Deep Sea Diving Bell and Submersible, 1910s

I must admit to wondering if it upset Adrian when the Devil announced that the Faustian compact in which he’s entangled, forbids love: “Your life shall be cold—hence you may love no human.” Did this part of the bargain cause him emotional pain? Will it? Did he feel the potential for passion and compassion, extinguish? Did he begin to doubt the longevity and sincerity of his derisive attitude to marriage? The Devil assumes Adrian has no regrets, as he professes to know Adrian very well: “A total chilling of your life and of your relations to humans lies in the nature of things—indeed it already lies in your nature…Is not coldness a precedence with you…?”

I was reminded of our prior collective reads of Dracula and The Historian when the Devil asserts, “You, fine creature well-created, are promised and betrothed to us.” And this: “[W]ith your blood you have certified it and promised yourself to us and are baptized ours…” Perhaps all the kings of Hell work from a common vernacular!

In exchange for a loveless life, Adrian is given twenty-four years of ingenious musical production after which time he will “be fetched,” cast for eternity into the underworld.

With the conclusion of Adrian’s manuscript we pick up where Zeitblom’s narrative left off, in the autumn of 1912 and Adrian’s move to the farmhouse in Pfeiffering that he and Schildknapp had briefly visited. Adrian is in the process of finishing his composition of “Love’s Labour Lost, but he had not yet completed it. Regarding Adrian’s move to a different environment at this time Zeitblom admittedly imagines Adrian’s thoughts (as opposed to Zeitblom’s usual, all-knowing style):

“For the sake of inner continuity, he said to himself, it would be better to bring a remnant of the project belonging to the old conditions along into the new and to cast his inner eye on some new project only when the new externals had become routine.”

(Perhaps this is more of a projection of Zeitblom’s own philosophy than that of his friend’s?)

Adrian seems to crave the rustic domesticity and isolation of the farmhouse, and I recall that earlier Zeitblom compared Pfeiffering to the farm where Adiran was raised. But Adrian makes liberal use of the train to journey into Munich for culture. And, of course, Zeitblom manages to secure a teaching position not too far away from Adrian, enabling him to see his friend without too much trouble.

When Love’s Labour Lost is released into the world the critics hate it, and its run is very short. One critic even refers to it as “decimating music.”

For a time, Adrian develops a fascination with the cosmos and the ocean’s depths, in short, the physical world. This interest results in new work as well as disagreements with Zeitblom regarding the God-lessness of spheres infinite or unimaginably remote. Zeitblom, with his humanistic view argues that “[p]iety, reverence, decency of the soul” are of the essence of man and his “spiritual and intellectual world,” and only through man’s “reverence for himself” is there God. To which Adrian responds that physical creation “is indisputably the prerequisite for what is moral, which would have no soil without it.” He says the Church insists “on ignorance out of humaneness,” and that Zeitblom’s humanism is of the Middle Ages and the “parochial cosmology of Kasiersaschern.”

Zeitblom always cites Adrian’s teasing tone during their debates, but the fact that Adrian composes his music based on his latest thinking, in this case the “cosmic music” of his Marvels of the Universe, demonstrates the influence these ideas have on him.

Close-Up of Hour-Glass, Albrecht Dürer's Melancholia I

This week’s reading features the most exciting chapter in the novel so far: Adrian’s written account of the Devil’s visit to him documented in Chapter XXV. We learn that Zeitblom only learned of this episode in his friend’s life upon Adrian’s death. Like the other philosophizing men in the book the Devil, apparently, does not endorse brevity!

Nursing a headache, Adrian sits at home alone in the Italian mountain town where he and Schildknapp have decamped for the summer. The latter left Adrian to attend a social engagement on both of their behaves. While passing the time with his book Adrian is suddenly struck by the sensation of “a piercing cold.” When he looks up there is a strange “man” seated across the room from him.

The Devil accuses Adrian of “feigning you had not long since expected me…our relation presses sometime for discussion.” He has come to reach an understanding with Adrian and cautions him that “the hourglass has been turned…the sand has begun to run.” He asserts they already have struck a compact for all time an eternity. The compact has to do with Esmerelda and the fact that he had sex with her knowing that she had syphilis. The Devil calls himself Esmeralda’s “friend and keeper,” and she acted as the Devil’s agent in infecting Adrian with the disease. The Devil’s goals were executed with deliberation over the previous four and some years:

“Disease, and most specially opprobrious, suppressed, secret disease, creates a certain critical opposition to the world, to mediocre life, disposes a man to be obstinate and ironical toward civil order, so that he seeks refuge in free thought, in books, in study.”

“Some men are better endowed than others for the performance of witchery…we know well to distinguish them.”

It turns out that the two doctors whom Adrian consulted in the early stages of his disease—one whom he found dead, the other arrested—were eliminated by the Devil after they served their purpose, that being to treat Adrian’s genital infection and in so doing, accelerate the “soft, silent work” of venereal meningitis. In exchange for Adrian’s “body and soul,” the Devil promises him “illumination” that will remove obstacles to a brilliant career, the “bright radiant annulment of all lame scruples and doubts.” Adrian will be visited by “an inspiration…that comes not from God, who leaves to reason all too much to do, but is possibly solely with the Devil, the true Lord of Enthusiasm.”

