Alles hat seine Zeit

by Karl Ove Knausgård, Paul Berf (Übersetzer)

Wie sieht es aus, das Göttliche? Hat es die Engel wirklich gegeben? In seinem hymnisch gefeierten Roman stellt Knausgård die großen universalen Fragen und geleitet uns durch die gewaltigen alttestamentarischen Erzählungen: über Kain und Abel, Noah und die Sintflut, über Sodom und Gomorrha, gelangen wir nach einem Zwischenstopp im spätbarocken und schließlich aufgeklärten Europa auf eine Insel vor der norwegischen Küste – bei einem modernen, schuldbeladenen Menschen, der die Einsamkeit sucht und die überwältigende Schönheit des Lebens findet.

Genres: Fiction, Novels, Historical Fiction, Literary Fiction, Literature, Religion, Fantasy

637 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2004

About the author

Nominated to the 2004 Nordic Council’s Literature Prize & awarded the 2004 Norwegian Critics’ Prize.

Karl Ove Knausgård (b. 1968) made his literary debut in 1998 with the widely acclaimed novel Out of the World, which was a great critical and commercial success and won him, as the first debut novel ever, The Norwegian Critics' Prize. He then went on to write six autobiographical novels, titled My Struggle (Min Kamp), which have become a publication phenomenon in his native Norway as well as the world over.

Reviews

[BlackOxford · Rating 5 out of 5]

A God Who Learns

Angels are dangerous creatures according to Thomas Aquinas. There is no mention of them in the creation stories of Genesis, he says, because their existence could become a distraction. The intense brightness of their pure knowledge can blind mortal beings to the divine. Knausgaard is aware of this danger and hints at the risk he's taking at the beginning of A Time for Everything when he says, "...darkness isn't the danger, light is. That is where all the pitfalls are to be found."

Nevertheless, Aquinas says, angels are messengers from the divine and deserve due attention. In particular, their assumption of material form is instructive in itself because it is a demonstration of the possibility of the infusion of the material by the spiritual. For Aquinas this demonstration becomes definitive in the Incarnation of the God-man Christ.

This may all sound biblical. But it's not. It's largely Greek philosophy which begins by positing the immutability, the un-changeability of the divine as one of its primary characteristics. Knausgaard, in the guise of his fictional theologian Bellori, dumps this Greek presumption of divine stability by taking the bible somewhat more literally than even many evangelicals might like. "It is not the divine," Bellori claims in his On The Nature of Angels, "which is immutable and the human which is changeable, he wrote, the opposite is true and is the real theme of the Bible: the alteration of the divine from the creation to the death of Christ."

What Knausgaard is exploring is therefore not the influence of God on man through the heavenly envoys but the opposite. Man's experience is so alien to God that it has to be communicated gradually to him, beginning with the conversion of the angels. These are the pitfalls he means. Angels "regard us with total apathy," he says. They don't have a clue about who and what we really are. They have to learn. And so does God:

"The fact that the Lord's feelings towards mankind alternated between sorrow and despair and a fury so great that it could cause him to destroy whole cities means that the expectations he had of them, which they could never live up to, were inhuman - that is, divine. He never saw man in his own right, never for what he was, only what he ought to be. ...he never understood them. And how could He? God was far too large for man, their lives too small..."

This becomes even clearer in the exegetical discussion about the prophet Ezekiel: "Before Ezekiel, the Lord's applications to mankind had always taken place outside them; the boundary between the Lord and the chosen one was absolute. With Ezekiel this boundary was crossed for the first time." God was learning, and consequently changing, turning more man-like: "Does not Ezekiel describe God as a 'form in human likeness'?"

But man too was developing. He was becoming 'divinised' (an explicit doctrine of the Eastern Church), that is, he too was becoming capable of change. He was fighting his way back past the mighty Cherubim guarding the gates of paradise, and back into the divine presence.

Ultimately this provides a very different view of salvation than Greek philosophy. Becoming divine is indeed a liberation but not into a nirvana of eternal stasis. Rather it is salvation into a world of continuous development: "Nothing is ever finished, everything just goes on and on, there are no boundaries, not even between the living and the dead, even that zone is quivering and unclear."

I admit that the first time I read A Time for Everything I just didn't get it. I therefore apologise, probably to myself, for not allowing myself to be drawn into his alternative theology of change, to be, that is, just a little bit divinised.

[Valeriu Gherghel · Rating 3 out of 5]

Pe la mijlocul secolului al XVI-lea, un băiat de 11 ani din Ardo, un sat din nordul Italiei, rătăcește printr-o pădure pînă se lasă întunericul. Cuprins de teamă, zărește undeva, departe, o lumină. Se îndreaptă spre un rîu și observă două făpturi înveșmîntate în pelerine. Ciudatele făpturi scrutează cu atenție și disperare apa. Una dintre ele ține în mînă o făclie, cealaltă o suliță. Au aripi. Băiatul, Antinous Bellori, înțelege imediat că a întîlnit - prin ce minune? - doi îngeri pescari. În schimb, aspectul lor decrepit îl uimește. Nu așa și-i închipuise pe îngeri: „Chipurile lor sînt albe, asemenea unui craniu, orbitele, adînci, buzele, fără sînge” (p.39).

Din această uimire se va ivi pasiunea lui tenace de a afla ce s-a întîmplat cu specia îngerilor. Bellori va studia la universitatea din Montpellier și va citi principalele opere de angelologie: paginile lui Dionisie Areopagitul, ale lui Thoma de Aquino etc. Îi va audia pe experți. În acest chip, pricepe că specia îngerilor e în declin. Ei nu mai au legături cu văzduhul, sînt prea obosiți ca să ajungă din nou la cer, au rămas închiși în spațiul strîmt al muritorilor. Cerul ți-a închis porțile...

După ani și ani de studiu înverșunat, va publica în 1585 un tratat dubios, cu titlul Despre natura îngerilor. Va fi chestionat de Inchiziție. Lucrarea lui va ajunge în Index librorum prohibitorum, lista cărților interzise. Dar are noroc. Inchizitorii îl iartă. Obsesia însă rămîne. Ea îl va împinge pe Antinous Bellori la o minuțioasă căutare. Va rătăci ani și ani. Dacă îngerii au rămas pe pămînt, unde se ascund? Abia în 1606, va afla. Și tot atunci va presimți, cu mult înaintea lui Nietzsche, că divinitatea - pretins imuabilă - e ceva care se schimbă (ori moare).

Acesta este, ca să zic astfel, firul principal al poveștii. Romanul devine treptat o rescriere capricioasă a unor episoade din Vechiul Testament (Cain și Abel, potopul, Ezechiel, Lot etc.). Narațiunea potopului (într-un peisaj norvegian) mi-a plăcut cel mai mult. Noe este, de fapt, un sadic, care asistă fără a clipi la dispariția omenirii. Pentru muritori, vasul lui e închis. În schimb, Ana, una dintre surorile lui, e un personaj puternic, impresionant. Își acceptă soarta cu seninătate.

Marea problemă a acestui roman fluvial e construcția. Textul e stufos, încîlcit. Firava biografie a savantului Bellori e întreruptă de sute și sute de pagini de speculații angelice, de rescrieri biblice și de o secțiune finală care ne dezvăluie și numele naratorului. Orice lucru își are vremea lui (titlul cărții e un verset din Eclesiast, i-am uitat numărul) e povestea unui anume Henrik Vankel, un personaj foarte deprimat (ca și îngerii lui Antinous Bellori), care citește din cartea lui Northrop Frye, Fearful Symmetry. Vankel a înțeles că îngerii s-au transformat în pescăruși (sic!). Sparge un pahar și cu ciobul rămas își crestează pieptul: „Seara, după ce am citit cîteva ore, mi-am tăiat și fața în același mod” (p.779).

Romanul nu m-a convins, totuși, că prozatorul norvegian e cu adevărat un fenomen literar”, un prozator inegalabil. Dar diluvial și haotic este...
(27.12.22, marți)

[Adam Dalva · Rating 5 out of 5]

Special book - stretches of major boredom when Knausgard dips too deeply into analysis of art, but the thesis of the work is great. Essentially, it is a fictional argument that the depictions of angels in art are based on reality, and therefore a suggestion that god/the divine are mutable: Why did seraphim turn into cherubim? There are 3 special sections that earned it a 5 star rating: A retelling of Cain and Abel that gives East of Eden a run for its money, a 50 page coda, and most of all the story of Noah, who is re-imagined as a moody albino.

[Manny · Rating 4 out of 5]

[Original review, Oct 2016]

Having now read most of Knausgård's novels, I think the thing they most obviously have in common is that you have no idea what they're about until you're close to the end. This one is par for the course, and I enjoyed working it out for myself. So if you're similarly inclined, all I'm going to say is that, at least as far as I was concerned, it's an excellent piece of work and there is a definite point. Read it and then see if you agree with me.

If, on the other hand, you're the kind of person who peeks at the last page to see who dunnit...

It has become a cliché to say that God is dead, and most people don't even stop to think about what that might mean. If you're an atheist, you'll say that He had it coming and good riddance; if you're a believer, you'll most likely echo Monty Python's Black Knight and explain that it's only a flesh wound. This novel has the courage to present the story in a realistic way. The light of the world has been taken from us. We are bereft.

