A Mysterious Star and the Mystery of Existence
On the western half of the Scandinavian peninsula is the Kingdom of Norway. Bestowed with a rich cultural heritage, its landscape is riddled with architectural monuments, stave churches, and historic towns, with UNESCO recognizing eight World Heritage Sites in Norway. A notable example of the Kingdom’s rich heritage is the Urnes Stave Church, one of the oldest wooden churches in the world, reflecting Viking traditions. The historic wharf Bryggen in Bergen is another cultural heritage. It was once the center of teeming trade during the Hanseatic League from the 14th to the mid-16th century. The Rjukan–Notodden Industrial Heritage Site highlights Norway’s industrial history, while the Struve Geodetic Arc is a transnational site shared with nine other countries, demonstrating scientific heritage and geodetic achievements.
The Kingdom’s lush cultural heritage is also translated into its literature. It traces its origins to Old Norse traditions, including Eddaic poems and skaldic verse from the Viking Age. These early works were integral in shaping the cultural identity of Norway. However, it was in the 19th century when a distinctly Norwegian literature emerged. From this period of National Romanticism emerged the “Four Greats”: Henrik Ibsen, Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson, Alexander Kielland, and Jonas Lie. Along with Knut Hamsun (1920), Sigrid Undset (1928), and Jon Fosse (2023), Bjørnson (1903) forms a quartet of Norwegian writers to gain recognition from the Swedish Academy, earning the Nobel Prize in Literature, long considered as the world’s most, if not one of the most prestigious literary prizes. This further underscores the Kingdom’s lush literary heritage.
The emergence of more excellent writers has ensured the future of Norwegian literature. It continues to thrive through writers such as Jo Nesbø, Jostein Gaarder, and Maja Lunde. Building on the legacy of the writers who came before them, their works have become ubiquitous, further introducing the Kingdom to many an international reader. Another prominent name in contemporary Norwegian literature is Karl Ove Knausgård, who gained global recognition with Min Kamp (My Struggle), a series of six autobiographical novels. The road to success, however, was fraught with challenges. Post-university, he held various jobs, including teaching high school in northern Norway, selling cassettes, working in a psychiatric hospital and on an oil platform, while trying to pursue a career as a writer. His persistence eventually paid off, and the rest, they say, was history.
If there was one thing I’d understood, it was that. A life is always complete in itself, always whole, no matter how long or short. Joar had once tried explaining to me that infinity wasn’t just infinity, there were different degrees of infinity. He said it had to do with set theory. I hadn’t a clue what he was talking about, surely infinity was unbounded, so how could there be different kinds, with different extensions? Exactly the opposite applied to life, it had occurred to me afterwards. Life was finite, not infinite, but even if it was bounded in time, time didn’t determine it’s boundaries — every life was complete in itself, none more complete than another.
Karl Ove Knausgård, The Wolves of Eternity
In 2021, he published his novel, Ulvene fra evighetens skog, which was translated into English in 2023 as The Wolves of Eternity. The novel opens in 1986, when readers meet one of its two main characters. Nineteen-year-old Syvert Løyning has recently been discharged from his Norwegian national service duties, having served as a cook for the Navy. Following his discharge, he returned home to the countryside near Bergen, where he lived with his mother and twelve-year-old brother, Joar. His father, who shared his name, had died in a car accident when Syvert was just eleven. Back home, Syvert was unsure of what to do with his life. His awkwardness made him the butt of jokes among both his old friends and the local girls he tried in vain to chat up. He was considering attending university, but he had no idea what he wanted to pursue or study. To occupy his time, he tried looking for a job. However, there were no jobs available to him.
He eventually found temporary work as an undertaker. He also stumbled upon his father’s old belongings, among them books and letters written in Russian. The letters were from someone named Asya. Syvert’s curiosity was further piqued when his mother confessed to him that, shortly before his death, his father had asked for a divorce. Interestingly, soon after returning home, Syvert had a dream in which his father confessed that his marriage had not been a happy one. Syvert then sought help translating the letters, believing that his father’s request for a divorce and the letters were related. The letters soon revealed details about his father’s life of which he had been unaware, prompting him to reevaluate his relationship with his father, as well as his own memories. The letters revealed that he had a half-sister named Alevtina. Meanwhile, he developed a liking for Lisa, whom he met during one of his trips to the bar. His confession of love, however, was neither rejected outright nor met with enthusiasm.