Turns out the Devil knows a good deal about musical theory, and in this respect the evil one’s preferences comport with the philosophy of musical composition that Adrian has shared with Zeitblom. The Devil tells Adrian:

“Composition itself has grown too difficult, desperately difficult. Where work and sincerity no longer agree…the masterpiece, the structure in equilibrium, belongs to traditional art.”

“It is not merely that you will break through the laming difficulties of the age—you will break through the age itself…the epoch of this culture and its cult, and dare a barbarism, a double barbarism, because it comes after humanitarianism…”

The Devil claims that Adrian will never be capable of contrition, of a retreat from “his promise” due to his own pride. “[T]he extravagant existence that you will lead is great pampering, from which willy-nilly one does not find a way back to wholesome mediocrity.”

Some of the most unsettling parts of the chapter are the remarks that indicate the Devil’s premeditation in targeting Adrian long before he ever encountered Esmeralda. The Devil refers to Adrian’s father’s experiments on the line between life and death and to Kaisersaschern, the town where Adrian grew up. He readily admits, “[f]rom early on we had an eye on you, on your nimble, haughty mind…”

There’s much to ponder in this section, but I’m thrilled that we’ve reached this point. The Faustian bargain has been clarified, at least for me. But perhaps for some of you it was clear all along?

Nick and I follow three generations of the Effinger family from a watchmaker’s bench in small-town Bavaria to the grand houses and Sunday lunches of Berlin, across about seventy years of German history that ends with the catastrophic destruction of the family and German Jewish civilization in WWII.

We talk about Gabriele Tergit’s documentary style and her 151 short chapters, the way she gives us almost no interiority yet still makes these people feel vibrant and alive. We talk about Uncle Waldemar, the jurist who refuses to convert and decades later sees clearly what is coming. We talk about the remarkable women of the novel, and about the last hundred pages, where the dread finally lands. And we spend time with Tergit herself, a Berlin court reporter and author of Käsebier Takes Berlin (also published by NYRB), who fled in Germany in 1933 and finished this book in exile at a point in time when the world of Effingers and the type of characters that populate it, had vanished.

If you want to read Effingers in good company, follow The Big Book Project on Substack and subscribe wherever you listen. Come read the big books with me.

Arnold Schoenberg's Notes on Twelve - Tone Music

The final few pages of Chapter XXII illuminate the future path of Adrian’s vocation as a composer, and I can’t help but believe they have a great deal of significance for the progression of the narrative. Adrian and Zeitblom return to the former’s home in Buchel to attend the wedding of Adrian’s sister. Following the ceremony, the two friends go for a walk during which Zeitblom confides that he also plans to marry, a woman Adrian has not met, Helene. (I found this to be a curiously funny bit of dialog: Zeitblom conveys no emotions about the woman that he is about to marry; Adrian’s rejoinder is a lecture on the hypocrisy of the church in using marriage as a tool to permit sex!)

Significantly, during this walk Adrian shares his current thinking about music composition. He tells Zeitblom that the story of the Ephrata holy man, Beissel, prominently featured in one of Kretzschmar’s lectures, has been increasingly on his mind, and in fact, he has never ceased to think of Beissel since first hearing of him. Regarding Beissel’s musical objective to create a strict style using “master and servant notes” in composition, Adrian asserts that such a method of composition is needed today. What would be required for this is a composer “with enough genius to combine the elements of restoration, indeed the archaic, with revolution.”

In response, Zeitblom says that he sees something very Germanic in Adrian’s “notion of the archaic-revolutionary schoolmaster.” Adrian’s “strict style” would mean “total integration of all musical dimensions,” the neutralizing of melody, harmony, counterpoint, form, and instrumentation. Adrian’s scheme would incorporate both an “ingenious” modification of the twelve tone construct and the logic of a magic square, like the one in Dürer’s engraving, Melancholia I, that Adrian has tacked to the wall above his piano.

Adrian claims that his idea would be an antidote for “ravaged conventions and the dissolution of all objective obligations…a freedom that has begun to coat talent like a mildew and is showing signs of sterility.” He believes that uncontained creative freedom wants constraints, “law, rule, coercion, system.” Zeitblom chaffs at the inherent conflict between artistic freedom and constraint. He questions whether music composition would exist under such a system because it substitutes the act developing a work’s organization for the act of art making.

Adrian believes that only within such ordered structure can the artist be free. It’s not hard to see how the application of this juxtaposition to politics, where civil society is told that order and rule of law are necessary to protect its liberty. At what point does the imposition of order become “unreason?” What is (or should be) the role of reason in the creation of art? Mann convincingly weaves these questions into the different (but not mutually exclusive) spheres of art and societal governance.

The Big Book Project was created as a forum to share ideas about challenging novels, and today’s conversation makes clear that questioning together is far more rewarding than puzzling alone.