There are, of course, some serious technical problems to solve. If your point of view is the modern one, that is to say atheism, you can't really excite much pathos from the demise of a character who never existed in the first place; if you take the standpoint of conventional religion, you run the risk of sounding delusional. Knausgård has found a brilliant solution. The novel is set in a universe which unapologetically assumes Creationism, but it is such a weird, idiosyncratic version of Creationism that it's impossible to read it as anything but an artist's imaginings.

The structure is complicated and odd, but it all fits together much better than one first thinks. The core of the book is two long episodes - essentially, novels within the novel - which are told straight; the first is the story of Cain and Abel, the second the story of the Flood. The Flood episode, recounted mostly from the point of view of Noah's sister Anna, is extremely powerful, and conveys better than anything I can remember reading the character of the jealous, wrathful God of the Old Testament, Who is loved but above all feared by His people. Wrapped around these narratives, which somehow manage to be both hyperrealistic and dreamlike at the same time, there is a long essay about the (fictitious) early Renaissance scholar Antinous Bellori, an expert on the vanished subject of angelology; and at the end, an unremittingly bleak segment set in modern Norway, which basically reads like a piece that has been lifted from Knausgård's later novel Min kamp.

The theme which holds the book together is the angels. We cannot see God directly, but the angels intercede between Him and us. Since the assumption is that Creationism is literally true, Knausgård is unable to show Western culture's gradual acceptance of the fact that God does not exist. Instead, the story is told inside-out; Bellori's researches lead him to the conclusion that the nature of the angels, and hence of God Himself, is not eternal and unchanging. They, and He, are gradually weakening, becoming increasingly impotent and degenerate as they are bound to the Earth. The book tracks this progress, from the uncompromising Lord who drowns His people for their disobedience and rains fire and brimstone on Sodom, through the brutal and despairing but still noble angels that Bellori witnesses, up to the modern day, where the angels have altogether lost their nature and become nothing more than a particularly vulgar and rapacious species of bird.

It's very well done. I tried to come up with other authors who have made similar attempts, and it's a short list. Doris Lessing's SF take in Shikasta is disappointing; Philip Pulman's YA version in His Dark Materials starts off well but loses its way somewhere in the second volume; James Blish's Black Easter would have been much better if he hadn't insisted on adding a sequel. But it seems to me that there is another author who's investigated this territory and succeeded. Tolkien's Middle Earth is an even more wonderful Creationist universe, and the Elves, the first Children of Ilúvatar, cannot be anything but angels. Like Knausgård's angels, they are able to interbreed with humans; but their contact with the mortal world weakens them, and in the end they depart. Knausgård is known to be a great admirer of Tolkien, and in the final section I thought I heard echoes, not just of Arnold's Dover Beach, but also of Legolas's song:

To the Sea, to the Sea! The white gulls are crying,
The wind is blowing, and the white foam is flying.
West, west away, the round sun is falling.
Grey ship, grey ship, do you hear them calling,
The voices of my people that have gone before me?
I will leave, I will leave the woods that bore me;
For our days are ending and our years failing.
I will pass the wide waters lonely sailing.
Long are the waves on the Last Shore falling,
Sweet are the voices in the Lost Isle calling,
In Eressëa, in Elvenhome that no man can discover,
Where the leaves fall not: land of my people for ever!

____________________________
[Update, Nov 27 2022]

I wonder if the following passage, which I just noticed near the end of Du Côté de chez Swann, was one of the inspirations for this book? In general, Proust is evidently an author who has influenced Knausgård.

Mais quand disparaît une croyance, il lui survit—et de plus en plus vivace pour masquer le manque de la puissance que nous avons perdue de donner de la réalité à des choses nouvelles—un attachement fétichiste aux anciennes qu’elle avait animées, comme si c’était en elles et non en nous que le divin résidait et si notre incrédulité actuelle avait une cause contingente, la mort des Dieux.

(Scott Moncrieff's translation:)

But when a belief vanishes, there survives it—more and more ardently, so as to cloak the absence of the power, now lost to us, of imparting reality to new phenomena—an idolatrous attachment to the old things which our belief in them did once animate, as if it was in that belief and not in ourselves that the divine spark resided, and as if our present incredulity had a contingent cause—the death of the gods.

[Darwin8u · Rating 4 out of 5]

"This is an extraordinary tale, and the angels' role in it is not easy to grasp. Traditionally, angels are the link between the divine and the human, at once messengers and the message itself... The angels are action and meaning in one."
-- A Time for Everything, Karl Ove Knausgård


“Concourse of Angels”, by J. Kirk Richards

It really is impossible for me to say how many different ways I loved this novel. It wasn't perfect, certainly. It was messy, and uneven in parts, but it was also strange, strong, addictive and compelling. It was powerful and gentle. It felt like a strange combination of The Red Tent and Wim Wenders' Wings of Desire with hints of Knausgård's later fictionalized memoirs (My Struggle) thrown into the Coda.

Primarily, this novel is a frame story that allows Knausgård to discuss his fictional 16th-century theologian and philosopher Antinous Bellori, who started writing about angels after an experience in his youth with a couple fallen messengers. The story unfolds as Knausgård discusses Bellori's Opus 'The Nature of Angels'. This giant work contains an exegesis on all the angels of the Bible. For this book, Knausgård focuses on four major episodes in the Bible that each, at some level, involve angels:

1. Cain and Abel
2. Noah
3. Lot and his family
4. Ezekiel
5. Christ

It is relevant to note here that this book is a bit of a head fake. The real thrust of this book isn't just angels. Certainly, it is hard to escape angels in this book, but it is just a reason for Knausgård to get into the weeds and retell these famous Biblical stories/myths using his gift for natural writing and human drama (there is a reason he is often described as the Norwegian Proust, besides his long, long, long books). For Knausgård, Angels represent a standard to measure our distance from God, or said better, to measure our changing distance from God.

For me, the strongest parts of this novel were the stories of Cain and Abel and Noah and his family. Just those two parts were completely worth my entire time spent on this. They were beautifully rendered anti-myths. He took the simple stories as related in the Bible, and backed them out of the packaging of the last couple thousand years, and turns and twists each story (kinda how Mantel does with Oliver Cromwell in Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies. He presents them in a way that was earthy, humanistic, emotionally relevant, and where the miraculous was just as normal as the mundane, earthy, and everyday. Imagine a post Garden of Eden world that feels more like an agrarian, pre-industrial version of Norway/Sweden than the dusty, locust-filled deserts of Judea. With Knausgård, there is magic in the physical and modest. There is myth woven into in the material world of the everyday.

I'm pretty sure this novel is one of those that will either floor you or bore you. It really depends on your background and patience. Having come from a religious tradition (Latter-day Saint) where material angels (Moroni, etc) play a real active part, this book was fascinating. But again, the novel isn't perfect, and I know I've probably still got some proximity buzz and bias going on, but my love for this novel is -- right now -- almost perfect.

[Lee Klein · Rating 5 out of 5]

Knausgaard's second book offers everything I fall for in a novel: authority, execution, audacity, oomph, heft. Other than a 75-page stretch midway where I worried this might have trouble maintaining the standard of excellence it had established, for ~425 nonconsecutive pages I was rapt, riveted, engaged, associating parts (the flood story, in general, is rising drama par excellence -- read 35 pages past bedtime one night to finish the section as the water rose) -- and I even ultimately gave the benefit of the doubt to that long stretch about Noah's sister that at first had comparatively seemed rushed and distracted/off the rails thanks to stuff really about the author's wife. But it recovered in retrospect -- by the end of the section it became clear that her love, her family, particularly the mundane daily tasks (cleaning), all gained significance knowing she and everyone with her would drown unless Noah took her aboard ye olde ark. Retroactive/spective change, with new sections changing perception of what preceded them, is a great strength and major theme of the novel.

Loved following the author's lead through biblical stories repositioned in a mythic Norway straight outta Growth of the Soil. I don't have my copy of it on me (leant it to my mama) but would love to find the Hamsun line the following Knausgaard line reminds me of:

"the seed corn flows over his fingers when he dips his hand into the bag that hangs over his shoulder, with small, even flicks of his wrist it is sprinkled over the land as he walks across it, as if calling something to him all the time, as if this is some mysterious ritual, an exorcism, a prayer for a miracle, and see! a few weeks later it germinates and each cast of the hand can be read and judged."

I'd suggest reading that one by Hamsun and the My Struggle series before taking this one on.

Loved how he complexified the Cain and Abel story.

"The only things that have always been remembered are the story of the first people who were driven out of paradise and into the valley, the story of the two brothers Cain and Abel, and the story of the great flood. But all the details about these people and the world they lived in were gradually erased. And as each new age is convinced that it constitutes what is normal, that it represents the true condition of things, the people of the new age soon began to imagine the people of the previous one as an exact replica of themselves, in exactly the same setting. Thus Cain and Abel became nomadlike figures who lived and operated in a flat, burning hot, sand-filled world, of olive and fig trees, oases, camels, asses, robes, tents, and little whitewashed stone houses. Gone were all the pine trees, all the fjords and mountains, all the snow and rain, all the lynxes and bears, wolves and elk. In addition, all the infinitely delicate nuances in the relationship between the brothers were lost over time, such that only the bare details remained: Abel was good, Cain bad, Abel was a shepherd, Cain a tiller of the soil."

Dramatizing the complexity of black/white archetypes is something really great lit does best -- I don't like to think about lit/art as something that "serves society," that's functional or necessary or useful per se, but Complexity Emphasis is one of the arguments in lit's defense.

