A Faustian Coldness: Reviewing Knausgaard’s The School of Night
This review contains spoilers.
Kristian Hadeland is a Scandinavian transplant who moves to London at twenty to study photography in The School of Night, Karl Ove Knausgaard’s most unsettling novel. He is a narcissist, possibly a psychopath, and deeply offended by how everyone else exists in the world. He cannot tolerate criticism—except, inexplicably, from Hans, a tall, enigmatic Dutch man he befriends.
Though Kristian generally resists influence, Hans becomes his quiet exception. Spurred by Hans’s attention, Kristian begins a photographic series about the hidden structures of life: first architectural beams, then fish bones, then—escalating grotesquely—a dead cat he steals, boils, and photographs. The work earns praise just as Kristian’s violence tips into reality. After a confrontation with a homeless man, Kristian kills him. Despite video evidence and witnesses, he is never convicted. The mechanics of his escape are left deliberately opaque. When Kristian is released, Hans appears in a park, surrounded by pigeons, his body briefly contorting in a way that suggests something not entirely human.
Years later, Kristian is famous. He has a wife, a son, and a devoted following. At the height of his success, he publicly recounts the killing, unable to grasp why an “accident” might horrify people. The fallout is swift. Then his son dies. Everything Kristian has valued—status, legacy, control—is stripped away.
In exile, after twenty years of silence, Hans returns. He shows Kristian his son reflected in a bathroom mirror: present, unreachable, unable to hear him. The novel ends there—cold, unresolved, and devastating.
The School of Night is so evocative it almost breaks the word. I can’t think of another novel that earns its title as fully. Knausgaard doesn’t place you in a scene the way a movie does; he makes you inhabit it. I grew lightheaded and dizzy when reading the part where Kristian’s son is struck by a bus. Not because it was graphic—it wasn’t—but because the pacing is brilliant and felt like a moment many parents recognize. Trying to answer a call, out in a crowd, maybe you take your eyes off your child for a second, and the worst happens.
To me, the difference between literature and fiction is nuance and subtlety. Literature is elegant, restrained, and well crafted. In that way, this psychological novel’s greatest strength is also its Achilles’ heel. The book hinges on a Faustian bargain—Christopher Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus—with Hans as its axis. Kristian is absorbed into a friend group through Hans, who I read, unambiguously, as the devil. Some readers dispute this, but the evidence is there: the eyes rolling back, the mouth stretching unnaturally wide, the obsessive knowledge of Marlowe and the occult. Hans’s sudden reappearance after twenty years, just before Kristian’s son dies. His showing Kristian his dead son in a bathroom mirror. Still, Knausgaard resists spelling it out, and that restraint is precisely the point. We are given slightly less than enough to infer the bargain without being handheld.
Beyond Marlowe, the novel hums with Dostoevsky—Crime and Punishment in particular—both in its moral claustrophobia and its fixation on interior justification. That said, the book leaves a number of loose ends, and not all of them feel intentional. Certain threads—Vivian’s relationship with Kristina, the Egyptian man who follows (stalks, really) Kristian, Hans’s oddly specific hobby—are introduced with weight and then abandoned. These moments feel less like productive ambiguity and more like oversight, leaning on the reader to mistake absence for profundity.
Still, one of the novel’s most impressive achievements is its portrait of a narcissist—possibly a psychopath—rendered with unsettling precision. Knausgaard may be unmatched in his ability to make such a character both truthful and, against your will, compelling. I often didn’t agree with Kristian’s worldview, but I couldn’t easily argue with it either. The narrative messiness may even be by design: a man like this would not care what became of most people once they drift out of his orbit.
The only misstep is that narcissists are often charming. Kristian has none. Narcissists thrive when their ass is kissed. Kristian is angry at the world even when people are singing his praises. To that point, striking a deal with the devil for a life you don’t even seem to want is an odd motivation for a character.
Despite the novel’s disjointed moments and its deep immersion into a disturbed mind, Knausgaard’s writing does something paradoxical—it makes me feel sane. He violates every workshop rule and gets away with it. He has said he never knew what his characters would do next while writing, and it shows. Kristian spends pages explaining how he organizes his record collection—two or three times. It feels illicit, like someone lighting a joint at your high school lunch table. You’re not supposed to do that. And yet, somehow, it works. Proof that there’s no better writing resource than one’s own gut and imagination.
