Meeting Karl Ove Knausgård
On a winter’s morning, outside the Three Lives bookstore in New York’s West Village, Karl Ove Knausgård has just finished signing copies of his latest novel, The School of Night. His features are familiar from the dustjackets – the gray-blue eyes, the grizzled beard – but he is surprisingly tall and his signature silver mane is now cropped short around the ears. Gone, too, are the cigarettes, traded for a vape. The School of Night is the fourth novel in Knausgård’s “Morning Star” series. It takes its name from a secret society of Elizabethan poets and scientists, which included the explorer Sir Walter Raleigh and the play-wright Christopher Marlowe.