Here’s a few of the threads that we pull on in this episode: how much should we trust Zeitblom the biographer writing almost fifty years after the fact, insisting on his fabulous recall ability, and probably in love with his subject; Zeitblom’s commentary on his own manner of writing Adrian’s story; the coded use of Esmeralda’s name; and, the twelve-tone system that Schoenberg made famous.

Throughout the discussion Lori and Chad keep returning to the tension underneath it all--humanism set against order, sentiment against system, during the decades in Germany when these arguments carried consequences far beyond music.

We hope that anyone who knows of Doctor Faustus only by reputation will find in this episode a reason to read and discuss it with us. Subscribe and follow along. Share your thoughts in the comments.

Allied bombing of Hamburg, July 27, 1943

Today’s post is concerned with Zeitblom’s thoughts on World War II and German nationalism, and the allegories and metaphors about it that the novel presents. In many respects Zeitblom’s personal perspectives illuminate these.

In the first four pages of Chapter XXI, sixty year old Zeitblom takes us outside the narrative chronology of Adrian’s life to discuss what is happening in October 1943 as he is writing this section of the novel. It’s an unorthodox approach for Zeitblom, who provides commentary throughout the book, but hasn’t reflected much at all on the extraordinary situation in Germany and the world during the time that he is penning Adrian’s biography, apart from scant mention in the novel’s initial pages.

Reading the morning newspaper reports of Germany’s submarine battle victories, Zeitblom feels “a certain satisfaction at our ever resourceful spirit of invention, at our nation’s competence, which despite so many reverses refuses to yield.” Yet he recognizes that such victories “serve only to awaken false hopes and prolong a war that in the view of reasonable men can no longer be won.”

Zeitblom considers that the “intellectual dream” of a European Germany has been replaced with the “rather terrifying, rather flawed, and as the world sees it, so it would seem, quite intolerable reality of a German Europe.” He refers to the German populace as “laden with guilt,” and the Allied air bombing of German cities as “crimes that we called down upon ourselves.”

As Tobias Boer asserts in his “Reader’s Guide” (which I cited in my initial posting on this novel), Faust stories are about damnation and redemption. If we consider Adrian’s desire to impose “order” on music as a metaphor for the Nazi’s determination to construct a “German Europe,” redemption seems possible only after Germany’s defeat and unconditional surrender. Despite Zeitblom’s national pride in the accomplishments of the German war machine, he recognizes this as well.

Professor Boer is quick to point out that the novel’s relevance today becomes apparent when we look at it more expansively than as simply historical allegory but instead having to do with the “helplessness of advanced intellectual culture in the face of unreason.” Zeitblom’s despair at his country’s “wanton contempt for reason,” is recognizable to what we are facing today, as is his premonition that the constant yearning to be intoxicated must now be paid for.

Zeitblom condemns the “sordid abuse and cheap peddling of what was old and genuine, faithful and familiar.” And this goes back, inevitably, to his misgivings about Adrian’s ambition for his music compositions. We will see how vigorously Zeitblom opposes these goals given his loyalty to and feelings for, Adrian.

Leipzig Opera House around 1900

Adrian spends two years at Halle studying theology and not surprisingly, Zeitblom follows him there and even audits many of Adrian’s religion courses, despite having little personal interest in the topic. Like the section on Kretzschmar’s Beethoven lectures, Zeitblom provides much detail on the faculty instruction and intense discussions that Adrian has with his fellow future theologians. These lectures and debates discomfort Zeitblom:

“theological air did not suit me, seemed uncanny, made it difficult for me to breathe easily, and presented me with a dilemma of conscience…Halle, whose intellectual atmosphere had for centuries been full of religious controversy—that is, of those intellectual squabbles and clashes that are always so detrimental to humanistic cultural endeavors…”

By this point, it’s quite clear that Zeitblom lives for Adrian, and as demonstrated by this novel, his biography of Adrian, he dedicates the better part of his life to him. There is little doubt that Zeitblom is in love with Adrian in more than a brotherly way. His love is sexual, obsessive, and he knows that it will never be requited. Zeitblom is possessive of Adrian. In these early chapters he mentions a few times his jealousy for a man that Adrian meets in Leipzig, Rudiger Schildknapp. And Zeitblom is shocked and enraged when Adrian relates in a letter, the prank directed at him by a porter from whom he requested a restaurant recommendation soon after he arrives in Leipzig to resume his music studies with Kretzschmar. The porter leads him to an establishment that Adrian later discovers is a brothel.

“There steps to my side a nut-brown lass, in Spanish jacket, with large mouth, stubbed nose, and almond eyes—Esmeralda, who strokes my cheek with her arm. I turn about, thrust the bench aside with my knee, and stride back across the carpet, through this hell-hole of lusts…”

Zeitblom’s indignation about this briefly described episode in the midst of his friend’s long letter, is quite funny. He assures us that he is not a prude but is convinced that his friend was very troubled by this incident, it being the entire reason that Adrian wrote him in the first place, to “unburden himself of an upsetting impression, for which I, his childhood friend, was indeed his only recourse.”

