The publisher's description of this book, and most of the reviews and readers' reactions I've read (many of them regarding UK publication this past summer of this same translation, under the title A Time to Every Purpose Under Heaven), mostly prepare you for the opening pages: a story of a boy lost in the woods at night, who comes upon two men with wings. It is a lovely story, but only takes you a little ways into A Time For Everything. The story is told to us by a narrator who occasionally announces himself as an "I" or a "me" as he tells us of Antinous Bellori, the lost boy who in 1584 witnesses two angels and who then devotes his life to researching and writing a book called On the Nature of Angels.

The dominant storyline of A Time For Everything is our narrator's consideration of Bellori's work on angels, including their appearances in the book of Genesis. But barely forty pages in, the narrator disappears for two long streches (with just a few pages' reappearance in the transition between the two). For a hundred pages, we are immersed in the story of Cain and his complicated but fond love for his younger quicker brother Abel. Then for two hundred pages, we read a moving story of people at the time of the flood. We meet Noah's sister Anna and her family in the days when the rain keeps falling and falling and they eventually take to the mountains to try to keep above the rising sea. We only briefly read of Noah's instruction from God to build an Ark, and how he and his sons set to work building a huge boat in a field up in the mountains. The narrative spends more time falling back to tell us of Noah and Anna's childhood, their relationship with their father Lamech, the joy that their kid brother Barak brings, and a family tragedy. When we circle back around to the days of rain, it is again to tragedy, heightened when Anna's daughter Rachel gives birth to a baby boy, only to carry him up and up until they can go no further, and must huddle on the peak of a mountain that is now an island, looking out at the other mountain peaks turned islands, other people visible on the nearest one, also looking out across the vast waterscape. And the water is still rising.


Then, three hundred and some pages into the book, we are back with our narrator and Bellori. Other descriptions of A Time For Everything say, to my mind too vaguely, carelessly, that it tells us all about angels. But there are many stories, myths, ideas about angels that would figure in a catalog yet do not come into play here; we hear only in passing, for example, about the image of angels as guardians.
especially in the relations between humans and the divine, and he sees angels as inhabiting the intermediary between the two, and therefore as informants about the weather there.
What our narrator is interested in is fault lines in human history -- both at the level of intellectual history, fault lines between worldviews, and also within that history, changes from what situation to another.

At the meta-level in the history of ideas -- how we think about our world -- and Knausgaard has situated Bellori as one of those "obsessed young men who, in the first decades of the modern age, ensconced themselves in rooms in great cities all round Europe to think." And while at this time angelology could still go hand in hand with geography, or numerology and alchemy be pursued alongside studies of motion and matter -- as they were, we are reminded, by Newton -- a worldview was coming into being in which reason and observation were ascendant over scriptural or traditional authority, and strict divisions made: material vs immaterial, concrete vs abstract, physical vs spiritual, scientific vs historical, natural vs divine. "In reality it was just a matter of time before the situation would beome what it's turned into today, where everything connected with the holy is regarded as abstract, so that we literally do not see the materiality of what is holy, whereas everything that concerns physical nature is exclusively seen as concrete, and we lose sight of physical nature's immaterial aspects, too."

"Always ask yourself, what if it's the complete opposite?" Lamech


Our narrator is intrigued with this moment, where he sees alchemy and physics, numerology and logic, superstition and reason, scriptural authority and observation, still intermixed but beginning to be segregated. Newton, he reminds us, developed his scientific theories in trying to understand the divine presence in creation, but kept his less verifiable suppositions mostly concealed from the public.

Newton in Cambridge, Leibniz in Nuremberg, Descartes in Utrecht.

These two levels are not separate, not really, and maybe that is why Knausgaard has put the story of Anna et al (within history) in the same book as the story of Bellori (ideas about history).


And just as this book has both sections where we are immersed in a story and sections where we are regarding the story,
~ looking at fault lines within history and also regarding it.