The story then moves forward to Putin-era Russia. Alevtina Kotov is a biology professor at Moscow University and a single mother to an adolescent son. During Syvert’s account, she was just nine years old. She and her son are about to set off for her home village to celebrate her stepfather’s eightieth birthday when she unexpectedly encounters her estranged friend, Vasilisa, who is currently working on a project she says she is trying to escape from. Meanwhile, Alevtina confesses that her own life has become adrift. As their stories unfold, their respective obsessions begin to reveal deeper aspects of their inner lives. At her father’s house, Alevtina reminisces about the time she spent at a rural retreat for scientists, where she developed an interest in the life of trees. Her intellectual inquiries delved into the symbiotic fungal networks that exist within their ecosystems. She was also curious about the possible forms of symbiosis between humans and the natural world.
Vasilisa, on the other hand, is a writer researching early twentieth-century Russian sects preoccupied with the resurrection of the dead and eternal life. She focuses on Nikolai Fyodorovich Fyodorov, a savant who once exerted a great influence on both Leo Tolstoy and Fyodor Dostoyevsky. Through a series of vignettes, the story of Alevtina and Vasilisa’s friendship is gradually conveyed. They first met at university. Vasilisa stood out for her eccentricity, while Alevtina turned heads with her beauty. Coming from opposite ends of the spectrum, their friendship did not get off to a good start. Nevertheless, an unusual incident brought them together, and their bond grew stronger through their shared interest in the works of the Austrian poet Rainer Maria Rilke. As Alevtina remarked, it was unusual to find someone who shared her interest in Rilke’s work. Alevtina’s interest in literature had been cultivated by her book-loving stepfather.
Nearness is undemanding and therefore unproductive in a way. What we know is near to us – no effort required. What we don’t know is remote from us, at a distance, we’re not in the same place as what we don’t know, and so we have to traverse that distance in order to learn. Longing requires distance – longing for another place, another state, another person, another set of things we know – and if there’s one thing that drives us, individually and collectively, it’s longing.
Karl Ove Knausgård, The Wolves of Eternity
The two major narrative threads are headed toward an inevitable collision, with Alevtina’s curiosity about her biological father also piqued. She discovers that her father died several years ago, leaving behind two sons living in Norway. When their paths eventually cross in Moscow, their meeting is initially fraught. However, the reunion ultimately comes with its own gratifying resolution. The siblings are forced to confront and reconsider their memories of their father. Syvert’s memories capture a man who seemed straightforward, the portrait of an upright man. However, as secrets are unraveled, this portrait is pierced, revealing a more complicated figure. He had a hidden life, another family, and desires that he kept from his son. In confronting the complexities of their shared history, the siblings’ reunion helps resolve decades-old trauma while exposing its ongoing repercussions as the past reverberates across generations.
As the half-siblings confront their past, the story examines the intricacies of family, particularly how families shape our identities. For Syvert, the secrets he uncovers prompt him to reconsider his understanding not only of his father but also of his own family. The central tension lies in how much of our identity is a product of what we inherit and how much is derived from the circumstances in which we are raised. Syvert and Alevtina share genetic material, but their lives and personalities could hardly be more different. Their reunion is therefore less a conventional family reunion than an encounter between two radically different ways of understanding the world. Syvert leads a more conventional life shaped by family, death, religion, and personal experience. Meanwhile, Alevtina approaches the world through science, philosophy, and intellectual inquiry.
Through the half-siblings’ contrasting lives, the novel subtly juxtaposes science and religious thought. Alevtina’s profession encourages her to understand life through biology and evolution. Yet her scientific pursuits lead her toward questions that science cannot easily answer. She delves into consciousness, what happens after death, and even the intelligence of trees. Knausgård challenges the assumption that science can explain everything, particularly matters pertaining to existence. The limits of human knowledge are central to his intellectual inquiry. Our understanding of the world is shaped by the information available to us, but these categories do not necessarily encompass all of reality. In her studies, Alevtina explores the possibility of forms of consciousness radically different from our own, creating space for spirituality and metaphysics to emerge.
