By Tessa Nolan
When Karl Ove Knausgård published the final volume of My Struggle in 2011, he had done something few novelists dare attempt: laid bare every squalid, embarrassing, transcendent detail of his own existence across 3,600 pages. The books made him famous and, by his own admission, cost him dearly. “I knew I was doing something I shouldn’t,” he told The Guardian in late 2025, reflecting on the anger the series provoked among friends and family whose lives he had cannibalised for art. Fifteen years on, Knausgård has completed a transformation that no reader of those confessional volumes could have predicted. He has become, unmistakably, a writer of the supernatural. And The Third Realm, the third instalment of his ongoing Morning Star series – first reviewed in these pages when the English translation appeared in late 2024 – is the crucible in which that metamorphosis solidifies.
The Title That Says Two Things at Once
The Norwegian title is Det tredje riket – literally, The Third Reich. The English translation, published by Harvill Secker in October 2024 and rendered into English by Martin Aitken, softens the resonance but does not erase it. The double meaning is entirely deliberate. In the novel, the black-metal cult leader Valdemar invokes the “Third Realm” as a medieval eschatological concept: the age of the Holy Spirit, following the age of God and the age of Christ. But Knausgård, who once chose Min Kamp as the title for his autobiographical series, understands the shock value of near-taboo naming better than any living author. The title is a provocation, a philosophical proposition, and a narrative key, all at once.
The title also signals something about the book’s ambitions. Where The Morning Star (2021) introduced a cast of nine narrators responding to the appearance of a mysterious new star in the sky, and The Wolves of Eternity (2023) functioned as a prequel set decades earlier, The Third Realm circles back to the same events as the first novel, retelling them from entirely new perspectives. It is, in structural terms, a literary palimpsest – the same story written over itself until the original becomes visible only through its distortions.
Nine Voices, One Shattered Mirror
The Third Realm opens and closes with Tove, the manic-depressive wife of the academic Arne – a character glimpsed from the outside in The Morning Star but here rendered from within, in all her fury and visionary lucidity. “Hell isn’t the psychosis,” she declares early in the novel. “Hell is leaving the psychosis. Hell on earth is what that is.” It is a line that captures Knausgård’s central preoccupation with startling economy: the boundary between revelation and madness is paper-thin, and those who cross it may be the only ones truly awake.
Eight additional narrators orbit the same events – a schoolteacher, a pastor, an H&M sales clerk, a neurologist, a policeman, an architect, a semiconscious stroke victim, and the undertaker Syvert from the second novel – each rendering the same August days through radically different consciousness. As Lara Feigel observed in The Guardian, the result is “an exemplary masterclass in what fiction can offer: the expansion of readerly sympathies, bringing a sense that there are potentially endless perspectives available.” Where My Struggle was the autobiography of one man, the Morning Star series is becoming something closer to the autobiography of a world.
This multiplicity is not merely a structural conceit. It is the novel’s philosophical engine. By retreading events already depicted in The Morning Star – a conversation between Arne and Tove, a moment of doubt in the pastor Kathrine’s marriage – Knausgård demonstrates that no event possesses a single meaning. Every interaction radiates outward into uncountable subjectivities. The effect, as Lev Grossman wrote in The Atlantic, is that “you start hallucinating connections to fill in the gaps. Soon you’re seeing them all over the place.”
The Mundane and the Metaphysical
Knausgård’s prose has always operated at what Grossman called “room temperature” – a deliberately flat register that refuses to distinguish between the act of brushing one’s teeth and the contemplation of eternity. In The Third Realm, this technique becomes the engine of an entirely new kind of suspense. A brain-dead patient revives on the operating table. Three members of a death-metal band called Kvitekrist are found skinned in the forest. Herds of landlocked crabs roam the Norwegian countryside for no explicable reason. None of these events are explained. None are connected – or rather, they exist in what Grossman termed a “Schrödingerian superposition,” both clue and non-clue simultaneously.
“There’s a kind of RD Laingian suggestion that psychotics may be more capable of imaginative insight,” Feigel noted, “but also a sense that we could all see like this if we looked differently.” Throughout the novel, devils communicate primarily with those already in the grip of psychosis. The implication is troubling and seductive: that the rational mind, in its desperate need for coherence, may be the very faculty that prevents us from perceiving what is actually there.