A really slant autobiography of sorts that, stylistically at least, ends where My Struggle begins. Daddy issues herein represented via God/angels interactions with us human folk. The autobiographical parallels crop up in Cain or Noah or the narrator at the end. A story from My Struggle: Book Two: A Man in Love appears in fictional form: in My Struggle it's pregnant Linda pissed at Karl Ove for not telling his friend to slow his speedboat down, whereas in this it's Noah's pregnant sister pissed at her husband for not telling a driver of a carriage going over a rocky road to slow down. The narrator (not named Karl Ove in this) cuts himself up again with a glass shard as he does in My Struggle Vol 2.

In a totally bold first-person coda that changes what you think about the preceding 450-something pages, there's a suggestion at the end that the narrator (author of the book you've been reading, not Knausgaard himself) is a prophet who might one day saw off his legs but there's no longer anything to prophesize these days, other than the pleasing benefits of noticing natural daily variation in the landscape (reminded me of the bit in My Struggle Vol 2 about how he only really cares about trees and water and sun).

Really an enjoyable, "rigorous" read, in part because the publisher Archipelago created a beautiful paperback with French flaps and a cover image that synchs with a bit toward the end of the novel.

Loved essayistic bits about how the art historical representation of angels changed over time along with their actual changing state. (Why do immortal angels change? Ahhh. Ya gotta read the book.)

Not touched on in the novel, but it struck me that some of these angels, say the one Ezekiel encountered with wheels, could've been outerspace aliens.

Not psyched that the angels' ultimate evolutionary destination was "spoiled" for me by a review on here -- I wish I could've experienced this clever little perception-shifting turn toward the end with fresh eyes.

Now that I've read 1500 pages of Knausgaard I am officially calling for a translation of his first novel -- seriously, English-language publishers, how is it not available?

Also interested to see how this compares with Thomas Mann's mega novel Joseph and His Brothers, up next for me, which also animates and humanizes a familiar bible story.

Highly recommended for all semi-adventuresome readers fortified with a bit of interest in the early bible stories. Worth it for anyone who appreciates clear, flowing, steady, smart language, and who likes novels that make novels seem like infinitely open art forms.

[Michael Finocchiaro · Rating 4 out of 5]

A Time for Everything is quite an original work. It is an exposé on the 1584 work by Antinous Bellori On The Nature of Angels, a re-interpretation of a few Old Testament stories in which angels played a great part, and in part an introduction to Knausgård's chef-d'oeuvre, Men Kamp.
The book starts talking about theories concerning angels and then launches briefly into the story of Adam and Eve and their expulsion from Eden before a long detour through the story of Cain and Abel which turns into an even longer detour on the story of Noah and the Flood. (If you have read Vol 2: A Man in Love, you'll be used to KOK's favorite narrative technique. These stories are all speculative and interesting, but sometimes there are anachronisms that were hard for me to align with (like these Biblical and thus Stone Age characters dressed like us today and having technology closer to the Middle Ages than to the Iron Age (which itself would be anachronistic). This is sort of explained after the Noah story because the Flood wiped out 1600 years of human (and angel) development causing Noah and his small family to have a redo. The conjectures are interesting such as the Nephilim (referred to very, very briefly in the Bible and expounded upon in the Jewish Apocrypha) being the offspring of angel-human copulation in the period before the flood. However, all that aside, I guess what is most impressive, is how KOK is able to create this entire narrative from a few ambiguous lines in Genesis about when "giants roamed the earth".
The book ends with a strange and seemingly semi-autobiographical section about a Norweigan on an island that does some weird stuff. That piece I had a hard time reconciling with the rest of the book, to be honest. That and the title, to a degree, unless the "obvious" reading is of the three time periods he proposes (before the flood, between the flood and Jesus, after Jesus) for human history. It is also hard to understand how much of the religio-historical conjecture is coming from KOK's narrator or from KOK himself, especially since he has since made his name and fortune with autobiography.
KOK's prose as always is highly descriptive and obsessively detailed:
"The green caterpillar crawling over the stone wall that isn't even aware of your finger, but crawls up it, makes you happy because it reminds you that she exists, just as smoke from a chimney that's whipped by the wind and dissolves into the gray air reminds you that she exists, and the brown water in the ruts of a cart track when the sun shines on it, and the green grass besides it and the squirrel that each day hopes along the same branches of the same trees at the same time of day, too, reminds you she exsists as it runs across the road with its bushy tail in the air, climbs a tree on the other side, and is gone. (p. 81)

Note in the following passage how he uses the sharp light to describe the colors and contours of a kitchen, like in a still life by Cezanne:
"All the lamps in the kitchen were lit. Nothing was concealed in the sharp light over the table. Everything was as it was. The faded rose painting on the drinking bowl, the small depression on its rim from all the lips that had grasped it over the course of time, the cracks in the soup plates, the faint yellow stains in the white tablecloth. The strands of gray soup meat, the smooth sinews, the white fat. The pale orange of the carrots, the pale green of the leeks. The red, shiny rum round Anna's eyes. The teeth that a constantly repeated twitching of the upper lip revealed." (p.236)

The scene on page 275 seems to have provided direct inspiration for the boat ride that KOK takes in Vol 2 of Men Kamp when Javan doesn't insist that David shouldn't drive so fast as it could hurt cause Anna to have a miscarriage.

I liked this paragraph about history:
"The history of natural things is indissolubly linked with the history of mankind. Everything we know is inextricably linked with loss and oblivion. And what knowledge does conquer is so infinitesimally small in comparison with what it jettisons that we might reasonably suspect it of being in retreat: Why else does it always set its abandoned landscapes on fire?" (p. 343)

After the long Noah parenthesis, he expounds once again on Bellori's text on angels and there is an interesting paragraph about their perception of time that I enjoyed:
"..as their presence on earth is generally brief, nothing of what happens here can leave a mark on them but must glide shadowlike past, we might think of it as something like the images of our dreams, frightened up by what is to them an unknown will. In the angel's time - which is our time before we are born and after we die, and therefore impossible, although material, as it means that that precious and inalienable I, to which we cling as fast as the shipwrecked mariner to a piece of flotsam, wouldn't exist all the time that death and the divine exist - everything ephemeral is in constant flux. The dead get mixed up with the living, what happened a century ago with what is happening now." (p. 379)

Following this on page 386 is more interesting and palpable description of angels on earth that was fun to read.

When we get to the end where we have a more autobiographically-inspired first-person passage, the experience of KOK with his dad and the garden can be read about in Men Kamp Vol 3 as well. In this vein, the paragraph on our pasts is interesting:
"But if it's true that events in the past open and close and constantly form new associations with what's happening in the present, where does the notion that the past is fixed and finished come from? Nothing is ever finished, everything just keeps on and on, there are no boundaries, not even between the living and the dead, even that zone is quivering and unclear." (p. 466)

This is typical of KOK's more Proustian moments of exploring associations that his brain makes and continues for a few more pages. His revelation comes a few pages on:
"Perhaps the ridiculousness lay not in the compulsive thoughts, as I'd imagined, but in the resistence to them...It could well be that compulsive thoughts gave expression to my real desires." (p. 473)

This is where the book sort of takes off on a strange tangent and ends rather abruptly. I had a hard time relating this episode in the Coda to the rest of the thematic material in the book.

Regardless, it was an interesting and at times exhilarating read and I recommend it to be read as I did between books 2 and 3 of My Struggle.

Fino's KOK Reviews:
Book 1
Book 2
Book 3
Book 4
Book 5
Book 6
A Time For Everything

[Caterina · Rating 5 out of 5]

A strange, wonderful, provocative book, the most original novel I’ve read, with richly detailed in-the moment narrative interspersed with flights of analysis and rumination, similar to the later My Struggle series. Knausgaard has called this his personal favorite of all he's written, and I can see why. This was his second novel, the first to be translated from Norwegian into English.

Antinous Bellori, an eleven-year-old boy from a mountain village of 16th century Italy, becomes fascinated by an anthill he finds in the woods. He studies it, poking at it with a stick and watching the ants repair the damage, until, driven by an urge that he does not understand, he deliberately destroys it. Seeing what he has done, he is so filled with guilt and shame that he runs away in tears, until darkness falls and he is lost, far from home. Glimpsing a light glowing nearby, he hopes that it is a lantern carried by his father come to rescue him. Instead, the light leads him to two angels who are spear-fishing in the river.

So begins Antinous Bellori’s life work: an aggressive, individualistic pursuit of scholarly knowledge about angels and a relentless pursuit of the angels themselves — divine beings towards whom he harbors a strange mixture of longing and reverence for their imagined purity, and a cold desire to capture and perhaps kill one so that he can dissect it, document it, and cement his scholarly reputation. Bellori’s thesis — that the nature of the divine has changed over time — becomes the frame-within-a frame for a series of imaginative retellings of stories involving angels from the Bible and other ancient scriptures, audacious speculation on theological and existential philosophical themes, and at the same time, an intimate meditation on being human.

The close-to-life narrative plays out the theme of the book's title: there is a time, one moment, for every thing. But I'm not sure that means what it first seems to mean. Instead, it seems to mean something more radical: there is literally only one time, the present moment, which itself is ever-changing -- and changing much more radically than we imagine.

While ostensibly angels are the connective tissue holding the book together, for me all the stories, human and angel, also speak in different ways of The Fall — of becoming mortal, human, inhabiting the brief time given to each of us — with all our failings and humiliations, but also our uniqueness and beauty. This slow and limited life, each in his or her own tiny footprint on earth, has such value that even the eternal angels want to partake in it.