It’s hard to image Adrian as affected by the incident as the besotted Zeitblom, who tries to justify his reaction by telling us how sensitive Adrian was to “lascivious crudities,” a distaste “so pronounced as to be forbidding,”

“If one was unable—and unwilling—to imagine him in any sort of ‘amorous’ situation, that was the result of the purity, chastity, intellectual pride, and cool irony that he wore like a suite of armor and that I held sacred—sacred in a certain painful and secretly humiliating fashion.”

Also, Zeitblom reveals something about himself: he lost his virginity seven or eight months previous to a “lass from the common folk,” with whom he broke off because her lack of education bored him. Zeitblom says that he kept this affair secret from Adrian.

This week’s reading has me doubting Zeitblom’s reliability as a narrator even more. It’s clear he’s very much in love with Adrian, and this makes him vulnerable to misinterpretation of his subject’s character and motivations. My growing sense of our narrator’s unreliability does not lessen my enjoyment of the novel; rather, it adds layers of satisfying depth and complexity to it.

Albrecht Dürer, Melencolia I

Adrian declares that he will study theology when he goes to university, and this announcement produces a curious reaction in his friend Zeitblom, who has “…no real doubt that pride had been the source of his decision. From that came the mixture of joy and fear that constituted the terror passing through me at his announcement.”

Zeitblom believes that Adrian’s decision to take-up theology is motivated by his desire to “reduce music” to place it and all other disciplines of research “beneath the sphere to which he would devote his talents.” And I enjoyed very much the mental image that Zeitblom has in response: “a baroque painting, a gigantic altarpiece, on which all the arts and sciences, in meekly sacrificial poses, were offering their homage to the apotheosis of theology.” Zeitblom sees in Adrian’s choice of study a manifest sign of his friend’s anti-enlightenment proclivities and his intent to double down, so to speak, on them.

Adrian is taking up theological studies not to become a practicing pastor, but rather as the basis for an academic career. He anticipates his tutor Kretzschmar’s disapproval of his decision and defends it by reasoning that music plays a significant role in theology, “a more practical and artistic role in fact than in the areas of mathematics and physics, in acoustics, that is.”

Looking back, Zeitblom tells us that in the weeks preceding and following his graduation, Adrian felt liberated and free of the town of Kaisersaschern. But Zeitblom doubts whether Adrian ever really freed himself from that place. When Adrian later takes up music composition, Zeitblom claims that his friend’s music was never “free music.”

“It was the music of someone who had never escaped; it was—down to its most arcane, ingeniously whimsical intricacy, to every breath and echo of the crypt emerging from it, characteristic music—the music of Kaisersaschern.”

Upon his graduation from grammar school one of Adrian’s professors explicitly cautions him:

“Natural merits are God’s merits on our behalf, and not our own. It is His adversary, having himself come to grief out of pride, who strives to make us forget. He makes a wicked guest and is a roaring lion who walketh about seeking whom he may devour. You are among those who have very reason to be on guard against his wiles…always bear in mind that self-satisfaction is itself apostasy and ingratitude to the Spender of every mercy!”

What are Zeitblom and Adrian’s professors seeing in him that gives them a foreboding sense of his future despite Adrian’s manifest talents? Is it simply that he is overly proud? Or are they sensing a certain darkness in him, a darkness that Zeitblom perceives in Adrian’s environments, first as an observer of his father’s attempts to dissect the intricate puzzles of nature and then in the very air and soil of the university town of Kaisersaschern?

Ephrata Cloister

I teased in the prior post my interest in the tone that Zeitblom establishes in these opening chapters, a sense of the entanglement of irrational and dark forces in the operations of both the natural world and artistic genius.

In discussing Leverkühn’s father, Zeitblom reports that in the elder’s studies of the natural sciences—biology, chemistry, physics—there was evident “a certain trace of mysticism, which at one time would have been suspect as an interest in sorcery…ambiguous moods, half-concealed allusions that insinuate some eerie uncertainty—that a piety of self-imposed decency could not help seeing any association with such things as a bold transgression.” It is particularly intriguing to me that Zeitblom, a self-professed Catholic sees the devout Luthern Jonathan Leverkühn as attracted to mysticism. In fact, in recalling Jonathan’s lesson to his son Adrian and young Zeitblom about the natural markings on mussel shells, our narrator tells us that Leverkühn regarded these imprints with a “dark reverence,” as a meeting between “sorcery and liturgy.”

As for the humanities, his own vocation, Zeitblom asserts that “regressive evil” can be suppressed not by religion but rather only by “literature, the humanistic sciences, the ideal of the free and beautiful human being.”

Adrian and Zeitblom both go to university in Kaisersaschern, which “preserved a strong sense of the medieval, not just in outward appearance, but also in atmosphere.” According to Zeitblom there hung in the air something of “a hysteria out of the dying Middle Ages, something of a latent psychological epidemic.” While at university Adrian lives with his uncle Nikolaus Leverkühn, a violin maker and purveyor of all manner of musical instrument. Of his uncle’s impressive inventory of musical instruments, Adrian “maintained an almost shrugging indifference before all that splendor.” Zeitblom writes of Adrian that “[f]or a long time, with intuitive perseverance, the man hid himself from his own destiny.”