I. At the level of experience, within the story, Within: the Flood: what was it like before. narrator ~ we can't know. it was different.
Before the flood, our narrator calculates, there must have been sixteen hundred years of human history.
human-divine relations as manifest by angels, in three periods:

1. before the Flood up until angels intercourse with humanity too far out of bounds out of balance the Nephilim.
-----this is the location of the story of Cain & Abel, near beginning, early, just a bit after the Garden.
----AND the story of Anna et al, marking the time just before the end of this period.

hmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm. here, our narrator is at a distance. just as the Lord ~ well, as narator discusses, actually quite close, walking in the cool of the evening in the Garden. calling out to Adam. making clothes for his people, after he tells them they are banished. and again, appears to Cain. and later to Noah.
but the boundary maintained? what does narrator conclude about this?
because through those stories, the boundary between author~Creator and Creation is maintained. we are simply in the story. the narrator does not announce himself.


2. from Flood until the Incarnation, when the Lord himself crosses bound ~ which means, annihilates? the boundary.

(in relation to hmmmmmmm above. here the narrator never fully disappears. continues to comment as relays story of Lot, and of Ezekiel. he is with us in the story, as we approach and then consider moment when the Lord joins His story, enters his creation. .....I don't know, I don't think Knausgaard thought this through, don't think he designed with care the interactions of the sections of his book, the levels of story, the levels of fault lines. Levels of story: narrator present. narrator gone, immersed in story. Levels of fault lines. Bellori & Newton & Descartes, modernity, science reason. dichotomies. Bellori sees through them. and sees the fault lines, the changes, in relation btw divine and humanity. )

-----story of Lot. Soddom & Gomorrah. that's after the Flood right?! not sure! (consult Genesis: the Garden, Adam & Eve, expelled, Cain & Abel, Seth, descendants thr generations .. begot who begot .. quick to Noah right?)
----story of Ezekiel, who eats God's scroll. Ezekiel becomes one with God's Word. *but also*: God's Word becomes one with flesh & blood man. first this, God's Word incarnated. then God himself.
[btw 2 & 3, period not covered: the life of Christ. angels not present. there at birth and at death but not imbetween. not during his life. narrator ~ Bellori imagines~understands that this is beause they are ~reeling. horrified, aghast, bewildered. the Lord himself has crossed the boundary that, when they approached it, prompted him to Flood everything.

3. after the Death of Christ, which the angels know is really the death of God. so from then on, this after, the third period, is Godlessness.


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Until the final 50 page coda, we might think the narrator is simply the author Karl Klausgaard speaking as himself; but in those final pages the "I" tells us a story of his own life, in our time, and we learn -- assuming that this "I" is the same as the one speaking throughout the book -- that he is a Norwegian man named Henrik Vankel.


Henrik Vankel is the protagonist of Klausgaard's first book, Out of This World.
A Time For Everything is the second book in a trilogy about Venkel. no. that LHild rvw seems to have been wrong about it being a trilogy. since now publishing 2500 page autobiogr novel ~Proustian~ in six installmnts. calling it Min Kamp = My Struggle = Mein Kampf (!). Bold.

So, this book is perhaps enigmatic because it is an installment in a very long work, an installment n which we mostly follow Venkel's study of On the Nature of Angels. The Genesis stories are beautiful portraits of characters and relationships, but what resonance do these stories have in this context? What meaning do they have for Venkel? What does the final coda have to do with anything that came before? ~ fathers, siblings ~. We could discuss possibilities -- and by asking these questions about how the parts of this book relate, we might go a ways toward understanding how this strange book is a 'novel' -- but I came away unsure that Klausgaard has intended a coherence. Maybe he spends two hundred pages on the story of Anna and her people, , because there *is* a time for everything. I kind of like that idea, but I also kind of find it too cutely clever, and anyway it seems unlikely that Klausgaard intended that by his title.

no it's not. just read in the coda where he considers how the past continues to be with you, and to change, and muses on this as *one* time for everything. 'one time to every purpose under heaven.'
emphasis on one. all at once. everything at once.

also, connectn btw coda & rest of book: dead seagull. father tells young Henrik "Did you know that seagulls were angels once?" shows him, under wing, a tiny little arm, pine-needle-thin fingers. vestigal.

so Henrik's father re seagulls were angels, Henrik narrates 200ish pages re Bellori on nature of angels.

