1 month ago
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Peter Craven
January 30, 2026 — 1:23pm
FICTION
The School of Night
Karl Ove Knausgaard, translated by Martin Aitken
Penguin Random House, $34.99
Karl Ove Knausgaard is one of the weirdest writers around because he combines massive factual features – sometimes of an interminable kind – with rapid changes of pace and focus.
Take the title. The School of Night rings a bell for people who know a bit about the Elizabethan period. It’s based on a line of Shakespeare’s in Love’s Labour’s Lost – the play that sends up far-out learned language – and it is associated with the theory of that adventurous scholar M.C. Bradbrook, who called one of her books The School of Night and who associates the satire with free thinking, the occult and all the dark aspects of Christopher Marlowe.
The eccentric Dutchman (who tells this story to our hero, Kristian, a 20-year-old Norwegian photographer) tantalises him with the theory that Marlowe fakes his own death and goes on to write Shakespeare’s plays incognito. But Hans (as he’s called) doesn’t believe his own theory, although there’s elaborate use made of Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus – a production of which our protagonist is scheduled to do the photographs for – and there’s also an identification of Faustus with Hamlet as well as quotation of Mephistopheles saying that this is hell and he’s never out of it.
We get the boy from Norway, forever fiddling and having sex with girls he doesn’t like. He’s also mightily shaken by the shadowy presence that haunts an early daguerreotype like a satanic presence.
He’s run away from his Norwegian parents but he’s gradually insinuating himself as a talented photographer who does a potently creepy work using the skeleton of a cat. There’s also a weird encounter with a homeless man and a cigarette lighter that results in the young photographer’s arrest when it turns out the man had died but nothing comes of this. Someone else confesses and there is some sort of inscrutable confession (to what?) from God knows who. The Dutchman remains a mysterious figure.
All this is in 1986, but in the next section of the book, 20 years have passed and our hero is a celebrated world-famous photographer doing a Q&A at a great gallery in New York. He is extraordinarily poised, dominant and lethal and the world obeys his merest gesture until he lets slip something about the homeless man who died. He becomes – maddeningly – the object of Daily Mail speculation of the most damaging kind and when his (plain, we’re told) PA tries to put out a statement, he rebuffs her and she even leaves him.
Flash back to London to his sleek, brilliant wife and his young son. There is another death and it is rendered heartbreakingly. Then, in the last movement of the book, there is an extreme act of vengeance that is another desolation that offers no escape from the mirror or the loss.
The School of Night is a devastatingly brilliant novel that presents several faces of the protagonist, each of which is moving in its own way and each of which is alienating at the same time. He has troubles with women, the way they carry themselves, the way they are essentially parachutes for him. But he is as hopeless a boy as he is a brutally impressive great man. He imposes his will on the world like an insignia on his dominion of the world and then he is broken into a thousand pieces by love of the most poignant and innocent kind. Though this, too, has a riddling element that the narrative never explains.
The School of Night is a very grand homage to the blood and tears of the everyday. The protagonist is forever reaching for a mythology that constantly lets him down and he is capable of consummate self-regard in which he indulges. He is, however, a tragic figure by simple virtue of the intensity with which his self-portrait is executed.
The different aspects of this seeker after the enigma of his selfhood are done with a meticulous attention to detail: he wants to have sex with the – plain again – theatre director but he wants her to keep her top on. The novel is full of idiocies of behaviour which we’re compelled to believe in for no other reason than the power of their executions. This means the narrative constantly swerves away from ordinary narrative satisfaction because the boy is such a baby and such an idiot, whereas the great man is such a master and such a delusion.
The collision between the two – or if you like the juxtaposition – is superb and mysterious. It’s like the unbelievable theory that Marlowe wrote Shakespeare. It’s barely possible, which is part of its fascination.
Part of the glory of Knausgaard is that he simply places a handful of contrasted portraits together and says to the reader to put these fragments side by side if they dare. It’s part of the mystery of his art that he brings them together by sheer force of realisation: Kristian, the lord of photographic art, the shattered father, the vengeful husband beyond all love.
Yes, Faustus is Hamlet and Mephistopheles is in hell. There is no model for these faces. They are simply hypothetical gestures to how a human being might look.
The translation of The School of Night by Martin Aitken is superb. He has precisely the right combination of slang and elegance to allow this loose and ominous bag of human possibility to take its difficult, sometimes momentous shapes.
But Knausgaard is a major writer. He does what he will with the mysticism of an ancient England or a Giordano Bruno burning at the stake. We just follow him wherever he wants to go.
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