The School of Night - Karl Ove Knausgaard

A
Literary Saloon
&
Site of Review.

Trying to meet all your book preview and review needs.

Contents:
Main

the Best

the Rest

Review Index

Links

to e-mail us:

support the site

The School of Night

by
Karl Ove Knausgaard

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

Title:	The School of Night
Author:	Karl Ove Knausgaard
Genre:	Novel
Written:	2023 (Eng. 2025)
Length:	501 pages
Original in:	Norwegian
Availability:	The School of Night - US
	The School of Night - UK
	The School of Night - Canada
	Die Schule der Nacht - Deutschland

	from: Bookshop.org (US)

Norwegian title: Nattskolen
The fourth volume in The Morning Star-series
Translated by Martin Aitken

- Return to top of the page -

Our Assessment:

B+ : weirdly compelling semi-Faustian tale

See our review for fuller assessment.

Review Summaries
Source	Rating	Date	Reviewer
Financial Times	C-	4/11/2025	Max Liu
The Guardian	.	25/11/2025	Charles Arrowsmith
NZZ	.	26/8/2025	P.Urban-Halle
The NY Times Book Rev.	.	13/1/2026	Randy Boyagoda
The Spectator	A-	22/11/2025	Leyla Sanai
Sunday Times	A	18/11/2025	James Riding
The Telegraph	B+	28/11/2025	Malcolm Forbes
TLS	.	28/11/2025	James Cahill

From the Reviews:

"The remainder of the novel is as bland as its protagonist’s new milieu, although occasionally Kristian’s carping about fame is amusing. (...) On the whole, however, the humour and self-awareness of the novel’s first half fall away. Finally, tragedy strikes but it feels too contrived to be affecting. (...) The School of Night is another instalment in his struggle to move on from his own “lifework” -- 500 pages he needed to write but you needn’t read." - Max Liu, Financial Times

"(A) compellingly nasty novel. (...) Other readers will be drawn into kabbalistic exegesis. I found myself translating Danish Reddit threads, examining Norwegian ferry schedules to trace Kristian’s movements, and scouring the classics to understand how the Faustus story may illuminate the world of The Morning Star. (...) Knausgård’s prose is sometimes not just erratic but incoherent; even fans will concede that you don’t read him for the beauty of his sentences. Besides, 500 pages in Kristian’s hateful company is a lot to handle -- and getting the most from The School of Night entails thousands of pages of background reading. (...) A lot is riding on Knausgård’s ability to deliver on the colossal promise of this sprawling epic. But for readers with the stomach, patience and faith to keep going, this work of millenarian fiction remains an object of fascination." - Charles Arrowsmith, The Guardian

"Bleiben wir als Leser deshalb am Ball ? Weil Knausgård wie sein Held das «Monumentale» will, eine epische Totalität? Und weil sein Stil eher nicht monumental ist, er schreibt ja wie gesprochen, wie einem so die Gedanken durch den Kopf jagen. Auch sein Hadeland denkt andauernd. Und schlingert und stolpert und schleicht und tappt dabei durchs Leben. Seine Gedanken können absolut ungewöhnlich sein, aber manchmal auch nur platt. Er schweift ab, er schweift weiter: mit jedem Bild, das er vor sich sieht (im Kopf oder in der Wirklichkeit). Trotzdem reisst es einen mit, vielleicht weil Knausgård es tatsächlich schafft, eine Verbindung zwischen Pop und Bildung herzustellen, zwischen Zeitgeist und existenziellen Fragen." - Peter Urban-Halle, Neue Zürcher Zeitung

"Kristian is derisive of the attention he begins to enjoy while endlessly expecting the world to recognize his greatness: In other words, he’s 20 years old. (...) Kristian remains a prodigious jerk. (...) If Knausgaard is trying to show us what happens when an artist wants it all and actually gets it, he didn’t need Marlowe’s literary-moral framing to do it. Unlike Faustus with Mephistopheles, Kristian never knows who and what Hans really is, or actually agrees to a bargain with him. (...) Can you make a deal with the Devil if you don’t know you’re making a deal with the Devil ? Knausgaard’s character takes hundreds of pages to deliver a dark yet inconclusive answer" - Randy Boyagoda, The New York Times Book Review

"Some of Kristian's ponderous expounding is debatable (.....) And some of his ideas about photography are too mundane to have attracted critical acclaim. Nevertheless, I put down this book only to eat and sleep. Knausgaard has produced another addictive psychological thriller -- by turns exciting, entertaining and tragic." - Leyla Sanai, The Spectator