Leo Robson, reviewing the novel in The New York Times, identified a more prosaic challenge. The Third Realm retreads events already covered in The Morning Star, and the repetition can feel less like enrichment than recapitulation. “The first narrators we encounter,” Robson wrote, “both contain exchanges depicted in The Morning Star, with little gained from the return visit beyond a mild frisson of dramatic irony.” It is a fair criticism, but it also misses the point: repetition is the method. Knausgård is not interested in advancing plot. He is interested in demonstrating that reality is inexhaustible – that the same moment, viewed from enough angles, will never yield a final interpretation.
From Autofiction to Apocalypse
What makes The Third Realm genuinely significant – rather than merely accomplished – is what it reveals about Knausgård’s artistic trajectory. After My Struggle, he published the largely autobiographical Seasons Quartet and a critical study of Edvard Munch. The Morning Star series, which began in 2020, represents a departure so radical that it amounts to reinvention. The Norwegian author has moved from the most exposed form of literary self-exposure to the most speculative: a multi-volume epic in which demons walk the earth, a mysterious star alters the fabric of reality, and the dead refuse to stay buried.
In a January 2026 conversation with actor Jeremy Strong for Interview Magazine, Knausgård reflected on the Faustian bargain of his early success. “It was a breakthrough, and I was loved and read and seen,” he said. “But then I realised there’s no end to how much you need if you go down this path.” Strong, visibly awed, told Knausgård: “There is almost no one on Earth that I am more honoured and genuinely thrilled to be doing this with.” The exchange captured something essential about Knausgård’s position in contemporary letters: he occupies a space usually reserved for dead canonical authors, yet he is still alive, still writing, still expanding.
The Morning Star series reads as a response to the vertigo of that position – a writer seeking not more self-exposure but something vaster: a fiction capacious enough to hold the full spectrum of human experience, from the humdrum routines of a Norwegian supermarket to the possibility of literal damnation. The series is now six volumes in Norwegian, with The School of Night (Nattskolen, 2023) moving backwards to 1985 London, following a young Norwegian photographer whose ambition curdles into something predatory. Arendal (2024) and Jeg var lenge død (2025) continue the expansion. The English translation of The School of Night, again by Aitken, arrives via Penguin in 2026.
The Problem of the Infinite
The Morning Star series was originally conceived as a trilogy. It is now, by any reasonable measure, something larger and less containable. Knausgård, who once compressed his entire life into six books, now seems intent on building a fictional universe that will never quite resolve – and that refusal of resolution is itself the point.
Feigel, in her Guardian review, identified the risk with precision: “The story is now at the point where it would be hard to write more without becoming more explicit about the presence of the demonic, which may take it too far into genre fiction and absurdity. But Knausgård seems prepared to be a brilliant failure – that may be part of his genius.” It is a generous reading, but a persuasive one. Knausgård’s willingness to fail at this scale – to attempt something that may ultimately prove impossible – is itself a form of artistic courage that contemporary fiction too rarely witnesses.
The Kirkus Reviews assessment captured the paradox neatly: “Typically contemplative for Knausgaard, but unusually propulsive as well.” The series is both deeply characteristic of its author – patient, digressive, obsessed with the texture of ordinary time – and unlike anything he has previously attempted. It is Knausgård at his most recognisable and his most strange.
What the Third Realm Demands
The Third Realm is not, finally, a novel about devils or stars or the medieval Holy Spirit. It is a novel about the human compulsion to find meaning in a universe that offers none automatically. Its characters – exhausted, dissatisfied, half-asleep – look up at the sky and project onto it every theory they possess: scientific, religious, conspiratorial, erotic. The star means nothing. The star means everything. The gap between those two positions is where Knausgård’s fiction lives.
For readers who came to Knausgård through My Struggle, the Morning Star series may initially seem bewildering – a confessionalist turned mythmaker, a realist haunted by ghosts. But the continuity is more consistent than it appears. Knausgård has always been obsessed with the gap between what we experience and what we can articulate, between the texture of lived time and the inadequacy of any language attempting to capture it. In My Struggle, that gap was filled with the raw material of his own life. In The Third Realm, it is filled with something stranger, darker, and more ambitious: the possibility that reality itself may be stranger than any autobiography could contain. As Grossman observed, the novel asks whether the world is “all noise, no signal” – and then refuses to answer. That refusal is not a failure of nerve. It is, perhaps, the most honest thing Knausgård has ever written.