Adrian has a gift for mathematics and on the sly, begins to experiment with and create music using his uncle’s instruments. He tells Zeitblom that “music is ambiguity as a system.” Zeitblom detects a passion for music in Adrian: “…how proud I had been of his universal indifference and how clearly I sensed his…budding passion…it was somehow embarrassing and scary.”

Zeitblom and Adrian attend the informal lectures on Beethoven of the cathedral organist, Kretzschmar, who will later become Adrian’s music teacher. In one of the lectures, Kretzschmar talks about Conrad Beissel, a religious leader and composer, who devised his own method of musical composition. In discussing Beissel afterward, Zeitblom notes that Adrian’s attitude demonstrated an “ironic distance” a sign of “inordinate arrogance” that has “something disquieting and insolent about it and is very apt to arouse concern about the health of his soul.” Adrian praises Beissel’s sense of musical “order.” “[E]ven foolish order is always better than none at all.” Zeitblom decries Beissel’s “absurdly imposed order,” to which Adrian replies that adhering to rigid rules always is praiseworthy.

Here we begin to see the contrast between Adrian’s and Zeitblom’s intuitions and appreciation of music, and art more broadly: the latter’s love for the sentimentality and “bovine warmth” of music, versus Adrian’s systematic response to it, his desire to order music under a new system of rules under his direction. Might this also be Adrian’s proclivity when it comes to his country’s impending fascism?

"The Gate of Hell" from Gustave Doré's illustrations of Dante's Divina Commedia

I don’t know about you, my fellow readers, but when I got to Chapter VIII of the novel and the various lectures of Kretzschmar on the musical theory of Beethoven’s compositions, I recognized that I could use some help in comprehending the book’s philosophical and theoretical themes. And I found an excellent (free) resource: “A Reader’s Guide to Thomas Mann’s Doctor Faustus,” by Tobias Boes, published last year and based on his teachings of the novel to undergraduate students at the University of Notre Dame. jj.29556534 Boes uses the John E. Woods translation of the novel that I believe most of us are reading as well.

Boes sums up his thesis nicely: The central theme of Doctor Faustus is the regression of progressive liberal culture into irrationality and barbarism. The novel uses early-twentieth-century Germany as a case study, but its message is of universal relevance.

And he identifies five things to keep in mind as you read the novel: the reliability of the narrator Serenus Zeitblom, Leverkühn’s friend; Mann’s portrayal of the Faust legend in light of its historical German origins; the historical context of the story and its narration during and in the decades preceding, WWII; the novel’s commentary on living an intellectual or artistic life; and, the way the characters consider damnation and redemption.

There is a lot of material in Boes’ one hundred and sixty page guide, and I will be referring to it, from time to time, in these posts.

Now, to the novel’s epigraph, which is the beginning of Canto II of Dante’s Inferno, here as translated by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow:

Day was departing, and the embrowned air

Released the animals that are on earth

From their fatigues, and I the only one

Made myself ready to sustain the war

Both of the way and likewise of the woe,

Which memory that errs not shall retrace.

O Muses, o high genius, now assist me!

O memory, that didst write down what I saw,

Here thy nobility shall be manifest!

It seems that Dante is mentally girding himself for the journey into Hell, and he recognizes the physical and spiritual toll that it will entail. If this interpretation is correct, it seems a fitting epigraph for the plight of our narrator, Zeitblom, as he embarks on the story of Leverkühn’s own journey to Hell.

It is significant that Zeitblom is narrating this story from Germany in the spring of 1943 with his country fully embattled in the war, and his attitude toward Nazism is ambivalent, at least in these early pages. He’s somewhat critical, but it is a muted criticism. Rather it is about the humanities that Zeitblom willingly expounds upon, and he is quick to tell us that music and literature, matters of the human spirit, belong to “a world of spirits.”

“Whether one can draw a clear and secure line between the noble, pedagogical world of the human spirit and a world of spirits approached at one’s own peril is very much, indeed all too much, part of my topic.”

And a bit later, “culture is actually the reverent, orderly, I may even say, propitiatory inclusion of the nocturnal and monstrous in the cult of the gods.”

This is a fascinating line of reasoning and sets the tone for what we begin to learn about Leverkühn. It will be interesting to learn if Zeitblom always felt this way about the “nocturnal and monstrous,” or if instead, his attitude toward the dark forces has been formed almost entirely by his decades-long relationship with his musical genius friend, Leverkühn.

Much of my time spent with this novel was spent trying to comprehend Kristian’s person. As some of you have commented, Knausgaard gives us few glimmers of light as regards his antihero’s dark soul. Still there are some unexpected things about Kristian. For example, and as regards this final chapter, I was surprised when Kristian suggested to Yelena that they start anew and have another baby. Does he offer this as a comfort to Yelena, or to himself? And if the latter, is it because he believes a replacement for Leo is possible as regards his own affections? That another child will fill the void? Atone for his guilt?

