A Time to Every Purpose Under Heaven

Angels have always eluded mankind. "A Time for Everything" is the tale of a sixteenth century boy by the name of Antinous Bellori and his encounters with angels. Norwegian author Karl O. Knausgaard drew upon much of the tales of angels, as he draws many connections to biblical stories such as Cain and Abel, Sodom and Gomorrah, Noah's ark and many other stories and the hand that angels played in them all. For anyone entranced with the concept of angels, "A Time for Everything" is a fine read, expertly translated from the original Norwegian by James Anderson.

Wings of Desire from Bookforum, Feb/Mar 2010 by Eric Banks By the time Antinous Bellori encounters angels in what we can euphemistically call the flesh, the creatures are no longer those divine messengers familiar from the Old Testament. Nor have they yet mutated into the chubby, rosy-cheeked babies hoisting puffy clouds that Tiepolo et al. gloried in depicting. The eleven-year-old Antinous, lost in the darkening forest near his northern Italian home circa 1562, stumbles on a pair of the flickering fallen ones just as they're sinking their bared teeth into a raw fish. The sight is horrible, more sublime than miraculous: "Their faces are white and skull-like, their eye sockets deep, cheekbones high, lips bloodless. They have long, fair hair, thin necks, slender wrists, clawlike fingers. And they're shaking. One of them has hands that shake." As they devour their sushi, their rolled-back eyeballs make them look blind--or even dead. Then with a dazzling light they depart; for Antinous, the experience is transformative. According to Karl O. Knausgaard's A Time for Everything, the encounter leads Antinous to a life of restless theological inquiry, eventually yielding his anonymous On the Nature of Angels, published in 1584 but consigned to oblivion until its 1859 rediscovery in London. By then, of course, to speculate about angels is to be embarrassingly reminded of the superstitious past. The Norwegian author's epic biography of the fictional Antinous is one layer peeled from the strata of stories constituting A Time for Everything. This baroque novel folds a text within a text within a text to tell what happened to the nature of the divine over the course of all history, from creation to the present. Running parallel to the story of Antinous are stories of the angels' salad days, the long span between the expulsion of Adam and Eve from the garden and the explosion of God's wrath in the great flood. Knausgaard's rotund novel seems itself out of time, a throwback to the grand European novel of midcentury; it is at once a sort of faux theological disquisition; a philosophical quest for the meaning of time, decay, and exile; and an unabashedly literary excursion into storytelling, with digressions narrating the psychological dynamics of Cain and the deprivations of Noah's extended family in Nod. The embedded novellas--of Cain and Abel, of the peasants of Nod as they flee up the mountainside in advance of the seawater that will exterminate them, of Abraham and Lot and Ezekiel--are themselves wrenched out of historical time: Cain and Abel wear britches and leather boots; the people of Nod tote hunting rifles, take notice of the quality of the morning light on the fjord, and build frame farms to take advantage of the lucrative market in mink breeding. In one delirious scene, Noah's father is pictured in the riotous summer market, a county-fair setting filled with pickpockets, carneys, and a freak show featuring the corpse of a murdered Nephilim, the ant

A Time for Everything is one of the most intriguing works of literature to appear in the past decade. Its pages are filled with detailed and arresting imagery, strange flights of imagination, and intellectual exploration. It is also ultimately dark and disturbing. To say that it deals with the history of angels, retells the stories of Cain and Abel, and of Noah and the Flood, and ends in despair for the fictional author merely touches the surface. It is not a novel in any normal sense of the word, but rather an important work of art merging multiple literary genres. An impressive depth of emotional and intellectual engagement with fundamental issues about life and art is offered in a prose that is both powerful and striking. The author has just won the 2009 Brage Prize in Norway for the first volume of his six-volume semi-autobiography, entitled Min Kamp (My Struggle), which I hope his English-language publishers will bring out soon. Karl O. Knausgaard is a writer set to step onto the stage of major world literature. A word about the English version: although I don't know Norwegian, and can only assume the text is even more impressive in the original, James Anderson's translation reads beautifully. This can't have been an easy text to translate--it is long, complex and demanding in every sense. Yet time and again the language and the ideas come through so strikingly that it is clear Knausgaard has been well served by his translator. Archipelago Books are to be congratulated for continuing to bring American readers into contact with the best and most challenging literature being written around the world.