For all his furious productivity, Karl Ove Knausgaard likes his narratives to unfold at a leisurely pace. In his new series – which follows a six-volume work of autofiction and a non-fictional seasonal quartet – mere seconds expand to symphonic proportions. By the end of the latest instalment, The Third Realm, we have reached only day three in a sequence of events that began in The Morning Star. In that volume, Knausgaard gradually established a scenario: a group of characters in modern-day Norway become increasingly unsettled after a new star appears in the sky; it seems to precipitate a string of sinister occurrences. No explanation of these is provided in the second volume, The Wolves of Eternity, which introduces another set of characters. In The Third Realm, Knausgaard returns to episodes from The Morning Star, providing different perspectives and dropping occasional clues about what might be happening. 

Knausgaard’s characters attempt as best they can to rationalise the new star. Syvert, an undertaker, is among the first to notice that people have stopped dying. ‘It was coincidence, of course,’ he tells himself. ‘But how many coincidences did it take for something to no longer be coincidence?’ The novel has an unattributed