In the pursuit of understanding existence, nature emerges as an alternative model. Alevtina’s studies dismantle the idea of the individual as an isolated, autonomous being. Forests are complex ecosystems in which organisms, often invisible to the naked eye, constantly interact with and depend upon one another. Knausgård posits that we are components of a broader biological network. The lives of the two main characters reflect this idea. They lead separate lives, yet blood, history, and memory connect them. Memory plays an integral role in the story. Although their father has been dead for years, he continues to haunt the present. The letters uncovered by Syvert suggest that we never possess a complete understanding of another person, even those closest to us.
One may tell oneself that death is part of life, and indeed I tell myself that it is so, for there is certainly a truth in it, but it is not the case that death is an inversion of life, its shadow as it were. Rather, the opposite is true. Life is an inversion of death. It is death that rules. We are all of us death’s children.
Karl Ove Knausgård, The Wolves of Eternity
Death and loss permeate the narrative. Syvert’s father’s death is the most overt example, as it continues to influence his son’s life long afterward. Syvert also contemplates the threat posed by the Chernobyl disaster. His dreams about his father transcend the boundaries between memory and presence, suggesting that the dead may somehow remain connected to the living. His work as an undertaker provides another direct connection to mortality, bringing him into contact with death as a physical and practical reality. Alevtina, on the other hand, studies biology in an attempt to understand and even overcome it. Interestingly, their contrasting professions are tangentially connected: Syvert examines life through the dead, while Alevtina studies life through biology and trees.
The exploration of mortality runs parallel to the novel’s examination of immortality, subtly referenced in its title. While investigating plant consciousness, Alevtina becomes fascinated by attempts to overcome aging and death. She becomes interested in cryonics, transhumanism, and even the possibility of resurrecting the dead. At one point, she encounters tanks containing cryogenically frozen humans kept in an oddly rural facility. Vasilisa, meanwhile, is fascinated by Fyodorov, a transhumanist philosopher who envisioned using science to resurrect the dead. Knausgård places these ideas alongside modern scientific sensibilities, making religious resurrection and scientific immortality collide while gradually eroding the distinction between them. Ironically, as the story progresses, he also appears to question why humans desire immortality when the pursuit of it can itself invoke tumult.
The Wolves of Eternity‘s extensiveness commands the reader’s full attention. Casting a net over a vast territory of ideas, the novel can be daunting. Nevertheless, Knausgård reels the reader in. Running underneath the family story is a strange metaphysical dimension. Echoing the supernatural phenomenon at the center of its predecessor, Morgenstjernen (2020; Morning Star), a mysterious bright star appears in the sky. Its reappearance further challenges our understanding of reality. The Wolves of Eternity amplifies the subjects explored in the first book, with ghostly visitations and doppelgängers adding to its unsettling atmosphere. The book even derives its title from a work by the Russian poet Marina Tsvetaeva: “However much you feed a wolf, it always looks to the forest. / We are all wolves of the dense forest of Eternity.” It is through Tsvetaeva that Vasilisa explores Fyodorov’s message. The mysterious morning star still hovers, even as a clear conclusion remains elusive.
An engaging and multilayered novel of ideas, The Wolves of Eternity is a thought-provoking and insightful read. Through Syvert and Alevtina, Knausgård examines the forces that connect us across generations, whether through blood, memory, nature, or the stories we inherit. Their contrasting approaches—one grounded more in religious thought, the other in intellectual inquiry—ultimately lead them toward similar reflections on life, death, consciousness, and human existence. Ambitious and demanding, the novel moves from intimate family secrets to explorations of ecology, resurrection, immortality, and the nature of reality. Knausgård transforms an apparently simple story about two half-siblings discovering one another into a sweeping meditation on what it means to be human. Despite venturing into mysteries surrounding death, the cosmos, and the possibility of resurrection, the novel offers no easy answers. Instead, it embraces uncertainty, reminding us that perhaps the most enduring mysteries are those that remain just beyond the boundaries of what we can know.
