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the Complete Review
the complete review - fiction



The Third Realm

by
Karl Ove Knausgaard


general information | review summaries | our review | links | about the author

To purchase The Third Realm


Title: The Third Realm
Author: Karl Ove Knausgaard
Genre: Novel
Written: 2022 (Eng. 2024)
Length: 493 pages
Original in: Norwegian
Availability: The Third Realm - US
The Third Realm - UK
The Third Realm - Canada
Das dritte Königreich - Deutschland
from: Bookshop.org (US)
  • Norwegian title: Det tredje riket
  • The third volume in The Morning Star-series
  • Translated by Martin Aitken

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Our Assessment:

B+ : another solid piece in a larger, still unclear picture

See our review for fuller assessment.



Review Summaries
Source Rating Date Reviewer
The Guardian . 2/10/2024 Lara Feigel
Literary Review . 10/2024 Sarah Moorhouse
The NY Rev. of Books . 7/11/2024 Christine Smallwood
The NY Times Book Rev. . 27/10/2024 Leo Robson
The Spectator . 28/9/2024 Leyla Sanai
The Times . 28/9/2024 Charles Arrowsmith
TLS . 22/11/2024 Catherine Taylor
The Washington Post . 2/10/2024 Brandon Taylor
Die Welt . 17/5/2024 Richard Kämmerlings


  From the Reviews:
  • "The book read to me as the final part in a trilogy, but it turns out there are at least two more to come. Thinking it was a finale, I found it magisterial. There is both sufficient resolution, brought by the feeling of endlessly proliferating perspectives, and sufficient ambiguity. As a midpoint in a longer work, I find it less promising, though it makes sense that Knausgård wants to undercut any sense of resolution. 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." - Lara Feigel, The Guardian

  • "At their best, the Morning Star books ask profound and troubling questions about the scope of human knowledge and create a potent climate of trepidation and anxiety. But at their worst, they are bloated and sloppy, over-stuffed with theme and burdened by tedious and banal dialogue. (...) Perhaps all will be revealed in time. I don’t intend to find out. It may be that the Morning Star series is a victim of its early achievement: the first volume was so successful at making me acknowledge my own death that I resented spending my life with what came next." - Christine Smallwood, The New York Review of Books

  • "In larger ways, too, The Third Realm is a wildly over-insistent piece of work, with a succession of ultra-pertinent symbols and reference points undermining the realist plausibility that was so central to The Morning Star. (...) Pulling off an exercise like this, in which the extreme engulfs the everyday, requires a tonal and rhetorical tightrope act. Knausgaard avoids one danger, self-defensive irony, but seems to fall prey to the opposite vice: po-faced earnestness, a lack of detachment. (...) The central theme -- more overt than in The Morning Star -- is the limit of the human mind." - Leo Robson, The New York Times Book Review

  • "There is a lot of dialogue, and Knausgaard’s skill in capturing conversation makes his characters spring vividly from the page. (...) A few might find satanic rituals and strange noises at night hackneyed, but they are used to spine-chilling effect. Others might baulk at scientifically impossible scenarios -- but the whole is so gripping, and at any one time, science only understands the tip of the iceberg of observed phenomena." - Leyla Sanai, The Spectator

  • "While The Third Realm may not be the place for new readers to start, it offers for the initiated a deepening mystery and a clutch of symbols and ideas that point to new and intriguing directions the series might take. Horror continues to seethe beneath the surface. The compulsion to keep reading springs, as always, from Knausgaard’s ability to transcribe patterns of thinking." - Charles Arrowsmith, The Times

  • "Karl Ove Knausgaard has delivered yet another complicated, chilling and vastly enjoyable novel of ideas that poses more questions than answers." - Catherine Taylor, Times Literary Supplement

  • "The effect is that The Third Realm is less a sequel and more of an eerie doppelgänger to The Morning Star. While the first two books can be read on their own without any trouble, The Third Realm requires a bit more familiarity with what came before. (...) Reading these revisited scenes, one feels the potential limitations of the project Knausgaard has set for himself. These events were granularly conveyed in The Morning Star, so even seeing them from another angle might stretch a taut line to the point of breaking. But Knausgaard expands the world of the story as well, adopting a meanwhile, elsewhere approach to bring us new dramatic episodes. (...) The Third Realm is the strangest of the novels in the series so far, and there are genuinely scary moments in the book that I will not spoil. It feels as if we’ve crossed some boundary of plausible deniability in the books, moved beyond a time when we might have accounted for the visitations, visions and other occurrences by some rational explanation. " - Brandon Taylor, The Washington Post

  • "Der neue Band ist der bislang finsterste der Reihe. (...) Man muss mindestens den ersten „Morgenstern“-Band gelesen haben, will man der Geschichte folgen. (...) Der Roman ist als literarische Form bekanntlich ein Omnivor, ein Allesfresser, und Knausgårds mit Mystery- und Horrorelementen angereicherter Essayismus ist das Paradebeispiel dafür (.....) Was den Roman wie schon seine Vorgängerbände dennoch regelrecht soghaft lesbar macht, ist gerade ihre Normalität, die in jeder einzelnen Figur an die Alltagsschilderungen der „Min Kamp“-Bände erinnert, auch wenn diesmal nichts direkt autobiografisch ist." - Richard Kämmerlings, Die Welt

Please note that these ratings solely represent the complete review's biased interpretation and subjective opinion of the actual reviews and do not claim to accurately reflect or represent the views of the reviewers. Similarly the illustrative quotes chosen here are merely those the complete review subjectively believes represent the tenor and judgment of the review as a whole. We acknowledge (and remind and warn you) that they may, in fact, be entirely unrepresentative of the actual reviews by any other measure.

