10 of 10 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Wings of Desire / from Bookforum / by Eric Banks, January 27, 2010
This review is from: A Time for Everything (Paperback)
Wings of Desire
from Bookforum, Feb/Mar 2010
by Eric Banks
By the time Antinous Bellori encounters angels in what we can euphemistically call the flesh, the creatures are no longer those divine messengers familiar from the Old Testament. Nor have they yet mutated into the chubby, rosy-cheeked babies hoisting puffy clouds that Tiepolo et al. gloried in depicting. The eleven-year-old Antinous, lost in the darkening forest near his northern Italian home circa 1562, stumbles on a pair of the flickering fallen ones just as they're sinking their bared teeth into a raw fish. The sight is horrible, more sublime than miraculous: "Their faces are white and skull-like, their eye sockets deep, cheekbones high, lips bloodless. They have long, fair hair, thin necks, slender wrists, clawlike fingers. And they're shaking. One of them has hands that shake." As they devour their sushi, their rolled-back eyeballs make them look blind--or even dead. Then with a dazzling light they depart; for Antinous, the experience is transformative.
According to Karl O. Knausgaard's A Time for Everything, the encounter leads Antinous to a life of restless theological inquiry, eventually yielding his anonymous On the Nature of Angels, published in 1584 but consigned to oblivion until its 1859 rediscovery in London. By then, of course, to speculate about angels is to be embarrassingly reminded of the superstitious past. The Norwegian author's epic biography of the fictional Antinous is one layer peeled from the strata of stories constituting A Time for Everything. This baroque novel folds a text within a text within a text to tell what happened to the nature of the divine over the course of all history, from creation to the present. Running parallel to the story of Antinous are stories of the angels' salad days, the long span between the expulsion of Adam and Eve from the garden and the explosion of God's wrath in the great flood.
Knausgaard's rotund novel seems itself out of time, a throwback to the grand European novel of midcentury; it is at once a sort of faux theological disquisition; a philosophical quest for the meaning of time, decay, and exile; and an unabashedly literary excursion into storytelling, with digressions narrating the psychological dynamics of Cain and the deprivations of Noah's extended family in Nod. The embedded novellas--of Cain and Abel, of the peasants of Nod as they flee up the mountainside in advance of the seawater that will exterminate them, of Abraham and Lot and Ezekiel--are themselves wrenched out of historical time: Cain and Abel wear britches and leather boots; the people of Nod tote hunting rifles, take notice of the quality of the morning light on the fjord, and build frame farms to take advantage of the lucrative market in mink breeding. In one delirious scene, Noah's father is pictured in the riotous summer market, a county-fair setting filled with pickpockets, carneys, and a freak show featuring the corpse of a murdered Nephilim, the antediluvian half-angel, half-human that, according to the Apocrypha, was the fruit of the angels' lust for female Homosapiens. Where are we? Knausgaard roams a strange landscape that resembles nothing so much as the pastoral 1800s Scandinavia of early Knut Hamsun.
Our delight in Knausgaard's virtuosity (and daring) in evoking these dreamy, ersatz settings is the payoff for his gamble in engaging an outsize theme--he is, after all, setting foot on terrain where Dante, Milton, and Blake dared to tread--and for his at times tedious digressions into angel scholarship. Knausgaard's mysterious, deadpan narrator is one of the book's more dizzying effects. It has become second nature for readers to greet this sort of reflexive novel by looking inside the collar for the irony label, but A Time for Everything wears its earnestness on its sleeve. In place of knowing humor and self-deprecation are startling episodes of Bosch-like violence and buffoonery. When Cain and Abel find their companion Jared mauled but still breathing in the forest, Abel slits his eyeball Un Chien Andalou-style and pulls his intestines out of his living body in order, Abel says, to experience his pain. Noah's father, dealing with a gangrenous big toe, saws off the digit with a knife before throwing on sock and shoe and continuing his chores.
Toward the book's conclusion, the narrator reveals himself; he is one Henrik Vankel, a young man living in self-imposed exile due to some unspecified transgression committed in the late 1990s on an island off the coast of Norway. There, he bleakly fishes for his lunch, desultorily reads Northrop Frye on Blake (OK, I guess there is a little ironic ha-ha here), and, in a bout of masochistic fury, slices his face and chest with a broken drinking glass in an attempt to, through pain, make contact with the infinite. The bloodletting doesn't work its magic--like the angels, Vankel is too removed from divinity to transcend this earthly existence. If Knausgaard drives home the message of A Time for Everything literally, it comes as no surprise. This is a literal-minded novel about a visionary subject--a grand mismatch of terms, a happily mixed metaphor, and an audacious effort for that.
Eric Banks is formerly the editor of Bookforum.
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6 of 7 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
An original and engrossing read, January 1, 2010
This review is from: A Time for Everything (Paperback)
A Time for Everything is one of the most intriguing works of literature to appear in the past decade. Its pages are filled with detailed and arresting imagery, strange flights of imagination, and intellectual exploration. It is also ultimately dark and disturbing. To say that it deals with the history of angels, retells the stories of Cain and Abel, and of Noah and the Flood, and ends in despair for the fictional author merely touches the surface. It is not a novel in any normal sense of the word, but rather an important work of art merging multiple literary genres. An impressive depth of emotional and intellectual engagement with fundamental issues about life and art is offered in a prose that is both powerful and striking. The author has just won the 2009 Brage Prize in Norway for the first volume of his six-volume semi-autobiography, entitled Min Kamp (My Struggle), which I hope his English-language publishers will bring out soon. Karl O. Knausgaard is a writer set to step onto the stage of major world literature.
A word about the English version: although I don't know Norwegian, and can only assume the text is even more impressive in the original, James Anderson's translation reads beautifully. This can't have been an easy text to translate--it is long, complex and demanding in every sense. Yet time and again the language and the ideas come through so strikingly that it is clear Knausgaard has been well served by his translator. Archipelago Books are to be congratulated for continuing to bring American readers into contact with the best and most challenging literature being written around the world.
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2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
remarkable, November 21, 2010
This review is from: A Time for Everything (Paperback)
one of the most remarkable books i have read in a long time.
knausgaard is using language in a way i have not encountered before --
and that's saying something, believe you me.
i do not mean to say that he is avantgarde or innovative in his use of language.
he is not.
nor is his language particularly beautiful.
it is not.
it is that he does something extraordinary in his writing.
almost like god himself he creates the *natural* world through the word.
the natural world devoid of our (human) impact on it.
devoid of our feelings evoked by it.
devoid of our perceptions of it.
the world fresh and new
as it is -- was -- would be:
unobserved.
as proust presented the world as conceived/perceived/constructed via human perception
knausgaard somehow manages to present the world as though unperceived by humans.
utterly astounding.
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