What was I scared of? Not that they were going to harm me. It was just that they were there. I felt every thud of my heart, and what came with it, a rising sense of tension and dread, pumping into my organism with every beat. Nothing had happened. Nothing had changed. No one wanted to hurt me. And yet, my heart and yet, that terrible feeling, coursing through me. It was a panic attack, I told myself, and clutched at the thought. It was a a panic attack, it wasn’t me, I was the same as before.
Karl Ove Knausgård, The Wolves of Eternity
Book Specs
Author: Karl Ove Knausgård
Translator (from Norwegian): Martin Aitken
Publisher: Penguin Press
Publishing Date: 2023 (2021)
No. of Pages: 789
Genre: Literary, Historical, Magical Realism
Synopsis
In 1986, twenty-year-old Syvert Løyning returns from the military to his mother’s home in southern Norway. One evening, his dead father comes to him in a dream. Realizing that he doesn’t really know who his father was, Syvert begins to investigate his life and finds clues pointing to the Soviet Union. What he learns changes his past and undermines the entire notion of who he is. But when his mother becomes ill, and he must care for his little brother, Joar, on his own, he no longer has time or space for lofty speculations.
In present-day Russia, Alevtina Kotov, a biologist working at Moscow University, is traveling with her young son to the home of her stepfather, to celebrate his eightieth birthday. As a student, Alevtina was bright, curious and ambitious, asking the big questions about life and human consciousness. But as she approaches middle age, most of that drive has gone, and she finds herself in a place she doesn’t want to be, without really understanding how she got there. Her stepfather, a musician, raised her as his own daughter, and she was never interested in learning about her biological father; when she finally starts looking into him, she learns that he died many years ago and left two sons, Joar and Syvert.
Years later, when Syvert and Alevtina meet in Moscow, two very different approaches to life emerge. And as a bright star appears in the sky, it illuminates the wonder of human existence and the mysteries that exist beyond our own worldview. Set against the political and cultural backdrop of both the 1980s and the present day, The Wolves of Eternity is an expansive and affecting book about relations—to one another, to nature, to the dead.
About the Author
Karl Ove Knausgård was born on December 6, 1968, in Oslo, Norway, to an English teacher and a nurse. He was raised on Tromøya in Arendal and in Kristiansand. When he was a teenager, his parents divorced, and his father, an alcoholic, moved in with his own mother and ultimately drank himself to death. He then studied arts and literature at the University of Bergen. The path to literary success, however, was fraught. Before pursuing a full-time career as a writer, he held various jobs, including teaching high school in northern Norway, selling cassettes, working in a psychiatric hospital, and on an oil platform.
He eventually published his first novel in 1998. Ute av verden (1998; Out of the World) was a critical success, becoming the first debut novel to win the Norwegian Critics’ Prize. His sophomore novel, Tid for alt (2004; A Time to Every Purpose Under Heaven, also published as A Time for Everything), was equally a critical success that earned him nominations for the Nordic Council’s Literature Prize and the International Dublin Literary Award. His first two novels were well received, but it was the six-volume Min Kamp (My Struggle) series of autobiographical novels that made Knausgård a household name in Norway. Published from 2009 to 2011, the series also elevated him to global recognition. The book, however, was without controversy. Shortly after the first book’s publication, his father’s family threatened him with a lawsuit for his scandalous depiction of his father and grandmother. This only expanded his readership.
In the 2020s, Knausgaard wrote yet another book series. It commenced with Morgenstjernen (2020; The Morning Star) and Ulvene fra evighetens skog (2021; The Wolves of Eternity). Because of the success of his first novel, it became imperative for him to write four more books: Det tredje riket (2022; The Third Realm), Nattskolen (2023; The School of Night), Arendal (2024), and Jeg var lenge død (2025). Between 2015 and 2016, Knausgård published Årstid-encyklopedien (Seasons Quartet), a series of four books titled Om høsten (Autumn), Om vinteren (Winter), Om våren (Spring), and Om sommeren (Summer). Like the My Struggle series, it is also autobiographical in nature, consisting of diary excerpts, letters, and other personal materials. He also published essays, short stories, and art writing. He now divides his time between London and Sweden.
