second book, like the first, ends on a cliffhanger. Although the final shape of Knausgaard’s latest enterprise is not yet visible, there’s famously no smoke without wildfires. It’s likely something wicked this way comes.

Charles Arrowsmith is based in New York and writes about books, films and music.

The Wolves of Eternity

By Karl Ove Knausgaard

Penguin Press. 800 pp. $35

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