The Third Realm
These page counts are reminiscent of fantasy or science fiction novels, which also operate at an epic scale and seek to re-create within themselves a cosmic totality ... One feels the potential limitations of the project Knausgaard has set for himself ... The strangest of the novels in the series so far, and there are genuinely scary moments in the book that I will not spoil ... One of the most genuinely suspenseful, alluring books I’ve ever read. Novel by novel, Knausgaard is replenishing some feral charge to the world. This book made me afraid of the dark again.
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The people in The Third Realm are as vivid and convincing as Knausgaard’s autobiographical persona ... Knausgaard’s writerly self-discipline is formidable. Most novelists freely pump the gas and the brakes, zipping through the boring bits to get to the good ones, but his pacing is remorselessly steady ... Mixed in with the everyday dross are a few sparkly flecks of strangeness, curious anomalies that might be clues to a larger mystery ... Maddening but enthralling.
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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 ... This time he is more actively exploiting the potential of the roman-fleuve, a form with an ability to complicate and comment on its own procedures, to work toward vast cumulative effects, to absorb and absolve its weaker constituent parts.
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