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A Time for Everything

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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.

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.

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.

"Perhaps Cain also keeps his thoughts under lock and key. Cage after cage of snarling thoughts he hardly dares pass, let alone take out, harness, and arrange into a team, which with heavy hand and cracking whip, he can get to pull him at breakneck speed through his own consciousness."

Within this giant novel (almost 500 pages, mostly well-packed with around 400 words) are two shorter novels, several short stories, re-writes of the dramatic opening chapters of the Bible's book of Ezekiel and of the story (from Genesis) of the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah, and some faux historical/theological writing, some of it derived from the writing of luminaries such as St Augustine, much of it from fictitious works of angelology. Of the latter, On the Nature of Angels by Antoni Bellori (1585) is given particular prominence. The tale of Bellori's lifetime study of the nature and history of angels provides a narrative thread almost throughout the book, plus short stories at the beginning and almost at the end of the book.

The Bible identifies four ranks of angel - Cherubim, Seraphim, Angels and Archangels. There were also Nephilim, who Bellori concluded were the result of angels mating with the `daughters of men'. God was unhappy with that development and determined to destroy the Nephilim along with all other life on earth, sparing only Noah and his immediate family. That leads us into the longest and most successful of the self-contained stories. Although we learn much about Noah - an albino, sensitive, artistic, a misfit in his agrarian society - the narrative focuses primarily on his wider family, those who were not saved, and their experience of the flood. It's a powerful tale, and curious in that although nominally located within sight of the Cherubim set to guard the Gates of Eden after the Fall of Man, the background seems to be that of 19th century Norway.

The scenery is the same for the other long story; that of Cain and Abel. Abel is fixated on regaining access to Eden and is burned by contact with the Cherubim as he makes the attempt. So we know Eden is close by, and yet the pastoral context - Abel herding sheep on the upper pastures, Cain producing some very European crops on the lower ground - is again fairly consistently that of pre-industrial Scandinavia. A notable feature of this story is the tension produced in the first-time reader by the knowledge that ultimately Cain will kill Abel, but not knowing when or how.

This has been called a Novel of Ideas, and for want of a better label I would settle for that. That puts it in company, amongst others, with Robert Musil's The Man Without Qualities (one of my all-time favorites) and Knausgaard's fellow Norwegian Jostein Gaarder's Sophie's World: A Novel about the History of Philosophy. The book is unusual, and even readers who are broadly sympathetic are unlikely to enjoy every word, but it's not a particularly difficult read. If you like something you can get your literary teeth into, this book may well appeal.

Angels have always eluded mankind. "A Time for Everything" is the tale of a sixteenth century boy by the name of Antinous Bellori and his encounters with angels. Norwegian author Karl O. Knausgaard drew upon much of the tales of angels, as he draws many connections to biblical stories such as Cain and Abel, Sodom and Gomorrah, Noah's ark and many other stories and the hand that angels played in them all. For anyone entranced with the concept of angels, "A Time for Everything" is a fine read, expertly translated from the original Norwegian by James Anderson.