Well, for a while, anyway. After all, it’s still life after the Fall. Some of these stories were so devastating that I had to put the book down for a while before continuing — especially the story of Cain and Abel, and the story of the Flood told from the point of view of Noah’s sister — who does not make it into the Bible — or onto the Ark. In a creative but chilling riff on the biblical underdog-hero pattern, Noah is a sickly boy confined to his room, obsessed with science and philosophy, seemingly least fit to survive on earth. Does his lack of community with other human beings render him more capable of doing what he does? Maybe — yet he spends the rest of his life drunk to avoid thinking about the sister (and all the others) he left behind to drown. What a commentary on “success” in our world. Perhaps the crew of the good ship Stephen Hawking will have a similar experience if and when they leave Mother Earth for dead.

Notably missing from this novel are the biblical stories of the angels that appear at the empty tomb of Jesus in the Gospels of Matthew, Mark, and Luke to announce to the women that Jesus has risen from the dead. Instead, the novel’s imaginative spin on contemporary European theology/philosophy incorporates Christ’s death without any explicit reference to resurrection. (And I'm not really sure whether the intention is to completely omit the resurrection or to imply a very different understanding of the concept.) But the story of the resurrection is so different in nature and significance from the other biblical stories in its centrality to the Christian faith, I’d love to ask Knausgaard whether he struggled over how to handle it, given that this book seems to be about (in part) where he perceives the currents of European history and thought over the past few centuries have led.

The novel ends with a Coda that pulls the camera back to view the outer frame, the fictional contemporary narrator Henrik Vankel who has “rediscovered” and become fascinated by Antinous Bellori. Yet this last chapter visits not Vankel’s adult life as a writer, but the days of his youth. At the age of 18, after having done some terrible unnamed thing, Vankel has exiled himself to a tiny, nearly uninhabited island off the coast of Norway where he supports himself in a minimal way by cleaning the lighthouse, relives memories of his complex relationship with his father, and tries to come to terms with going on with life. Unexpectedly, he finds immersion in the concrete details of the everyday to be an agent of healing. I loved this section. Just as the older Vankel has noted that in each era we completely remake history, changing it to suit our current viewpoint, this final chapter seems to change everything that came before it.

[Matt]

There’s a time for everything and now is the time to abandon this sorry excuse of a book.

It’s not because I don’t like the text. Far from it. I actually quite love it. It’s because this special edition, the Kindle-version of the German translation, published by btb Verlag (which belongs to Random House) is riddled with typos and formatting issues that I just can’t stand it anymore.

Over and over there are two or more words strung together to a single one like this: “imUnterholz” instead of “im Unterholz”, “AugenblickmitBedacht” instead of “Augenblick mit Bedacht”. There’s hyphens where they don’t belong, like “eige-nes” instead of “eigenes”, “betrach-m tete” instead of “betrachtete”. There are sentences that stop in the middle of the screen, leaving the rest of the screen blank and continue on the next screen. There’s mysterious numbers and digits within the text for now apparent reason that don’t make any sense. There’s font changes from small to large and back, sometimes within a single paragraph or even sentence. The dots over the capital German umlauts, especially the Ü, are often missing, turning the word “Über” into “Uber”, “Ärger” into “Arger” and so on. I counted 90+ such issues in the first third of the text alone!

But what really made me drop this book for good is the following sequence (copied from the English translation):

Shem told them now, that was his link with God, but this was too thin to convince Ham and Japheth of course, and even Shem himself wasn’t really convinced, he’d only been seven or eight years old at the time, and could no longer tell if he’d really seen it, or just imagined that he had, either at the time or later. But it wasn’t unthinkable. Hadn’t Ham
They buried him next evening. There was only the four of them. They carried the coffin between them across the field and over to the mound.

If you think that there is something missing here you are quite right. The scene completely changed to another place, another time, and other characters. I checked the English version (which I bought after I found this problem) and realized that the missing text between these two sentences make up 17% of the whole book. In other words: There’s at least 17% missing from the text in the German Kindle-version! Of course this is unacceptable and I’ll file a complaint with the publisher.

In the meantime I warn anyone who consider buying this book as the Kindle-edition. Better stay away from it! You’ll be in for a major disappointment. I don’t know if the paperback contains the same problems, but at least it looks much better in the preview on Amazon.

Because this is no fault of the author, or the translator, but only of the sloppy publisher/editor I don’t give a rating at this point.
______

Update 27/9/2018

I now finished the English version of the book (and even read some passages in German).
See review here.




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[Josh · Rating 5 out of 5]

Wonderful narrative self-assuredness in this book, which, like some sort of gigantic airplane, takes a while to actually get off the ground but is practically unshakable once you're aloft. Knausgard's subtlety surprised me again and again: he keeps his thematic and structural innovations so hidden behind (or integrated into) his story that we barely even notice them. Paraphrased, this sounds annoyingly retrograde, but it's incredibly absorbing. The centerpiece, which centers around Noah and his family in the days leading up to the Flood, is particularly moving.

[Matt · Rating 4 out of 5]

We know nothing. Nor is there anything to know.

Karl Ove Knausgård’s take on the evolution of angels and their sightings throughout history was as compelling as it was confusing at first.

As with his other novels, the Norwegian doesn’t narrate a story from beginning to end. Instead, a fictional Renaissance scholar named Antinous Bellori is introduced, who, after observing two angels in the flesh as a child, spent many years in writing a book that contains an comprehensive history of angels (On the Nature of Angels). One aim of this book is to demonstrate that angels are still (from a sixteenth century perspective) among us, but that they have changed in appearance as well as manner. Like God, they are subject to some form of evolution. Parts from Bellori’s work and discussion about it are interspersed with well known episodes from the Bible in which angels play a more or less essential role.

Most notably are the stories of Cain and Abel and that of Noah and his family facing the Great Flood. Together those two pieces, which are interpreted very freely from the Bible and with some surprising twists, make up more than half of the whole novel. I admit I was particularly taken with the Noah story, a family saga that spans four generations (parents to grandnephew). It almost brought me to tears at one point. Here’s proof that Knausgård can indeed be a captivating narrator — if he wants to. Someone should make a film out of this “novel within novel”. Interestingly enough the author has relocated the people around Cain, Able, and Noah to a place with mountains, forests, and fjords that resembles his own Norway and which looks nothing like the one you might expect from reading the Bible.

I started reading this book with the German Kindle version (translated by Paul Berf like almost all of Knausgård’s works, whom I have come to know as an excellent translator). It turned out that this specific edition has quite a large number of typos and formatting issues (see my review here), so I gave up on it and switched over to the English edition right in the middle of the Noah novella (a large part of which is actually missing from the German Kindle edition). This was my first time reading Knausgård in English. From the second half of the book I switched back and forth between German and English to see how they compare: I find the narrative passages are better in English. They seem somehow more sympathetic, more human, closer to the people. The German text is distant, colder in a certain way and it doesn’t suit the fantastic Noah story in my opinion. There are also some essayistic insertions, which are typical for Knausgård, and with these the German text seems more suitable to me. The differences in both cases are subtle, but perceivable, even for an ESL like me.

The novel ends with a 50 page “Coda”. There’s almost nothing about angels anymore. Instead we are in the present Norway and watch the first-person narrator as a child who goes crab fishing with his father and brother and later, as a young adult, is spending time on an island doing bascially nothing. The concluding part is quite typical for the Norwegian and strongly reminds me of his Min Kamp series, whereby the island episode is also mentioned in Winter .

This is a book which might not be very pleasing for atheists as it somewhat denies theirs “beliefs”, but which also religious people might consider offensive in parts. So it’s an ideal read for agnostics like myself.


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[Ken · Rating 4 out of 5]

As a fan of KOK's My Struggle series, I was a natural for this resuscitated effort from his early career. True to form, it stretches out to 500 pages, or about the length of Norway, north to south.

Labeled a novel, it's really almost a collection of novellas under a poorly-framed conceit. Meaning? It's a sweet mess, but the sweet flavors the mess enough for 4 stars.

See, it starts off in the 1600s with this youngster who stumbles upon two angels while traipsing through the woods. That, plus the Boticelli close-up of angels on the cover, tells you this is going to be a book about Angel Chasers.

Not quite. After that brief episode, KOK moves into Biblical mode. Novella #1 is about Cain and Abel, as reimagined by a Norwegian with a rather Scandinavian setting. I liked it because the two bros were interesting and your sympathies went out to the bad boy loser, Cain (similar to Tim Rice's Jesus Christ Superstar, where your emotions are directed to another bad boy loser, Judas).

From here we move to a Scandinavian (complete with fjords!)-based rendition of Noah and his ark. In truth, the focus is more on his sister, Anna, and the tough life in her family and her rural community to the point where you feel like you're reading an undiscovered Knut Hamsun (a treat!). Using the Anna POV allows KOK to score some points against OTG (read: Old Testament God) and even Noah who should have Noah-ed better in a critical scene during the flood.

Those were the lion's share of the book, but there's extended narrative about Ezekiel (yawn) and even Jesus (passingly) before KOK realizes he was supposed to be writing about angels and comes back to our 1600s hero and his angelic quest. Trust me, these are not your father's Oldsmobiles angels, either. Very disappointing, to the point where, ridiculously enough, we wind up in Alfred Hitchcock's Birds mode (angels evolve, don't ya know).

Interestingly, the book has a long "Coda" that looks like a warm-up for the My Struggle books. Our young hero (all new and out of the blue) is a young Karl Ove look-alike with a brother (like Karl) and a mean father (like Karl) and a certain talent for details (like Karl).

