Autumn 2026 – liam beran – The School of night

In 2009, the Norwegian author Karl Ove Knausgaard drops a bomb on his hometown. 

The first book of his autofiction series, My Struggle, is published. It contains an anecdote in which Knausgaard describes the aftermath of the alcohol-induced death of his father, a teacher and an influential local politician. He comes to his father’s home to find it in disrepair — filth and detritus, the stench of “mold and piss,” fill the space. His senile grandmother is there too, a ghost trapped in the home’s walls. 

“Her arms were no more than skin and bone… She stank of urine.”

Upon reading a pre-publication manuscript, his father’s family threatens legal action and begs Knausgaard to withhold the anecdote. Scared of retribution, he corrects some errors but does not cede to their ultimate request. After the book is released, his paternal family calls it “Judas literature” in Klassekampen, Norway’s third-largest print newspaper. His wife relapses into depression. 

Knausgaard keeps writing. 

After the second book of My Struggle is published, his mother calls him. Her request, as Knausgaard relayed it to The New York Times, is simple: “Can you stop now? Stop now. It’s too much. Think of your children.”

It takes four more books for him to stop; the final novel includes a 400-page essay on Hitler’s Mein Kampf, from which the series takes its name. By this time, the series has become an international sensation, and Knausgaard feels a combination of guilt, exhaustion, and a sense that “I’d done something wrong.” In a sweeping profile appearing in The New Republic in 2014, Knausgaard says he’s done writing autofiction. His next series, he says, will be something different. 

“Influenced by Borges and Calvino, the new book will have elements of the fantastical, the otherworldly. It won’t be about his life at all,” writes journalist Evan Hughes.

The School of Night is not that book.

After his sister overdoses during Christmas dinner, a photography student Kristian Hadeland, who is in Norway for the holidays, takes out his camera and starts photographing the empty rooms of his parents’ home and the distress left in his sister’s wake.

“It struck me suddenly that it was all still intact. Everything was the same as when they’d left. It could still be documented. It should be documented.”

The next day, Kristian’s father tells his wife there’s something wrong with their son: “I know you’ve said he’ll grow out of it. But it’s not going to happen. It’s what he is. He’s a narcissist, through and through.”

Seeing any parallels?

Welcome to The School of Night, Knausgaard’s death metal-inspired journey into Hell and the fourth book of his fantastical Morning Star series; Kristian appears as a minor character in two prior installments. 

When we meet him, Kristian is bitter, living by himself in London, and finding little success in his studies. He spends his nights drinking alone at pubs and meets the closest thing to a friend he’ll have on the novel’s fourth page — Hans, a quiet, enigmatic Dutch man who treats him as a dear companion.

An early reference to Christopher Marlowe, the playwright behind Dr. Faustus, offers some indication as to why. Hans’s guidance swiftly propels Kristian’s artistic progression and moral degradation — clandestinely photographing family members in distress becomes skinning a cat corpse to pose as a subject. Just as he’s nearing artistic realisation, Kristian commits a crime echoing American Psycho and Crime and Punishment and looks to Hans — whether knowingly or unknowingly — for salvation. The latter third of the novel details his accompanying moral reckoning, which passes about as smoothly as one might expect.

Serge Doubrovsky coined the term “autofiction” in the 1970s to refer to works neither fiction nor autobiography, but “fiction, of events and facts strictly real.” By Doubrovsky’s definition, The School of Night is not autofiction; the events depicted therein are entirely fictional and make no claim to be otherwise. 

I’d argue it’s not that simple, though. Knausgaard is toeing a dangerous line; in interviews, he’s described Kristian as a shadow self and the elements of himself as “magnified and put in him.” These elements are both temperamental and, in some instances, biographical: Kristian’s discontent with his photography, for example, is largely based on Knausgaard’s own disastrous early forays into poetry as a teenager and the scathing criticism from peers that followed.

Knausgaard isn’t Kristian, though, and empathy is, in his view, their greatest divider: As Knausgaard was writing My Struggle, he sometimes felt physical pain. By contrast, Kristian “doesn’t care” that he’s hurting his family for his art.

“That freedom comes for him in the end,” Knausgaard told The Guardian, “that, to me, is the Faust story.”

In a way, it was strange for Knausgaard to so decisively leave autofiction, a genre whose current ubiquity he shares a large deal of credit for. In 2026, autofiction, and questions surrounding it, is everywhere: played straight in Andrea Bajani’s The Anniversary; played for scandal in Rachel Cusk’s 2026 Life of M; played on the silver screen in 2024’s Sebastian and 2026’s Bitter Christmas.

Why? An algorithmic imperative that rewards author as influencer, tastemaker, and news topic is one likely reason; the idea, as Guardian journalist Alex Clark argues, that autofiction gives us a “new way to describe reality” in a time when truth is contested, is another; a publishing industry obsessed with the marketability of one’s lived experience, particularly if it’s traumatic, is a likely third. After all, its first mention came in a blurb on the back of Doubrovsky’s novel.

“Autofiction came to us as part of the language of commercial promotion, a way of marketing as new something almost as old as writing itself: the blending of the real and the invented,” critic Christian Lorentzen argues in Vulture.

But by forgoing an autofiction label, The School of Night fails in the opposite direction. The text ignores that many of Kristian’s struggles are incomprehensible without Knausgaard’s own life as a counterweight; it’s self-flagellation presented in the absence of a self. The whip cracks into the air. We’d like it to crack into a body.