Yelena refuses him, saying that she never wants another child with him. It’s difficult to say whether this is because she faults Kristian for Leo’s death, doesn’t trust him as a partner or a parent, or is just too grief-stricken to bear the thought, seeing as Kristian suggests it only three days after Leo’s death.

Stepping away from the narrative a bit, I think that one of the questions that Knausgaard invites us to consider with this novel is what sort of person is susceptible to a Faustian bargain. It seems to me that its allure is seized upon every day by many less “bad” than Kristian, at least in the sense of advancing their own self-interest at the expense of others or in opposition to their own moral principles. Everyone is self-interested. But Kristian inhabits an altogether deficient, moral code. This is surprising given his upbringing, but perhaps Knausgaard is demonstrating that some people are simply born to like Kristian—cold, calculating, unfeeling—the very type dangerous to a society based on shared principles of morality. Especially so if they are highly intelligent like Kristian.

There has been some commentary on our Substack about the meaning of the final two pages of the novel when Hans resurfaces and makes Leo appear to Kristian in the mirror. Kristian tells Leo that he is sorry, but according to Hans, Leo cannot hear him. Leo’s image is there, but he’s somewhere else, unable to communicate with or reach Kristian. Leo places his palms flat upon the mirror. He has not aged and looks just the way he did on the day that he died. Kristian and Leo are now in different realms. We are unsure if Kristian is still in the world of the living or in the afterlife. Either way Kristian will never be able to reunite with Leo, in life or death. As Hans declares, Kristian is in Hell, alone, and suffering. Whether Kristian deserves this fate is for each reader to decide. Kristian would say that he never intended anyone harm, he simply wanted to be an acclaimed artist, that the means he employed don’t deserve this drastic moral reckoning, a conclusion this tragically sad. I doubt that many of us agree with Kristian’s choices. Who can say if richly rewarded ambition is ever entirely free?

Well, what an ending! The price of Kristian’s bargain with the devil/Hans is the life of his young son. Hans’ reappearance in the novel’s last pages, whether as a physical being, dreamed of visitation, or afterlife reunion, makes it clear that Leo is the sacrifice. I must say that I was a bit surprised by Hans bringing back Leo from the dead because heretofore Knausgaard has been a bit ambiguous on the specifics of Kristian’s Faustian transaction.

Knausgaard sets up Leo’s tragic death in such way that it nearly seems predictable. Kristian is an unnatural father. He interacts with his young son in ways that would only be appropriate (if even then) with a much older child. Kristian’s duty to his child at this stage in his son’s life is to provide unconditional love, nurture, and safety. Instead, Kristian moralizes, always trying to teach Leo a lesson. He’s far too harsh with him and unsurprisingly, demonstrates none of the qualities that we saw Kristian’s own father demonstrate toward his granddaughter when they went Christmas tree hunting early in the novel.

Leo does not want to go into London with his father for this Saturday excursion. His premonition about death that morning is eerie. It’s no surprise that Kristian dismisses Leo’s discomfort and desire to remain at home. Discipline and refusal to support or placate Leo’s thoughts and feelings are paramount to Kristian’s parenting style. We all sense impending disaster when Kristian leaves Leo alone in the queue outside the Lego store while he pursues, to no avail, another man who looks just like Hans. I’m probably not alone in thinking that Leo was going to be kidnapped or lost during Kristian’s absence. Instead, we feel relieved when Kristian finds Leo, and he is ok. But just a couple of pages later Leo is run over by a passing double-decker bus as he tries to follow his distracted father across the street. The fact that Kristian’s distraction arises from a phone message about the unexpected appearance at his home of the spurned Sonja is a less likely scenario for Leo’s death than Kristian’s chase of a Hans doppelganger. But it is a very appropriate precipitator of Leo’s death, nonetheless, as it demonstrates Kristian’s pathological selfishness and his comeuppance for disrespecting yet another woman that he used solely for sex.

Some of Kristian’s actions following Leo’s death, especially as regards Yelena, his wife and Leo’s mother, are monstrous. He’s simply incapable of communal mourning, whether with only his wife, with members of his own family, or with anyone who knew or loved Leo. His hasty removal of Leo’s clothes and toys from the car and house is hurtful and unfeeling toward Yelena. It might be the cruelest thing that he does over the entire course of the novel, except for the fact that the next day he leaves Yelena forever, even before Leo’s funeral. This exit is so very reminiscent of his final departure/rupture from his parents:

“Leaving the house in the evening without saying where I was going would disquieten her. And her concern would only be heightened when after a few hours I still hadn’t returned as she no doubt expected, not to mention when morning came.”

I hope that you will share your thoughts and reactions to the novel’s conclusion as well as what you think about Knausgaard’s book, overall.

The idea of the Faustian bargain has been around since medieval times and was popularized by Christopher Marlowe’s play, Doctor Faustus, in 1594. Since then, literature has been rich with narratives of “selling your soul to the devil.” My personal favorite is Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray. I’m looking forward to the prospect that this novel by an exceptional author will become a new Faustian favorite, and I am very excited to discuss it with you!