That this coda has nothing--and I mean nothing--to do with angels is cool because, well, you've given up on that by now and, quite frankly, the "My Struggle" warm-up is more interesting than the fully-devolved Raphael and Michael and Gabriel and cherubim and what-not, anyway.

See what I mean? Sweet. Messy. And don't worry about your guardian angel. By now he's seen everything.

[Karmologyclinic · Rating 5 out of 5]

Χρόνος είναι εις πάντα, και καιρός παντί πράγματι υπό τον ουρανόν.

It's been 20 days since I finished this book. And I've been thinking of it every single day. In a few occasions, it kept me awake at night, thinking. I can't pinpoint exactly why (my psychoanalyst would stare at me with a raised eyebrow here), but this book has affected me emotionally and intellectually. It has even got me to read the Bible piece from which the title is generated and that's something, as I've never touched the Bible before. And I've read this Bible piece 5 times now and, in case you don't know, I have not a spiritual cell in my body, but that Ecclesiastes 3 piece has a lot of meaning packed inside, meaning for the mortal, not the divine. And roughly, you can see that the whole Ecclesiastes 3 is an outline for Knausgård's novel.

It refers to being human and being human has to do with time and time inevitable has to do with death. And in this journey there is a time for everything. From Cain (a time to kill) to Noah (a time to gather), to Noah's sister (a time to weep) etc.

Knausgård has a unique story-telling ability. He can drag you inside his stories, he takes the Bible stories and re-imagines them, with a sincerity and literalism that theologians and believers won't. And it is this same sincerity (that I felt manifested in My Struggle) that makes it all worth it. You don't often see sincerity, be it in everyday life or literature. I mean gut-related sincerity, confessing your inner self, something unadorned and kept intact by a powerful superego. Most people would not destroy this facade (and that's a healthy thing to do), some will, Klaus Ove does it again and again in his books, he does it wilfully.

The story is set on layers. There is the layer of the Bible stories, as reimagined by the fictitious Bellori, then there is the story of Bellori, as told by the so-called researcher of Bellori, Vankel, and then there is the author's alter ego, Vankel himself, at the Coda of this book. The stories also go from the external to the internal. You go from sympathizing with ostracized albino Noah's feelings to a painful Vankel first person breakdown. The Coda part of the story, the contemporary story of the alter ego Vankel, was heart wrenching to me. A man self exiled in an island after a breakdown. Maybe my mindset is more close to Knausgård than I'd like to admit (not a good thing). It also steeps in its blood, retroactively, what was narrated before it. Remember? Layers. The outer layer will stain the inner layers.

The external part of the story is the history (and part treatise) of the divine in western philosophy. Leave it to Knausgård to make that emotional af. The internal part of the story is the existential anguish that the death of the divine has brought on Bellori/Vankel/humanity. And the personalized part of the story is devastating, a man really breaking down in front of you. I find this shocking and kind of pornographic, I think it's intended to be this way.

Knausgård finds ways to tell a story that were never used before. Brilliant and honest. Confusing and straight forward.

A book that inhibits a readers's mind for this long, deserves a raise from 4 (my initial rating) to 5 stars (what was I thinking...). You don't get many books in a year that can do that. For 2017 I can count 2 so far (besides A Time for Everything):
Human Acts and The Association of Small Bombs

Fun fact: I really went blank and without knowing anything beforehand into this book and for a big part of it, I thought that Bellori was not fictional but a fictionalized character that historically existed. That was fun.

[Nita · Rating 5 out of 5]

Epic. Soaring. Ambitious. Canonical. Triumphant. This novel has reset the bar for what constitutes literature for me. Incredible narration of a fascinating story about the oldest book in the Western world deftly and confidently told with profound insight and every now and again a tiny flip-flap wing of humor. Addicts of the author's My Struggle series will enjoy the touches of overlap as well as the knowledge that book two is what was happening in the author's personal life as he wrote this novel.

Deeply, satisfyingly good. And you needn't know a lick of Bible to follow along.

It is humbling to read such terrifyingly good writing.

---
Update 4/28/15
Related:
http://www.theatlantic.com/entertainm...

[Ernst · Rating 4 out of 5]

Echt jetzt? Ein hymnisch gefeierter Roman? Also das muss ich zumindest damals komplett verpennt haben oder die Hymnen waren alle auf Norwegisch.
Wie auch immer, heute mehr als 20 Jahre nach dem ersten Erscheinen lese ich da ganz was anderes und das geht in etwa so:

Es war nie leicht für die meisten Männer, sich von ihren Frauen versorgen zu lassen, als Hausmann zu arbeiten, ohne konkrete Perspektive selbst einmal zum Haushaltsbudget beitragen zu können. Die Frau ist nicht so wahnsinnig glücklich, aber fügt sich und gibt vor, an ihren Mann und seine Träume zu glauben. Schließlich wünscht sie sich einen selbstbewussten Mann und kein von Selbstzweifeln zerfressenes Wrack. Er ist Schriftsteller oder möchte es sein. In dieser heiklen Situation, er ist bereits Anfang 30, versucht er mit wachsender Verzweiflung ein Thema zu finden, auf das er sich selbst einlassen möchte, das sich aber auch verkaufen lässt. Lange Zeit ist seine Suche erfolglos, der Druck in der Ehe wächst, unausgesprochen zunächst und schließlich immer offener. Er müsse der Realität ins Auge blicken, ein Brotjob steht als Vernichtungsschlag am Horizont. Aber noch ist er nicht bereit aufzugeben, sucht Zuflucht in der Literatur, zunächst in der Glück- und Erfolgversprechenden Esoterik, am Ende aber landet er bei der Bibel, öffnet sich für Gott und einen Hinweis, was er machen soll. Und siehe da, Gott muss sich gar nicht mehr zu Wort melden. Die Bibel selbst ist die Antwort. Und dann ist es nur noch ein kleiner Schritt, denn was ihn immer wieder bereits in der Esoterik fasziniert, sind die vielen Bücher über Engel und nun findet er sie gemeinsam mit anderen himmlischen Geschöpfen auch in der Bibel wieder. Bald entsteht ein Romankonzept in seinem Kopf. Er muss seine Erkenntnisse in einen Roman einbetten, denn er will ja kein Sachbuch schreiben, also erfindet er einen mittelalterlichen Engelsforscher, der die Erkenntnisse des Autors als die eigenen ausgibt. Der Autor stattet ihn auch mit weiteren Eigenschaften seiner eigenen Persönlichkeit aus. Die Verbissenheit mit der er sein Projekt verfolgt, er setzt dabei alles aufs Spiel, die Ehe wird später in die Brüche gehen, aber die Zerrüttung ist bereits in vollem Gange. Die fast wahnhafte Sturheit mit der an dem Engelsprojekt über die Jahre arbeitet, stößt immer mehr Menschen in seinem Umfeld ab. Ein Buch über Engel? sagen sie und wenden sich innerlich ab, die freundlichsten Reaktionen sind eine Art verunsichertes Belächeln, er muss das ironisch meinen.

Er selbst ahnt, dass er keinen Erfolg damit haben wird. Aber er verbeißt sich weiter wütend und außer sich wie eine Bulldogge im Teddybären.

Er entwickelt die Geschichte beginnend mit Kain und Abel, als die Engel noch als stolze Cherubim ein Leuchtfeuer hoch oben am Berg bildeten, über Noah, denn Gott war dem Treiben der Menschen und Engel auf Erden überdrüssig (sie schwängerten Menschenfrauen, die daraufhin die riesenhaften Zwitterwesen Nephilim gebaren), bis zu dem fiktiven Engelsforscher, Antinous Bellori, der im späten 16. Jahrhundert Engel mit eigenen Augen sieht und beseelt von dem Drang, sie wiederzusehen, jahrelang auf der Suche ist wie die Suche nach dem heiligen Gral. Und tatsächlich wird er fündig. Bellori findet heraus, dass die Engel in der Epoche des dritten Reichs (die seit Jesu Tod andauert), durchwegs gefallene Engel sind, die nicht mehr in den Himmel zurückkehren können, weil Gott, der in Jesus eingeflossen ist, mit dessen Tod auch gestorben ist. Es gibt massenhaft Engelssichtungen, aber sie werden von Hunger gequält, sie nehmen kleinere Gestalt an (Putten), machen sich aufgrund ihrer Unersättlichkeit unbeliebt und werden überall verscheucht, bis sie ihre Gestalt weiter ändern und zu einer neuen Möwenart werden, nämlich jener, die sich dem Menschen ungeniert nähert und ihn umkreist um sich die Essensabfälle zu sichern.

Und nach mehr als 2 Jahren Arbeit erscheint endlich das Werk, er bekommt Anerkennung, aber die Verkaufszahlen bleiben sehr überschaubar. Man gratuliert ihm zu dem Achtungserfolg, aber die meisten belächeln ihn weiterhin. Dennoch fühlt er sich bestärkt, denn er hat gelernt, ja ich kann schreiben, auch das ganz breite epische Format und er beginnt mit einem autobiografischen Konzept, das am Ende 2-3 tausend Seiten umfassen wird. Und nun hat er den gewünschten Erfolg, wenn auch an unerwarteter Stelle.