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The complete review's Review:

       The Third Realm is the third novel in Karl Ove Knausgaard's The Morning Star-series, but returns to the time and characters of the first volume, The Morning Star. Again, the novel has multiple narrators, nine characters describing their experiences in longish sections, with limited overlap; only a few narrate more than a single section. While many of the narrators are familiar characters from The Morning Star, they are largely different from the narrators of the earlier novel -- but often recount familiar events from a different perspective. So, for example, here it is Tove, wife and mother of three, who seems to be losing her mental balance again -- hearing voices --, events we are familiar with from her husband Arne's account of them in The Morning Star. The only character who came to voice in the earlier novel and also does so here is pastor Kathrine -- though her husband, Gaute, also gets a section here.
       Whereas The Morning Star was divided into two main sections -- 'First Day' and 'Second Day' -- The Third Realm starts without any such section-heading; before the final two narrator-accounts, however, there is a break, announcing that we have now moved on to the 'Third Day'.
       Though one of the characters begins his earlier account: "It was just a day like any other", even before we get to the third day there are some disturbing goings-on. As another character observes:

     Something's not right.
     What is it ?
       That is one of the big questions in the novel; certainly, quite a bit isn't right. The murder of three members of heavy metal band Kvitekrist -- skinned (except for their faces), the corpses' heads: "wrenched so far round that their backs were where their chest should have been" -- is a more familiar kind of horror, but there are other strange happenings as well. There's that shiny thing in the sky that has mysteriously appeared -- the 'morning star' of the series-title -- for one, but what's most bizarre is that ... no one seems to be dying any longer. People have begun to notice -- doctors at hospitals are surprised none of their patients have succumbed to their injuries, for example -- but for quite a while no one seems to put together that it's practically an epidemic of survival; as funeral-home owner Syvert realizes: "No one had coordinated the data" yet, so it's almost a week before the newspapers pick up on it.
       These un- or super-natural occurrences are familiar from The Morning Star, with The Third Realm shedding more and new and different light on aspects of them, broadening the story. The new perspectives -- the different narrators -- also expand on some of the previously familiar events.
       Among the personal stories narrated here is Tove's account of the family-holiday, which she finds difficult to navigate in her condition, as she isn't taking the medication that keeps her grounded (and dulled), leaving her hearing voices and the like. Kathrine's husband, Gaute, practically seethes with jealousy, suspicious of his wife, while also dealing with the extended absence of one of his students from school. Star architect Helge Bråthen turns sixty, but is unenthusiastic about any celebrations -- and haunted by an event from his childhood, ultimately unburrdening himself to Syvert (in one of the few instances where different narrators meet). Teenage Line is drawn to Valdemar, and takes up his invitation to hear him and Domen play -- a legendary band, who only occasionally play before small, select audiences and have not released any of their music. And neurologist Jarle Skinlo travels to examine a patient who is clinically dead .....
       The characters' lives seem to go on more or less as usual, but the unusual hovers in the background throughout: the 'morning star' in the sky; the news of the killing of the three musicians (and the search for the fourth). Many of the characters suffer from various kinds of disconnect from reality, including the nightmares keeping Gaude's student from school and the hysteria of the fourth member of Kvitekrist. Religion, too, features in various ways, not just because of pastor Kathrine -- including Line's mention that:
     Valdemar wasn't a Nazi, even if a lot of people thought he was. When he spoke about the Third Realm, it wasn't the Nazis he was talking about but something people had believed in thge Middle Ages, that the First Realm was the age of God, the Second Realm the age of Christ, and the Third Realm the age of the Holy Spirit.
     'We're entering the Third Realm,' he said. Not to me, but to others.
       It is this realm Knausgaard is exploring here, the characters not entirely immersed in it but touched, in various ways by it -- the first glimpses. They struggle with various concerns -- mostly variations of the usual everyday ones, of life and dealing with other people --, with still only the hint of a larger story here in the connections and similarities.
       The Third Realm isn't quite or just a rehash and reconsideration of The Morning Star, but it also does not (yet) complete the picture (with The Wolves of Eternity also tied together with it in a few places but still an outlier). If originally planned as a trilogy, the pieces so far now suggest a much larger project, and it will be interesting to see where it goes.
       For now, The Third Realm stands as one more building block -- interesting enough to read on its own, but also just a way-station. It's probably not the place to start with in the series -- though one certainly could -- and most rewarding read in conjunction with The Morning Star.

- M.A.Orthofer, 10 October 2024

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Links:

The Third Realm: Reviews: Other books by Karl Ove Knausgaard under review: Other books of interest under review:

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About the Author:

       Norwegian writer Karl Ove Knausgaard (Karl Ove Knausgård) was born in 1968.

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© 2024 the complete review

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