(Lori recorded this interview on a different device, and we apologize for the poor quality of her audio.)

In this conversation Steven joins host Lori Feathers to discuss his new collection, “Last Time Around”: Essays, Reviews, Interviews. They discuss why Gaddis turned toward the nineteenth-century Russians, what W. M. Spackman understood about style that most critics still miss, and why a sense of humor is closer to a sense of rebellion than to mere lightness.

The conversation moves into the question of artistry, that elusive quality that separates literature from fiction, and Steven argues for the kind of close attention that asks why an author chose dusk rather than twilight — the choices that take a second reading to even notice. They discuss the small presses that have come to the rescue of literature, dwindling book coverage, and whether there is still an audience for the big, brainy, erudite novel of the kind that once changed Moore’s life. Toward the end Lori draws Steven into a round-robin, asking Steven to opine on novels by, among others, Lucy Ellmann, Susanna Clarke, Mervyn Peake, Joseph McElroy, Gertrude Stein, John Cowper Powys, and James Elkins.

If you love long novels, dense novels, novels that ask something of you — subscribe to The Big Book Project on YouTube and follow along on Substack. Host Lori Feathers reads the abundant works of fiction with fellow bibliophiles, one extraordinary novel at a time.

Why does Kristian reveal to his interviewer, and the world, his altercation with the homeless man that occurred twenty four years ago? True, it was in response to a question about his series of photos of the homeless in London, but surely he anticipated being asked about this series and the others that are part of his MoMA retrospective. He must have thought about how he would respond to the standard question that he was asked: what was your thought behind taking pictures of the homeless?

Once Kristian starts to open-up about that night and his confrontation with the man over the lighter, the exchange with the interviewer rapidly gets out of hand for Kristian:

“Well, he died. It wasn’t my fault. He resisted when he should have given me the lighter back…after that I started seeing those destitutes. From being anonymous lives I never really noticed, they became individuals. And that was what I was trying to show with those pictures.”

Kristian soon realizes that he’d “completely miscalculated” when he hears murmurs from the audience in response to his confession and registers the shocked face of his interviewer. This word “miscalculated” implies that he did think about how he would respond to the interviewer’s expected question about the homeless series. His hubris allows him to believe that everyone will concur with him about the morality of his actions, his violence against the man, and support his justification.

But there is maybe another reason why Kristian either consciously or unconsciously blunders into this confession: Hans haunts his career and its success. Just a day or so before the fateful interview, Kristian mistakenly believes that he’s spotted Hans on the streets of New York and chases him down, only to find that the man he’s been pursuing is not Hans. And we learn that over the years Kristian occasionally thinks about Hans, wonders what he might be doing now, nervous that he might unexpectedly show up at one of his exhibition openings. Kristian imagines what he might tell Hans:

“You inspired me when I was young, I don’t mind admitting it. A lot of people inspired me in those days. But any suggestion of plagiarism is ridiculous. I remember exactly where and how I became interested in the occult, and it was before I ran into you.”

Again, Kristian is full of self-justification at the thought that Hans or the world might accuse him of copying Hans’s work:

“There was no danger. I was perfectly safe. He couldn’t touch me.

“He was a nobody. I was Kristian Pedersen.”

Except we see that Kristian is not safe from the consequences of his own miscalculations. Hans continues to “touch” his life, his work. Hans’ shady role in saving Kristian from a long prison sentence and clearing the path for him to achieve artistic stardom is an inescapable condition of Kristian’s internal life, one impervious to his denials, self-aggrandizement, and dirty soul.

Fernando Pessoa's Heteronym, Alberto Caeiro, by José de Almada Negreiros

Part Three takes us to New York City in 2009, where a retrospective of Kristian’s photography is opening at the Museum of Modern Art. These days Kristian lives in London with a wife, Yelena, and their young son, Leo. But Kristian’s self-righteous contempt, so prominent in his younger years, remains. He’s still cold, aloof, and arrogant about his work and place in the art world.

Not surprisingly, Kristian’s chronic condescension extends to New York City and New Yorkers:

“Everything went from the inside and out, nothing from the outside and in. Anyone who constructs such a thing as New York City, where the human in unable to find footing, cannot possibly be sensitive to the world, perhaps even is completely oblivious to it…They hated communism, but were communists themselves, only with money.

“They lived a lie, but didn’t know it was a lie, and instead were proud of it and everything it represented.

“At the same time…New York was an important city. For me there was no getting around it. It was here that everything happened. And if it happened here first, everywhere else would follow suit.”

Kristian has a loyal assistant, Mette, with whom he gets on well because she’s Danish and understands him “in every way possible…loyal and smart, and, importantly, as ugly as sin, so Yelena was quite at ease whenever we were away on one of our trips.” But in typical Kristian fashion he rashly determines to part ways with Mette the instant that he perceives silent disapproval from her:

“In movies, celebrities were always surrounded by yes-people, which was presented as something negative, a sign of poor judgement and egomania, but of course it wasn’t that simple in the real world, at least not for creatives, who needed a no-tension zone, a space where the answer was yes, yes, and never no.