Das Engelsthema lässt ihn trotzdem nicht los, er ist besessen davon, es in einem neuerlichen Anlauf zu dem Erfolg zu führen, den es seiner Meinung nach haben muss. Ich zeige es euch Lächlern allen noch. Jawohl! Aber es muss über die Vergangenheit hinaus gehen, die Menschen wollen wissen was kommen wird, ja und wenn schon, dann noch einen Schritt weiter, stell dir vor, wenn der Tod überwunden wird.
Wir sehen was wir wissen sagte sein Engelsforscher, und wenn wir wissen dass es Engel gibt, dann sehen wir sie auch, wenn wir wissen dass es sie nicht gibt, sehen wir sie nicht.
Aber nun gibt es einen weiteren Stern am Himmel.

Ähm, ich war eigentlich bei 3 Sternen, aber ich hab einen vierten rausgepresst, Knausgardbonus.

[Paul Fulcher · Rating 3 out of 5]

A very ambitious novel - not all the parts are completely successful nor is it entirely coherent as a whole, but a stimulating attempt to do something very different to the usual novel.

The key framing device is a treatise on angels written by a (fictional) 16th Century Italian, Antonius Bellori. Aged 11 he encounters two of them, and what he experiences is so different from what he would have expected, that he dedicates the rest of the life to studying angels.

His treatise involves a fundamental re-think of angels, based on a detailed re-examination of the references in conventional and apocryphal scriptures, as well as their post-scriptural
manifestations as documented in literature, history and art.

Bellori's key assertion is that the divine is not immutable and angels have changed both their physical nature and their interaction with humans significantly over time, as indeed has God. Once that is accepted, as well as treating Old Testament stories as representing physical reality and valid in it's own right, rather than merely foreshadowing Christ, then a complete re-imagining follows.

However, what are reading is not Bellori's work, but rather a commentary on it, and on his life, from the narrator.

And during this commentary, we also get a detailed expansion of some key biblical stories where angels play a role - in particular, the story of Cain and Abel, the Flood and the tale of Lot and the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah.

The first two in particular are actually more like novellas embedded within the main book - running to 100 and 200 pages respectively - and the role of the angels is relatively limited.

The book's Cain and Abel, other than sharing a name - and an ultimate fate - seem to have little overlap with the biblical characters and the story seems set in a world more like the American wild-west than pre-historical times, with a world of bridges, furnished houses, even guns in Noah's time.

As I was reading this section, these anachronisms rather grated - they seemed either clumsy or worse a rather simple attempt at post-modernism. However Knausgaard/the narrator does later neatly justify them, by reference to the Flood which destroyed and reshaped the world completely, and was designed to wipe out the traces of angels' influence on human life (based on the Genesis 6 verses that tell of angels inter-breeding with humans):

"Apart from their carnal lust, these angels also brought their knowledge to mankind, knowledge about everything from medicine, mining and weaponry to astronomy, astrology and alchemy, according to the Book of Enoch. Furthermore, it is quite obvious that the angels' activities were the direct cause of the great flood".

But why does no trace of this more advanced pre-diluvian society remain in the written record? According to the book:

"As each new age is convinced that it constitutes what is normal....the people of the new age soon began to imagine the people of the previous one as an exact replica of themselves, in exactly the same setting. Thus Cain and Abel became nomad-like figures who lived and operated in a flat, burning-hot, sand-filled world of olive and fig trees, oases, camels..."

On to New Testament times, and Bellori imputes massive significance into the absence of angels between their appearance at Jesus's birth announcement and his resurrection - his conclusion is that it "could be that they were shaken to their core....now [God] had flaunted the greatest prohibition of them all" - the incarnation was God doing what angels had been condemned for thousand of years earlier and which had caused the Flood.

Bellori makes an even more radical conclusion at the end of his life - and one which is evidenced only by a 14th Century frescoes rather than a contemporary source - that God himself died permanently on the cross, and angels are now trapped on earth.

And this highlights one oddity of the book. Many of the theories expounded by Bellori / the narrator are carefully researched and plausibly evidenced, ultimately by Knausgaard as the author of the book we're reading, but others (such as in the paragraph above) rely on some rather heroic leaps of logic or highly selective readings of the evidence. Knausgaard seems to rely on the device of his fictional narrator reporting that "according to Bellini" to doubly distance himself from the weaknesses of his own arguments.

A rather rapid section then explains the story of angels after Bellori's death and has them becoming first the baby-like cherubs of 17th Century art and then, ultimately, a new species of seagulls in Sweden! That's not quite as far-fetched as it sounds given the logic of Bellori's theories, but seems designed mainly to provide a bridge to the final section.

The book makes a very sudden shift in the last 50 pages, when the book's narrator who, for the first 470 pages has been anonymous and in the background, suddenly takes centre stage and narrates his own story in coastal Sweden, the only explicit link to the rest of the book being the frequent appearance of seagulls (and the narrator's father brief explanation to him of their origin as angels).

This last part provides an intriguing link, both thematically and stylistically, to Knausgaard's more recent fictional-autobiographical "My Struggle" series of books, in particular the first "Death in the Family" based around his father's death.

My Struggle is known for the hyper-detailed descriptions of real-life, the un-adorned text written very quickly and without revision, and the unflinchingly, perhaps overly, honest character portraits of Knausgaard and his family and friends. There is a massive contrast to the first 470 pages of "A Time..." with his heavily researched, highly imaginative and poetic story.

In the last section, the narrator, now named, is clearly not Knausgaard but the themes are similar. Reference is made to his father's violent and possibly self-inflicted death and to a shameful action of the narrator, but no details are given of either, together with a painful self-harming episode. And the prose becomes as detailed (when the narrator answers a phone call from his mother, we get two paragraphs of things like how many times it rang and where he gets the best reception), if not as deliberately flat, as My Struggle.

Overall - a very worthwhile read, and particularly recommended to Knausgaard fans as the sheer contrast adds to the appreciation of his later works.

[John · Rating 4 out of 5]

I agree with many of the previous reviewers in thinking that this is truly an odd book. It's boring and completely compelling at the same time. You wonder what the point is in filling in improbable details around the biblical stories of Cain and Abel, Noah, etc. but you keep reading because he is a very good story teller. And strangest of all to me is where the author himself is coming from. The narrator appears to actually believe in the absolute truth of every word in the bible about angels and in the crazed writings of Bellori, but I kept questioning the author's commitment to that truth. It's as if the author has created a narrative voice that is somewhat deranged and not trustworthy. As I haven't read his supposed autobiographical novels, I don't know where the actual Karl Knausgaard fits. It's creates a rather disturbing background to the reading experience.

[Andrew]

I often make fun of Knausgaard, but in a Friars Club Roast kinda way... he makes it so easy, with his embittered proclamations, cigarette between his whiskered lips. But it's all love.

So this was my first book of his outside My Struggle, and unlike his confessional, this was something more in line with the fraught, theological Scandinavian literary tradition (hey there, Par Lagerkvist! this is directed at all 10 of you who have read him, but you all should…), and that has its ups and downs. I really loved the Cain and Abel bits, and all of the weirdo Medieval scholastic theology and the commentary on that and the hierarchies of angels and what not, all fantastic. Other parts, not so much… the whole Noah plotline at the middle frankly sucked. However, it's a worthy if heady read.

[Michael Bohli · Rating 5 out of 5]

Gerne sage ich über Karl Ove Knausgård, dass ich auch Telefonbücher, welche von ihm verfasst wären, mit grösster Bewunderung lesen würde. "Alles hat seine Zeit", ein Roman aus dem Jahre 2004, wagt ein ähnlich gefährliches Unterfangen: der norwegische Autor erzählt gewisse Teile der Bibel neu. Im Verband mit historischen Aussagen, philosophischen Gedankengängen und fiktiven Figuren der Geschichte, werden die Sagen von Kain und Abel, Noah und sogar Jesus, in das Gefüge seines vorangegangenen Buches eingebettet.

Im eigentlichen Sinne nie als Sachbuch zu verstehen, schafft es Karl Ove Knausgård auf grossartige Weise, dieses Buch als Abhandlung darzustellen, voller verblüffender Passagen und weitreichenden Gedankenexperimenten. Mit erschütternden Sätzen, mit wunderbaren Beschreibungen, mit einem Gerüst, das nicht nur unsere Welt, sondern mögliche Realitäten umfasst.

[M. Sarki · Rating 3 out of 5]

http://msarki.tumblr.com/post/1449514...

There seems to be nothing easy about Karl Ove Knausgård, which is a good thing I suppose. His writing is quite sophisticated in its simplicity. He almost tricks you into reading on even when the body does not want to. He can tell a good story, and often digresses to a degree that is confounding to say the least. In his most recent books (in my case their being the first two volumes of My Struggle, particularly A Man in Love) he flat out wears me out with his hundred page accounting of changing a diaper. Or talking to the parents at a daycare meet-and-greet. Or how, in great detail, as an adolescent, he hid his beer. But this book made more sense to me for eventually reaching its end. In contrast to even his first book in the series, A Death in the Family, I never once asked myself what I might be doing instead with my valued time.

To be forthcoming I confess to being an ex-communicated Lutheran. It is actually a badge of honor I wear defiantly, and at time perhaps, too loudly as well. But Grace Evangelical Lutheran Church in East tawas, Michigan deserves my wrath and my less-than-adequate vengeance that might rain down on its congregation. It is where I learned their version of every bible story I know. And it is where I did my public catechism and served as an altar boy for too many years to want to remember in detail. But what I learned upon graduating from high school in 1972, and taking off for parts unknown in search of my own forty acres and a mule, is failure to drink the wine or give the church money is grounds for one’s dismissal from the church you had previously earned your way into through hard study and public demonstration of your belief and understanding of God’s word. The relative public demonstration as well warrants an equal measure in the spirit of exacting revenge. But I have no hatred in the expression of my feelings regarding this transgression to me, instead I exact an untold level of joy in my every recurring advantage to further engage my attack.