"The School of Night turns out to be something exciting: an inspired fusion of brooding Scandi-lit and Elizabethan drama. (...) Knausgaard has alighted on the ideal source material. His baggy, genre-defying writing gains the original play’s plunging momentum and its crucial hinge points -- moments where Kristian might have turned back but instead falls deeper into the abyss. It also offers a crucial reassurance sometimes missing from the author’s shaggy-dog sagas that despite the novel’s indulgent tangents into 19th-century photography and Eighties music, your attention will be rewarded. Hell will be discovered. (...) The School of Night is still long, weird and frequently repulsive, but if you found his other books too formless, this could be the one that convinces you. Ostensibly set in the Morning Star universe, it is self-contained with a cumulative power and a strong, dramatic core. It’s a damned masterpiece." - James Riding, Sunday Times

"In many ways, The School of Night is business as usual for Knausgaard. Deftly translated by Martin Aitken, Kristian’s first-person narrative takes the form of an up-close-and-personal, warts-and-all account. As ever, Knausgaard refuses to telescope scenes or crop extraneous detail; he would rather convey his protagonist’s every word, deed, mood and impulse. (...) When Knausgaard’s characters don’t so much speak as speechify, or indulge in navel-gazing over soul-searching, The School of Night can grate. I found chunks of it overly familiar (.....) Nonetheless, Knausgaard still imbues these new proceedings with originality and intensity. There are several bravura set-pieces in which we see Kristian for who he really is" - Malcolm Forbes, The Telegraph

"Part of what makes the novel riveting, even in its more eventless phases, is Knausgaard's ability to inhabit the mind of such a person. The emergence of Kristian's faintly sociopathic nature is mirrored in his burgeoning artistic vision. (...) In Martin Aitken's translation, the prose is fluent and nimble, the imagery possessed of a steely melancholia. (...) In the novel's final third, the setting shifts to the early twenty-first century and Kristian's life as a renowned photographer in his forties. It is a necessary move, guiding us towards the devastating downfall that the opening presaged, but jolts us discomfitingly away from the simmering unease of the 1980s sections. (...) That older tale, however, is the novel's essence -- a realist affair laced with the faintest suggestions of myth, the occult and the perverse operations of fate." - James Cahill, Times Literary Supplement

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.

- Return to top of the page -

The complete review's Review:

       The School of Night, the fourth in Karl Ove Knausgaard's The Morning Star-series, is narrated by Kristian Hadeland and begins with him reflecting on death. The novel opens: "There is no reason to be afraid of death" and presumably Kristian wants to remind and convince himself of that, because he has also decided that: "I am going to 'take' my own life". But first he wants to write about what happened to him, and so The School of Night is presented as memoir cum confession, and (very extended) would-be suicide-note.
       He begins his account with the events of 1985-6, when, age twenty, he came to live and study in London. As the defining events in his life, they also dominate the novel. An aspiring photographer, Kristian had been offered a place at a renowned art school -- a far cry from small-town Norway where he had been born and raised. Very early on he describes returning home for Christmas, when he's briefly off from school, but he can barely stand the domestic scene, bridling at basically everything. When he overhears his father accurately describe him as: "a narcissist, through and through" he's had enough (despite there being a family crisis that he could be showing a little more concern for ...); he up and leaves, heading back to London early, a break with the family that he petulantly turns into a basically complete one.
       Dad is right with his diagnosis:

He shows all the signs. Excessive need for attention and admiration. Grandiose sense of self. Arrogance, and a sense of entitlement. Manipulative and exploitative behaviour. Lack of empathy. It all adds up.

It does -- and also makes for a narrator so full of himself, and who acts (out) so pathetically that he can be rather hard to take. And yet .....
Older sister Liv -- though she has issues of her own -- also has him pegged, when she looks at some of his photographs:

     'Do you know what your problem is ?' she said, and lit another cigarette. 'You're always tying to be bigger than you are. It's fatiguing. You'd feel a lot better about yourself if you stopped doing that.'
     'I feel fine about myself.'
     'Your photographs are ordinary. You try and make out they're art. What if you end up living your whole life like that ? Pretending you're someone you're not, and never will be. That's going to be pretty strenuous.'

