The publisher's description of this book, and most of the reviews and readers' reactions I've read (many of them regarding the 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 ofA 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 stretches (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. We stay with them, more or less, for the next one hundred and fifty pages (so, overall, the story of Anna and her family gets a little bit more page weight than Bellori and On the Nature of Angels). I'm talking about page counts because I think it is easy to be vague and even inaccurate in saying what this strange book contains, and I want to try to articulate what is actually found in these five hundred pages. This is hardest to do with regard to this main storyline, concerning Bellori's life and work. 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 could figure in a catalog or investigation into the nature of angels, yet do not come into play here; we hear only in passing, for example, about the image of angels as guardians. Our narrator is concerned with angels as on a fault line between the human and the divine, and with fault lines generally: at the level of intellectual history, as changes between worldviews; and within that history, as momentous shifts from one situation to another. With regard to intellectual history, our narrator is able to use Bellori to muse on the shift to a modern worldview, since Knausgaard has positioned 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." At Bellori's 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, our narrator reminds us, by Newton -- but reason and observation were becoming ascendant over scriptural or traditional authority, and divisions being 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 become 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." Along with such assessing of Bellori's own moment in history, our narrator follows Bellori's work in assessing major shifts in the relations between humanity and divinity, the fault lines appearing as the great flood, the incarnation, and the crucifixion. Bellori posits that the real reason for the flood was that angels had overstepped their proper bounds, as referenced by one line in Genesis, by taking up with human women who then bore their children, the giant Nephilim. How shocked, Bellori realizes, must the angels have been, when their Lord, after flooding and killing everything in reaction to their transgression, then himself so much more completely crossed that same boundary by becoming man? And how fallen must the angels be now, after watching their Lord die?

Thinking over this book, I find that I try to make it come together. I try to see how its concern over shifts in human worldview lines up with its concern over divine-human relations. The interrelation of concerns is obvious but unneat. Knausgaard puts a lot out there, but it does not seem finally to have been carefully designed. Is there a parallel between the human-divine relations, the proximity of God to his people, as Bellori finds manifested by the angels, and the changing proximity of our narrator to us? Until the final fifty page "coda", we might think the narrator is simply the author Karl Klausgaard; but in those final pages the "I" tells us a story of his own life, in our time, and we learn that he is a Norwegian man named Henrik Vankel, protagonist of Klausgaard's first book, Out of This World. Vankel's father tells him when he is young that seagulls used to be angels; this is the one link back to the previous four hundred and fifty pages. The coda does not mention Bellori, does not have Vankel reference all that thinking that I guess he's been doing about angels, the flood, the life of Christ. Vankel does give us in these final pages the reflection that provides the book title, thinking about how "not even the past is done with, even that continues to change, as if in reality there is only one time, for everything, one time for every purpose under heaven." I had thought perhaps the title was in keeping with how much this book contains, resonant but not specifically tied together: a time for everything, and here is some of that everything. Vankel's emphasis is on the "a" - one single time for everything, all at once. What to make of it?