~ what happens at end to Bellori? and to the angel he has captured, who we are given to understand did not die a final death but has been dying over and over and over, with Raphael tending to him, leaving him against the tree after he dies, returning to him .


a note about Klausgaard: the Guardian published a column in which he listed his 'ten favorite books about angels' and among these he includes Bellori's On the Nature of Angels. From all other indications, Bellori and his book are fictional. Klausgaard made up Bellori's book, and here he includes it on a list of favorite books. So maybe he is more consciously playful then was apparent to me in A Time For Everything?
I do not like that article, other comments found by Knausgaard in interviews (reading ggl transl after search 'Knausgard intervju'), too glib. I want author to speak re his book, closer to it. seriously, somewhat from within it.



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beautiful writing, moving, rich, imaginative, thoughtful. provocative: get lost in it, associations, reminded of so much. reminding.


in general reminded me of Calasso - not a novel, but a ruminative retelling. immersion in a subject (in Cadmus & Harmony, the subject is Greek mythology > the Greek mind. here, the subject is ~ the Bible~Genesis > the relations between humanity and the divine. and how humanity views their world.)

but here, two long stories separated out from the ruminations

Anna & Lamach & Noah & Barak I found moving, and reminded me of Per Peterson Out Stealing Horses. there the tragedy-memory was in the context of man reflecting on his early life and his father. which ~ the coda ~ maybe this is, also. but book here d n come tgthr as a whole like that.
re Anna et al, rather tightly structured within itself, sets up a frame:
the days of rain, the cherubs leaving.
moves back to Lamech at his brother's funeral, then back to the childhood of Anna and Noah, forward to Barak, then his death, then long part re Anna's meeting then life with Javan. finally return to Lamech at the funeral where he first cracks - reexperiencing the day of Barak's death "who was that man on the roof?" who he saw when arriving back in the morning from market. gets a ladder later, goes up there. then goes & rounds up the cows "Come along, girls!" he sang "Come along, girls!". Anna & Javan realize what is happening, Lamech's mental life deteriorates, now he is lying as an invalid when the rain is falling, the water rising.

back to narrator. Noah in the stark sandy world after the flood. everything is different.
~ complaints re Knausgaard setting his pre-flood human life in a Norwegian style landscape. fjords. farmhouse. advanced: guns. clothes: made professionally? some are 'homespun' but this is a distinguishing description of Abel's clothes, so generally their clothes are obtained through barter ~ ).
but to the complaints, I say Knausgard set up as ~ what if. (Lameh: Always ask yourself, What if it's the opposite?). we know little of those 1600 years of human history, human way of life must have advanced good bit, and the landscape would have been totally different than after the flood, the weight of water that so changed, demolished it. so imagine it this way.


stories with commentary, esp Ezekiel, and maybe all of the narrator's overt presence reminds of Saramago. which I like very much. irony ~ cool, dry, factual accounting.



book as a whole, left with sense that it does not add up.

writing a review not easy, because my impulse is to make it fit together. int in fault lines. antiquity /medieval/ modernity. ascendance of science. view: materiality vs divine. divine as immaterial and (so) as unchanging. Bellori saw angels, knew they were corporeal - they were eating, and knew they were a state different from how they were in the Bible. so, they had changed. so he, situated at this moment when division between material and immaterial was being reified, was specially suited to resist that view. ~ . how does that line up with his work, his finding? = the three periods of human-divine relations.

I don't know. maybe should back off the statement that int in fault lines. which seems to have gotten me all involved in trying to assess the various levels, how at work in the book. how the attention to worldview change, and human-dvine change, and narrator present or absent are parallel or meaningfully related in some way.


just review: not really a catalog of angels. ok if want can say these two: world view fault line, human-divine fault lines. seem might add up, but do not. final coda.

hard to write, because infinity of directions could go ~ is this my trouble with getting anything down, in general? not perfectionism in sense of wanting it to be perfect to be well received, but yestrying twoard some kind of perfection, saying what is the case, and with this book, so long, so much in it (and seems does not add up), could get head into it in any number of ways.

..I'm leaving out some that d n at lst yet attend to closely: anna w javan, that's what 70 pages? and the coda.