       Kristian is convinced of his own genius, and that he is destined for greatness. But his work is lacking -- and while he can run away when he gets criticized at school (running completely away, rather than facing criticism, or people, or difficulties is Kristian's default reaction throughout the novel) even he understands, at least early on, that he is falling a bit short of his grand ambitions. In a rare moment of almost-humility he goes so far as to admit: "I was never short of ideas. The problem was the results, the pictures themselves, were always so less than I'd imagined".
       Kristian mentions London and the art school straight off but begins his account with another detail: "The first time I came across the name Christopher Marlowe was in August 1985" and so presumably -- or even obviously -- this detail is particularly significant. (There's also, of course, the novel's title, as, as someone explains to Kristian: "The School of Night was a group of prominent figures in Elizabethan England who were, well, bolshie, I suppose you could call them"; Marlowe was a member.) Kristian does take some stabs at self-improvement, trying to read all of Shakespeare, chronologically, for example, but that's slow going and so it's not Shakespeare that seduces him (at least not at that point, though he eventually does make it to Hamlet and takes some ... lessons from that). But Marlowe keeps cropping up ..... One reason is that one of the acquaintances Kristian makes, outside of school, is Dutchman Hans, who is a great Marlowe enthusiast, arguing: "He was the greatest English dramatist. Completely renewed the genre. Possibly the greatest talent ever". Hans notes that Marlowe died very young -- and that: "there are those who believe that Marlowe didn't die then. At the time, he was in a bit of a tight spot, you see. It's possible he staged his own death [...] the suggestion is that he fled to Scotland [...] and lived there under a different identity".
       There are several parallels between Marlowe and Kristian -- not least then Kristian emerging from a tight spot of his own under a new name, deciding that: "Kristian Pedersen was me. Kristian Pedersen was my name. And I would make it famous" (yeah, always that desperate need to become someone ...). And, if not quite as early in his life as was the case with Marlowe, Kristian too eventually steps away from his life and career -- at least publicly -- and basically disappears (his early break from his family an early dry run that simply wasn't quite as clear-cut as the later one is). When someone then thinks they recognize him as the famous photographer Kristian deflects -- and says: "As far as I know, Kristian Pedersen's dead". And then there's the fact that, while this whole account is being written, in a most secluded locale, as a suicide-note that one would presume would lead to Kristian ending his life, well ... maybe not.
       Through Hans, Kristian is introduced to Vivian, a budding theater-director now working on a production of Marlowe's Doctor Faustus. She seems attracted to Kristian -- and also offers him a gig taking photographs for the production; typically, Kristian can't quite deliver. But the Faust-story, and the Faustian bargain with Mephistophilis, are, of course, significant here; indeed, The School of Night is a variation on it: when Kristian finds himself in deep trouble -- arrested and likely to go down for a crime he did commit -- he turns to Hans, and Hans really comes through. (Typically, too, Kristian does not investigate what that all involved; he'd rather not know ....) Helpful Hans does then remind Kristian: "You owe me a favour".
       Faust-like, Kristian -- now as Kristian Pedersen -- does then soon and completely get what he's always wanted, triumphing as a photographer. Most of the rest of the novel is then set more than two decades later, when he is on top of the photography world, complete with career-retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. By that time he is also happily married (though he still takes a woman to his hotel room when he is in New York for the MoMA show ...), and with a six-year-old-son, Leo, whom he dotes upon. (The younger Kristian's interactions with women -- one can't call them relationships -- were all pretty cringe-worthy; while apparently appealing to some of them he did not have a great way with the ladies .....)
       Even as a twenty-year-old, Kristian wasn't lacking in self-confidence:

I was talented. My work was up to scratch -- and far better. I did have a future in photography.
Or maybe even the future of photography was me ?

As unlikely as it seems to the reader -- well, Knausgaard has him become one of the greats, as: "Provocateur, innovator, portraitist of death". Whatever deal with the devil he might have made, it doesn't seem to involve his soul, since he's so shallow and such a shit to other people that there's really not much to work with there; the one seemingly close connection that is eventually shown is with son Leo and even there ... well, you'd figure Dad would keep a better eye on the kid ..... But by that point Kristian has got his comeuppance: unnecessarily, in a very public interview, he brings up the event that Hans had rescued him from more than two decades earlier, and that does not go over well. Obtuse Kristian feels misunderstood and doesn't understand the reaction but, yeah, things do not go well; Kristian gets his, and more (and, of course, then runs away).
In a rare semi-self-aware moment, Kristian does wonder:

Was I so easy to manipulate ? Was I not my own person ? Was I really so dependent on the appraisal of others ? It wasn't meant to be like that, and I wasn't going to allow it to be either. I had to forge my own path, do what I needed to do, and stick to my guns no matter what the circumstances.