My coming to read this novel is in ways a bit absurd. The last thing I thought I would ever do would be to subject myself to more bible stories. But Karl Ove Knausgård more than subtly demanded I do just that. And I resisted for as long as I could. Then it took me a very long time to actually begin reading the book I had kept shelved in my library for at least two or three years. I was surprised when I guardedly began my reading. I actually liked what he was saying and the stories he told. I have no idea why he wrote the book, and I do not care. I like his voice. It draws me into whatever he is writing about. Even subjects I do not have a care to be involved with. It is what I believe a good writer must do.

[Cam Mannino · Rating 2 out of 5]

It must be said first that I came to this book cold. Unlike most other reviewers, I had not read other Knausgaard books. I picked it up because I like challenges and I’m always interested in “midrash,” i.e., people expanding, imagining their way deeply into ancient myths and stories, particularly Biblical ones. Given all that, this turned out to be a very tough book for me to finish, but I did.

Knausgaard clearly has an incredible love of detail and a rich imagination. In fact, the amount of detail in the book is mesmerizing in a strange way; it kind of hypnotizes the reader. I think it was that deep immersion that kept me going – and at the same time, left me almost numb with boredom for long periods. An odd accomplishment.

I liked the Cain and Abel story (which I learned later was probably a kind of fixation Knausgaard has about his own brother). Both brothers were likable and irritating and Knausgaard explored the psychological possibilities of their relationship with great skill . It took me a while to adjust to the contemporary Scandinavian feel of the primordial world, but I decided I was inside a Scandinavian imagination and kept going.

I was really intrigued by the story of Lot, a mysterious character, who Knausgaard imagines as someone trying to impress the neighbors with his important angelic guests. And the idea of the angels making a mistake in focusing on him and getting too connected to humans for the first time, leading to their ultimate loss of power, was a creative way of dealing with the fact that no one but Lot and his family ultimately are warned about what’s coming. I was reminded of Jack Miles’ book Christ: A Crisis in the Life of God and its premise, if I recall it correctly, about God’s death beginning with Jesus’.

But Noah’s story just about did me in. Having to go back through all those generations of his family almost made me close the book. It was as if Knausgaard had decided he needed to develop all the “begats” in parts of the Hebrew Bible. After a while, I was just plowing along trying to get to the flood, waiting for that long central part of the book to be over.

The slow decline of the angels was painfully interesting, though the final form they take just seemed kind of small and a bit silly, frankly, after the sweeping scope of the book.

I deeply appreciated the landscape descriptions – a browse of some of that is what made me buy the book. I will always be able to visualize the farm on which Noah grew up, the ark floating past his relatives, the flaming swords by the river as if they were my own memories.

But I won’t read another book by Knausgaard. Life’s too short to spend too many hours with books this detailed, this deadly boring in parts, and ultimately only mildly satisfying for a reader like me. Obviously, there are plenty of readers to support this very skillful and creative author and I’m glad there are! I’m just not one of them.

[Bruno · Rating 5 out of 5]

I'll have Knausgård any day of the week, please.

Wow. WOW! Questa è un'ulteriore prova che Knausgård è molto più che quell'autore norvegese che ha scritto una biografia pretenziosa in 6 volumi.

Immaginate alcune delle più famose vicende bibliche trasportate in un'ambientazione da Norvegia primordiale, metteteci delle atmosfere faulkneriane, aggiungete un tocco di realismo magico à la Márquez e un linguaggio forbito e rigoroso. Io sono ancora in estasi.

A Time for Everything potrebbe definirsi una sorta di saggio/esegesi su On the Nature of Angels, l'opera di Antinous Bellori, un teologo fittizio che avrebbe vissuto nel XVI secolo, il quale analizza le manifestazioni angeliche contenute nella Bibbia e discute la natura degli angeli e la componente mutevole del divino. Alternando considerazioni sull'arte, la filosofia e la religione, Knausgård espone delle versioni ampliate e romanzate delle vicende di Caino e Abele e del diluvio universale, delineando dei personaggi carichi di un'umanità che non traspare dal testo biblico.
A chi ha letto i volumi del Min Kamp, appariranno evidenti i riferimenti biografici, in particolare nella figura di Lamech, il padre di Noè, che mostra molti tratti caratteriali del padre di Karl ove.

E poi c'è la Coda, quel capitolo finale che ha ribaltato completamente ogni certezza ed è di una bellezza e di un dolore sorprendenti.

[Clay C. · Rating 5 out of 5]

Wow, this book blew me away. I should say up front I'm not writing this review to offer an actual thought-out review of the book but more just a record to remember this book and why I loved it so much. I recently read Knausgaard's The Morning Star, a book that I also loved. A Time for Everything is much less of a page-turner than The Morning Star (it took me probably three times as long to read) but they possess many similarities. Both deal with reimagined and twisted aspects of Christian theology. Both delight in delving into the minutiae of their characters' lives in a way that could be boring if not for how loving and sympathetic the execution is. And both are enveloped in a brooding sense of mystery, magic, and unease that, despite mostly dwelling in the margin of the narrative, is always there in some form or another.

A Time for Everything begins with a fictionalized account from the life of the Renaissance-era writer and scholar Antinous Bellori, in which a young Antinous stumbles across two angels hunting for fish while lost in a dark forest. These aren't the angels we see in medieval paintings or in porcelain relief in our grandmothers' houses. Rather they are pallid, eerie, and skeletal; more dead than alive, more animal than human. This event is the catalyst for the rest of Bellori's life and scholarly pursuits: a study of angels and a hunt to encounter them again. For Bellori, angels are almost a kind of cryptid like sasquatches or the Loch Ness Monster, and in many ways his tireless pursuit of them resembles the modern people who've given up their lives to pursue these fantastical creatures unheeding of the ridicule they inspire in others. I'd never encountered angels depicted in this light, but Knausgaard's narrator recounts countless examples where angels act closer to emotionless killing machines or even aliens than the loving guardian angels they are often depicted as today. Bellori's ideas fit into the strangely open battleground of ideas enjoyed by other Renaissance thinkers. HIs main argument is a fascinating one and his tragic and haunting final revelation about the nature of angels as pieced together by Knausgaard genuinely floored me. Alongside the narrative of Bellori's life, Knausgaard's unknown narrator discusses the theories of Bellori and his contemporaries in the written voice of a scholar writing an academic article or monograph. This is the kind of book where if you don't go into it ready to learn a lot of new information about art, culture, and history (reminiscent of the works of W.G. Sebald) you might got bogged down very quickly.

The catch is that Bellori is completely made-up. He's a creation of Knausgaard, though naively I believed he was an actual historical figure until things really started kicking off. Not only does Knausgaard invent Bellori, but also all the fictional historiography where Bellori's ideas are discovered, published, and dissected by modern academics. It feels very metafictional in a deeply appealing way, reminiscent of Borges and Calvino for me. Still, the sections where Knausgaard discusses Bellori's theories and findings seem so authoritative that I doubt I was the only one hoodwinked.

However, Bellori's life takes up little actual space in the narrative. Two novel-sized section of the already lengthy book are retelling of classical tales form the Bible: the story of Cain and Abel, and the story of Noah and the Flood. These stand out as one of few moments where God makes direct contact with human beings. These are much more reimaginings than retellings. Rather than the arid, sun-soaked lands of Mesopotamia and Palestine, they occur in Knausgaard's native Norway, with Knausgaard providing beautiful depictions of the lands of pine forests, fjords, and gray skies where they take place. Additionally, references to houses, firearms, and clothing make the impression they occur in a version of 18th-century rural Norway that is playing the part of the world immediately after the Fall of Man.

These sections are absolutely beautifully told. Knausgaard has the power to conjure up scenery that can put any nature writer to shame. Also, the detail he gives to the inner workings and thoughts of his characters make them breathtakingly human and relatable. The tangents, memories, and reveries they travel down helps us learn so much about the characters and see ourselves in them even when they doesn't directly move the plot along.

Cain and Abel are reimagined where Cain becomes the "good" brother and Abel the "bad" brother. Abel is the apple of his community's eye, but behind closed doors his seemingly unstable mental state and dangerous disconnection from others make him do cruel things. Cain, on the other hand, is a social outcast seen as a curmudgeon who is covetous of his brother, when in reality he is simply cursed by his painfully shy and introspective nature which hides his inner gentleness and love. Both brothers share a twisted and toxic love, which has just enough innocence and purity in it to make Cain's eventual act of murder all the more heartbreaking. There are no actual angels in this story but we feel their phantom presence in the inner conflict of the story. Abel's thirst for forbidden knowledge leads him to confrontation with the angels guarding the garden, which seems to further corrupt his already disturbed nature and leads his brother to take his life.