One example: Throughout the text, Kristian worries about being perceived as gay — most significantly during a scene in a diner where two girls mistake Kristian’s meeting with his professor, which ends in tears, as a gay couple “breaking up” (Kristian’s response is to walk up to the girls and call them “dogs.”) To a reader who has read My Struggle and encountered Knausgaard’s struggles with internalised homophobia — he told The Guardian in 2015 that he was often called gay by other children in his youth — these events provide a valuable bridge between Knausgaard and Kristian.

To someone who hasn’t read My Struggle, the events feel like shots in the dark disconnected from any larger narrative or textual happenings. Such instances abound throughout the text, and the reader wonders if Knausgaard has forgotten that he is not writing a life, but a novel; long forays into Henrik Ibsen’s oeuvre or the exacts of Kristian’s eating habits (mostly noodles, beans and premade pastries, if you’re wondering), charmingly self-effacing as they relate to a real human’s life, in the fictional form are rendered inert. One wonders how much of this is related to Knausgaard’s own admission that he tends not to plot a novel nor favor heavy edits to it.

Given this reliance on biographical detail, it’s frustrating that the one thing in the novel that truly and unequivocally happened in real life — Knausgaard’s deal with the devil to make My Struggle a success — is rendered so ambiguously in the novel. In real life, Knausgaard publicly called upon Satan in a 2009 newspaper article, prior to the publication of My Struggle, to make the novel a success: “Come to me too, for fuck’s sake, oh Prince of Darkness! We can write a book together, I’m more than happy to sell what’s left of my soul to make the book so big that the world will lie at my feet.”

In The School of Night, Kristian never makes a Faustian bargain as it relates to art. His request to Hans, whom he has no certainty is a supernatural figure, is ultimately practical: to be freed from potential incarceration. And Hans, devil as he might be, isn’t culpable for Kristian’s actions: Hans does not tell him to steal a dead cat; Hans does not tell him to photograph his sister’s overdose. 

Every terrible choice Kristian made in the past, and all the terrible choices that follow, are entirely his own, and one can hear the black metal scream of “This is all my fault” in each misdeed. One almost imagines it might be Knausgaard’s voice screaming it.

When tragedy finally befalls Kristian — some thirty pages before the novel’s end — it’s not a surprise. The novel reveals itself in its first pages as a suicide note. 

The real question, then, is what to make of this tragedy. 

Is it, as Knausgaard suggests, Kristian’s punishment for artistic freedom? Is it his punishment for freedom from incarceration? Does it have anything to do with Kristian at all? 

The School of Night doesn’t offer a clear answer. The novel’s last page reads like an acknowledgements section, though it has no heading. Its author, presumably Knausgaard, notes that the distinction between literature and life “is porous and osmotic, the traffic in both directions considerable,” and that “as a character, Kristian Hadeland has no basis in reality.” 

“One of the people who read it while it was still taking shape asked me who the main character was modelled upon. I replied, truthfully: no one.”

This statement, on face, seems completely irreconcilable with Knausgaard’s assertion that Kristian is a “shadow self,” that Kristian’s deal with the devil is analogous to his own (for good measure, one could point to Knausgaard’s comments to LitHub that, to create Kristian, “I took a lot from myself at 18 or 19.”). One wishes to take Knausgaard, famously quiet and pensive in interviews, by the shoulder, give him a good shake and shout “Pick a side!” 

(Having said that, I empathize with the fact that nuance is invariably lost in translation, and it’s possible that Knausgaard’s acknowledgement makes more sense in its original Norwegian.)

Perhaps this is the work of an overzealous critic. Perhaps this is the risk authors court in writing autofiction — by surrendering your life to the page, you’ve created a celestial body whose gravity threatens to pull all your subsequent works into its orbit. We have 3,500 pages of Knausgaard to draw from; faced with a seemingly impossible question, who wouldn’t turn to them?

Perhaps Knausgaard just couldn’t resist himself.

In the spirit of having no good answers — an interview request I sent to Vintage, the Penguin Random House imprint that published The School of Night in English, did not receive a response — I’d like to offer my own, likely flawed, analysis.

Knausgaard has spoken at length about his difficulties accepting touch from other men. He told The Guardian in 2015 that he tries “to avoid” things such as embracing another man, as he’s “never felt at ease with it at all.” 

“‘Those small things like giving a hug to [a] man,’ he says, almost wincing, ‘I try to avoid it.’”

It is notable, then, that the novel closes with a physical gesture of compassion: Hans holding Kristian’s shoulder as he comes to terms with an unimaginable loss.

Hans is mercurial and, at the same time, perhaps the best-defined character in the novel. He is kind and cruel; he summons Kristian on a whim and dismisses him with the same capriciousness; he pushes Kristian to artistic fulfillment but takes no responsibility when that artistic fulfillment hurts innocent people. 

He delights, above all else, in seeing Kristian’s works come to life. 

We are the devil, and Knausgaard is our protégé. He’s been performing for us for over a decade. And, after reading The School of Night, you might, too, want to give him a gesture of warmth. To tell him that it’s time to stop hurting. And, after reading The School of Night, you might, too, want to give him a gesture of warmth. To tell him that it’s time to stop hurting.