Kristian was a narcissist and a misanthrope. What’s worse, in the mid-Eighties, he studied photography at a London art college. The School of Night (Penguin Press, 512 pp., $32) is his suicide note — or suicide dissertation. It’s also Karl Ove Knausgaard’s twelfth novel, though we can argue about that count. The author has ground down the distinctions between fiction, nonfiction, and autobiography as well as the definitions of “book” and “volume.”
Knausgaard began his Morning Star cycle in 2020 and has since produced six books with remarkable punctuality. The School of Night, the 2023 installment, has just been translated into English by Martin Aitken (who also translated the author’s My Struggle series — Min Kamp in the original Norwegian — between 2012 and 2018). It’s unclear how many books the Morning Star project will comprise, but The School of Night stands just as well on its own.
Comments