The story of Noah and the Flood is also reimagined in this 18th-century pastoral Norwegian setting. Noah is recast as an albino with a scholarly temperament, much the same kind of person that Bellori was. However, we learn just as much about him as his family: his sister Anna, father Lamech, and brother Barak. This section is probably my favorite in the book. Knausgaard devotes nearly all his effort to the slow breakup of a close and sympathetic family. I feel like I keep saying this, but the way he embodies his characters' inner lives is pure magic; such as the lengthy sections about the hasty but beautiful romance of Anna with her eventual husband Javan, Noah's quest to categorize all life while struggling to maintain connection with his beloved family, and Lamech's grief when tragedy strikes. The decision to recast this relatively brief but important biblical story as a simmering domestic drama was simply genius. From only a couple lines in the Bible, Knausgaard crafts a story with some of the most sympathetic characters I've encountered in fiction in god knows how long. The story of God's decision to destroy mankind becomes beautifully and heart-breakingly mundane. The section's tragic but inevitable conclusion leaves us grieving the demise of this family we've come to know and sympathize more than the actual destruction of the world. Just as in the Cain and Abel section, angels also seem to have a mysterious hand in this story, which is confirmed later in the novel.

In between these long sections is more of Knausgaard's narrator describes more of Bellori's findings and other Renaissance thinkers' ideas about angels. We definitely get the feeling that he's plumbing some of the more shadowy aspects of the bible and biblical apocrypha in defense of his claims about angels. These include the poorly understood but fascinating references in the bible to giants or Nephilim (which make an appearance in Noah's story) which some apocryphral sources point as a crossbreed between angels and humans that hastened the fall from grace of the angels and the flood. Or other murky references to a jealous, prideful angel who tempted Eve alongside the serpent to imbibe the fruit of the tree of knowledge. All this heralds Bellori's ultimate revelations on the nature of angels which as I've said is truly haunting and surprising (angels are trapped on earth after the physical death of God embodied in Jesus) . After the story of Noah and his family is a section describing the life of the prophet Ezekiel which I found comparatively unimpactful. The same isn't true of the long section describing Bellori's fateful last interaction with angels, which was wonderfully eerie and mysterious. I wouldn't call this a horror book, but the account of Bellori's final days are scarier than most of what I've read in that genre.

In a decision that shocked me in its bravery, the coda of the book follows a Norwegian man living in the present day. This sections seems to completely break the continuity of the earlier narrative (which already had no issues breaking continuity) but small references to ideas explored earlier relating to angels and the divine give the reader that the story has come full circle. It's only as the section continues that we realize the first-person narrator in this section describing his loneliness and some mysterious trespass he's committed is the same scholarly voice that has been our companion through the entire earlier sections of the novel. This decision of Knausgaard's reminded me so much of the final chapter of the Morning Star, which also ditches the convention set by the earlier part of the book. By the end, there is no true catharsis or resolution to the troubling things we've read, but the journey we've been taken on has been remarkable.

A Time for Everything was haunting and beautiful in the way few books are. It was a magic mix of the real and the unreal, the fantastical and the mundane, and even by the end it doesn't reveal all it's tricks. Just like the unknowable, alien angels it depicts, we feel that a consciousness far beyond our understanding is guiding the events of the novel. Its one of those books I get the feeling I'll never truly stop thinking about it and I know I'll be rereading it for years to come. If you want something truly unlike anything you've read before, I can't recommend it highly enough.

[Kenny · Rating 5 out of 5]

Brilliant.

[David Wegehaupt · Rating 5 out of 5]

Wow, that was one of the most satisfying reading experiences of my life. Knausgaard is getting great acclaim and attention for My Struggle, and while I fully enjoyed the first two volumes of that, this one blows those out of the water, for me.

I mean, as one who grew up religious and now couldn't be further from that, I never thought a book so centered on Biblical stories, on the nature of the divine and humanity, novelizing stories that are told in mere paragraphs in the Bible... This just didn't seem like something that would be up my alley, but I couldn't have been more wrong. The rigorous insight of the essayistic portions had me highlighting line after line, looking up paintings, reading various translations of the Bible... The expansion of the Biblical stories of Sodom & Gomorrah, Cain and Abel, Noah and the flood, Ezekiel's prophecies, etc, they were so fascinating and came to some stunningly interesting and convincing conclusions. These iconic stories and characters are imagined as if they were a) true and real, and b) as if the people involved in them were real people, with real personalities, emotions, complicated lives, conflicts, etc etc etc. These brought a depth to the events that are merely described briefly in the Bible that I'd never really considered, and his deconstruction of the stories and what they mean seemed to me to be wholly unique, original, and fascinating. My jaw dropped over and over as Knausgaard brilliantly made me think and re-think stories that I'd heard over and over in childhood and adolescence. Stories which are usually used to convey very traditional morals and conclusions. This flips everything on its head. I want to get deeply religious people to read this in order to be able to discuss his take on these things... but, I fear they'll be offended or turned off by the less than traditional interpretations and conclusions drawn within

And when he finally tells us more about Bellori... and the Coda of the book. Who'd have thought I'd spend so much time thinking about Angels... ever?

Definitely will be a book to revisit again in the future. Right now, I"m planning to revisit all of my highlighting I did and really internalizing all of the interesting insight and arguments he makes through this. It can be a pretty dense read, (not in prose style... it's very simple, elegant and beautiful throughout in style), but it's full of ideas that need to be tracked over the course of the book. Anyway, just read this and then let's chat about it??

[John · Rating 4 out of 5]

The narrative backbone of this odd and gripping book is the story of a renaissance scholar whose childhood encounter with a pair of angels leads him to a lifelong vocation of studying and meditating upon the nature of angels. Most of the book is taken up with re-tellings of the Biblical stories of Cain and Abel and Noah.

Many people have noted Karl Ove Knausgaard's way of writing in what seems to be a flat, circumstantial style, filling pages with the most mundane details, while all the time creating a book that the reader is unable to put down. I don't know how he does it.

As in Knausgaard's other books, large and intriguing themes appear and disappear like fish leaping from the ocean: reflections on the nature of time and history, and most strongly, on the progressive loss of the presence of the divine in the world. (The book's fictional scholar concludes that the divine realm has actually been deteriorating through the ages, and that the angels have become trapped in materiality — a conclusion that not surprisingly causes him to be examined for heresy by the Inquisition.)

For almost the entire time I was reading A Time for Everything I wondered, How does this all hang together and where is it going? I still don't think I have good answers to those questions, but after finishing the book and reflecting on it I was left with strong but hard-to-pin-down sense of artistic wholeness.

One question that haunted me while reading was: Who is the narrator? Knausgaard provides a kind of answer by ending the book with a startling Coda, a diary-like chapter by a man who is, to put it mildly, Not Doing Well: living as a recluse on an isolated Norwegian island after having committed some unspecified terrible deed. We have to conclude that he is the author of the book that we've almost finished, and this understanding forces us to look back in new ways on everything we've read.

Karl Ove Knausgaard is, I think, one of our great writers, and this is a fine book, full of many of his strengths. But I'd encourage readers who don't know his work to start with A Death in the Family, the first book of his six-volume My Struggle. I only give this book four stars rather than five bacause I preferred his My Struggle.

[Arlo · Rating 5 out of 5]

When I finished the first section of the book I was oscillating between 3 or 4 stars. After finishing the Coda I was oscillating between 4 or 5 stars. It just brought everything into context of the book being a piece of fiction. Prior to the Coda I was looking for the narrator of "My Struggle 2:A Man in Love" to appear and doubting the actual narrator. Perhaps, I may have been better served if I read this prior to My Struggle.
After reading the Coda my mind was set free and I was able to truly appreciate the Angel story that binds the book and the expanding of the the two or three sentence biblical passages remade into wonderful stories that stretch over 100's of pages.

[Sorin Hadârcă · Rating 5 out of 5]

As it happens, with Knausgaard no stone is left unturned, biblical stories discounted for present value... Cain first, then Noah, reinvented as if they wrought their biographies themselves. And the darkest spots of the soul revealed for there's time for any purpose under heaven.

[Nils · Rating 3 out of 5]

God bok, men jeg ender opp på tre stjerner. Handlingen er litt overalt, og den røde tråden, englenes historie, er tidvis fjern fra handlingen. På sitt beste er den er svært god, men det er dessverre litt for langt mellom høydepunktene. Jeg sliter litt med å se nøyaktig hva det er som gjør boka så "objektivt" god – noe den nesten må være da den var nominert til blant annet litteraturprisen til vår alles favorittråd fra Norden.

[Daniel Chaikin]

26. A Time for Everything by Karl Ove Knausgaard
published: 2004
format: Archipelago Books Paperback
acquired: from amazon in 2014
read: May 16 - June 17
rating: ??

I can't possibly review this fairly as I ran into a worst reading slump early in the book. Seems unfair to blame Knausgaard, even if his book played a role and even if I feel better now reading the next book (Ovid's Amores)...although, not entirely better.

I will say that I'm not a fan of prolonged satirical but entirely true to the text biblical retellings. I fully understand the bible demands some satire, but I don't typically enjoy it. I don't really know why, other than to say that I'm not really a fan of satire in general. But 100 pages on Cain and Able with unsettling modern touches, and, far worse, 200 pages on Noah's extended family with guns and other non-biblical technology (re-located to Norway, by the way), clever as it was, was really really pro-longed. He also covers Lot and Ezekiel (and his wheel) too, but the length on these was reasonable.

The sort of faux subject of the book is a sixteenth century Italian theologian, Antinous Bellori, who came across real angels as a child, and wrote about them anonymously and heretically, carefully studying the existing biblical and related texts.

If you don't like any of that, the book is saved by provoking, if disturbing coda—about 50 pages of a pseudo-autobiography. If you do like all the above, the coda is just a bonus. To be fully honest, many readers might not like it because of how disturbing it gets, but it is something quite interesting, regardless.

(side note, the Norwegian title translates to A Time to Every Purpose Under Heaven. No idea why it was changed.)