       For a long time, he does seem to allow it to be like that; the only path he seems able to forge on his own is one of abandonment. As to what his 'guns' might be, that's also never clear; he has artistic vision of sorts -- notably around a fascination with death, which is the sort of thing that can catch up with you ... -- and a mild curiosity, turning to books for information (there's that stab at Shakespeare; a biography of Marlowe) and he is generally something of a reader but certainly at that earlier stage in life mostly he comes across as fairly vacuous. (He continues to be a reader, to some -- if not necessarily readily apparent -- effect, claiming, in the end-stages: "I could not have thought so clearly without having read. It was what the best literature offered: from books I drew thoughts which otherwise would have been unavailable to me; from me they drew thoughts which otherwise would have been unavailable to them" (yeah, he really likes to think of himself as being in the middle of things ...). Yet he also admits his engagement with books: "led to nothing -- nothing came of my reading, apart that is from these thoughts, and what use did I have of them ?")
       A quote by a (fictional) Austrian poet, a Georg Trakl-like figure called Paul Becker that Vivian likes, and that is written on the back of a Daguerre print that is given to Kristian also haunts him, the whole message on the back of the photo reading: "He who is dead is dead and cannot be saved / Choose life, Kristian, and you shall do well". As a friend of Hans' suggests, this Becker: "wrote something about choosing death in life, which is of course is what Faustus does. According to Vivian, at least". So is this 'death in life' what Kristian chose ? Certainly, all he seems to have gotten out of life is the fame and recognition he lusted for -- with a good dash of notoriety then, just as his career hits its high and then collapses. If his work truly showed genius, one would imagine it standing beyond anything else, but Knausgaard focuses on the personal trajectory -- for better and worse (better, because Knausgaard's strength is definitely in the up-close-and-dirty personal, not hifalutin ideas and concepts, which he is certainly interested in but struggles to achieve much depth with).
       After his sudden fall, Kristian loses the urge to work -- "The joy of artistic creativity vanished from me completely, and in such circumstances it was meaningless to even try". Like when he was young, he still has ideas -- but nothing comes of them. Suggesting, surely, that all that really mattered was the fame and adulation, not the art; being seen as a genius, rather than actually being one.
       It gets worse for Kristian, a tragic turn -- and this too, entirely focused on the personal, Knausgaard does very well. Indeed, as throughout, The School of Night is compelling because of the very rawness -- and detail -- of Kristian's account, a typical Knausgaardian narrator, delving deep and throwing it all out there -- even one as shallow as Kristian, who is practically incapable of true introspection.
       Still, there are also some moments of some self-awareness, and by the end Knausgaard does suggest some of what is driving Kristian (specifically: away from everyone), as Kristian muses:

I was by no means unaware of the possibility that the problem that characterised both Hamlet and Faustus -- their lack of connection with anything or anyone in their respective environments -- was mine too, albeit to a lesser degree.

We've seen that Kristian is no romantic, but it goes much further than that, as he argues:

     Love is the facade before which we halt, never to dare or even wish to investigate what might be going on inside the building.
     Was it possible to love another supremely ?
     No, was the answer Shakespeare gave in Hamlet. The supreme human loves not.

He says 'supreme'; you may say 'hollow'. But, hey, it's a philosophy, and along with his craving for fame and recognition, a way to lead a life. Still, we know from the opening section that Kristian is not happy about how things have turned out, moaning:

If I could articulate what I'm feeling as I sit here, the despair that night and day rips and tears at me, the bottomless darkness, you would understand. But I can't, for in language there is hope, in language there is light. The night is without language. And language is always directed towards another. To convey loneliness by means of language is therefore impossible. Where there is loneliness, language is not; where there is language, loneliness is not.

       Obviously, with five hundred pages to go at that point, he's still holding out some hope (and, in addressing a 'you' reaching out towards another ....). Still, soon enough and through to the ... conclusion (which doesn't quite have the finality of an end), it's hard not to see pretty much all of this a s amess of his own making (and his odd and in many ways immature character).
       The Marlowe-play -- and Marlowe in general -- are nicely used in the novel, and there other inspired touches as well, none more so than the Boulevard due Temple-daguerreotype, the only two figures visible showing a man having his shoes shined, even as a world rushed by on the busy street (as, because of the long exposure time needed, nothing that was moving was captured in the image).
       There are few obvious connections to the rest of The Morning Star-series, but with The School of Night that is also developing into a more intriguing large-scale project. (It'll be interesting to see how far Knausgaard takes it.) The School of Night stands well enough on its own, too, and is an interesting piece of work -- successful despite (or in some strange way: because of ?) its ridiculous protagonist and his so often obnoxious behavior and many petty, foolish actions (as well at least two huge, huge (indeed, fatal) mistakes which he presumably chooses to see as accidents but both of which he is entirely responsible for).

- M.A.Orthofer, 8 February 2026

- Return to top of the page -

Links:

The School of Night:

Penguin Press publicity page
Harvill publicity page
Forlaget Oktober publicity page
Luchterhand publicity page
Q & A at Interview
Profile at the Literary Hub

Reviews:

Other books by Karl Ove Knausgaard under review:

The Morning Star-series:
1. The Morning Star
2. The Wolves of Eternity
3. The Third Realm
4. The School of Night
My Struggle: Book One (UK title: A Death in the Family)
My Struggle: Book Two (UK title: A Man in Love)
My Struggle: Book Six (UK title: The End)
[A Time to Every Purpose Under Heaven (US title: A Time for Everything)]

Other books of interest under review:

See Index of Scandinavian literature
See Index of Series and Sequels under review

- Return to top of the page -

About the Author:

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

- Return to top of the page -