“A personal assistant had to understand that a human is a complicated being, that a human is all things, that creativity and talent exist side-by-side with impatience and irascibility, often manifesting as petty-mindedness.

“Mette saw all that. Recently I’d suspected that she didn’t care for it, that she was averse to it, averse to me, and was doing her best to hide the fact.”

One of the things that Mette “sees” is Kristian’s one night stand with Sonja, a fellow Norwegian who attends Kristian’s honorary dinner as a representative of a prestigious art gallery. Kristian’s lack of respect and feeling for Sonja is reminiscent of his sexual encounters many years prior with Stina, Vivian, and Liz. We get the sense that the night with Sonja is not the first time that Kristian has cheated on Yelena, yet his interest in his wife as a person is a notable contrast to these other women.

Before he takes Sonja upstairs to his room, they share a drink at the hotel bar.

“I enquired a bit about her life, to make her feel I was interested in who she was.”

But regarding his wife:

“The strange thing about Yelena was that even now, after seven years, she remained a stranger to me. In principle we shared everything…Yet, I often got the feeling that I didn’t know her…She was completely autonomous, which I found unusual…her autonomy meant that she didn’t need me, that she might simply walk away whenever she felt like it…”

Kristian’s leverage over Yelena seems to be of a different quality, one that unsettles him, although he believes his insecurities about his importance to her “were moments of weakness, not of truth, for the life I gave her was something she’d be hard pressed to find elsewhere, with another man.”

A few pages later, Kristian gets physically aggressive with Yelena, demonstrating his irrepressible, brutish misogyny, even with the mother of his child. In my next post I will write about the scandal that precipitates Kristian’s violent anger against Yelena, Kristian’s needless resuscitation of the moment when he murdered the homeless man.

Parmenides of Elea, Cappella Palatina, Velia, Italy

I’m very intrigued by Kristian’s reaction to watching Vivian’s stage play interpreting Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus. The play begins with old film footage:

“It must have been Hans who’d made the films. He’d recreated the mood of his photographs to perfection. And found an actor who actually looked like Marlowe.”

Then,

“Terror seized me.”

“It was Marlowe. It was sixteenth century Greenwich.”

And moments later:

“Something was wrong. Something was terribly wrong.”

“It was as if the world was unraveling.”

“Liz must have sensed my horror, for she took my hand and squeezed it.”

How do we understand the play’s strong impact on Kristian, the fear that he feels? Especially when we consider his otherwise despite stoic demeanor, someone who seems incapable of being moved like this by art. Does he see his own life in the play? Is his terror because he just cannot get his head around Han’s apparent, unsettling ability to produce film footage and photographs that capture a century that long precedes the development of the necessary technology? Is Kristian’s fear enhanced by Hans’ abrupt and unannounced departure from his studio and possibly London?

Despite being deeply disturbed by the Vivian’s play, Kristian continues to study Hans’ photos, trying to make some sense of them and of Hans as well:

“Hans was the key.

“Where had he got these photographs from? The film sequence in the play?

“Who was he?

“Suppose it’s true…Suppose photographs exist from premodern times. How could it be explained? And how come no one knows about it?”

He consults his bookshelf and discovers that silver nitrate was discovered in the thirteenth century, the diaphragm in 1568, and the camera obscura in the eleventh century. Kristian begins to think that it actually might be possible that someone could have produced photographs and film in the 1600s, “[b]ut how had Hans tracked them down?”

I’m wondering if the enigma surrounding Hans is real or a product of Kristian’s active imagination? He’s been reading the novel by (the fictional) Paul Becker, Parmenides’ Secret, in which the narrator becomes ill after discussing “the philosophy of Night” in which “death was dawn. Life the night, death the day. It was the living who were dead, the dead who were living.”

Kristian concludes that this is a sick philosophy, “[t]o transmute death into an awakening – only a person at death’s door could think such a thing.”

We readers might seize this philosophy of Night as a metaphor for Kristian—murdering the homeless man marked the death of Kristian’s soul and, with the help of Hans, he has turned his death into an artistic awakening? I’m not sure. But I do feel challenged by this novel, in working out how the philosophical underpinnings of the novel converge with the story of Kristian’s life.

Ron Restrepo is one of the most intrepid readers I know, and I had fun talking to him about News From the Empire. We discuss that wonderful style, the novel’s polyvocal narration, and how Del Paso interrogates notions of empire and historiography. I hope that this conversation will persuade you to read this exuberant, funny, and tragic novel. Or if not, perhaps you will enjoy our discussion of the brief reign in Mexico of two European royals: Maximillan of Hapsburg Austria and his Belgian bride Charlotte, the daughter of King Leopold, I, and how Europe’s imperial ambitions in Latin America were debated, at times resisted, and other times poorly implemented, with the United States, France, Spain, and the Church in Rome each exercising its power in pursuit of conflicting interests.