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The Wolves of Eternity: A Novel Audiobook
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An NPR Best Book of 2023
“Knausgaard is back, with a compulsively readable new novel.” —The Washington Post
“The Wolves of Eternity, like some 19th-century Russian novel, wrestles with the great contraries: the materialist view and the religious, the world as cosmic accident versus embodiment of some radiant intention. Is this world shot through with meaning or not? Has there ever been a better time to ask?” —Sven Birkerts, The New York Times Book Review
From the internationally bestselling author Karl Ove Knausgaard, a sprawling and deeply human novel that questions the responsibilities we have toward one another and ourselves—and the limits of what we can understand about life itself
In 1986, twenty-year-old Syvert Løyning returns from the military to his mother’s home in southern Norway. One evening, his dead father comes to him in a dream. Realizing that he doesn’t really know who his father was, Syvert begins to investigate his life and finds clues pointing to the Soviet Union. What he learns changes his past and undermines the entire notion of who he is. But when his mother becomes ill, and he must care for his little brother, Joar, on his own, he no longer has time or space for lofty speculations.
In present-day Russia, Alevtina Kotov, a biologist working at Moscow University, is traveling with her young son to the home of her stepfather, to celebrate his eightieth birthday. As a student, Alevtina was bright, curious and ambitious, asking the big questions about life and human consciousness. But as she approaches middle-age, most of that drive has gone, and she finds herself in a place she doesn’t want to be, without really understanding how she got there. Her stepfather, a musician, raised her as his own daughter, and she was never interested in learning about her biological father; when she finally starts looking into him, she learns that he died many years ago and left two sons, Joar and Syvert.
Years later, when Syvert and Alevtina meet in Moscow, two very different approaches to life emerge. And as a bright star appears in the sky, it illuminates the wonder of human existence and the mysteries that exist beyond our own worldview. Set against the political and cultural backdrop of both the 1980s and the present day, The Wolves of Eternity is an expansive and affecting book about relations—to one another, to nature, to the dead.
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"Knausgaard is back, with a compulsively readable new novel . . . The good news, at least for hardcore Knausgaard fans, is that the second book in [his] series, The Wolves of Eternity, poses more questions than it answers . . . Knausgaard once again proves a thoughtful and wide reader. Dostoevsky, Tolstoy and Rilke are referenced alongside Marina Tsvetaeva, the poet who gives the book its title, and Nikolai Fyodorov, a pre-revolutionary Russian futurist who believed that all human effort should be directed toward resurrecting the dead . . . Knausgaard remains one of the great chroniclers of the moment-by-moment experience of life. Alevtina will be thinking deep thoughts about evolution one minute and contemplating meatballs the next. Knausgaard is acutely in tune with the simultaneity of life’s majesty and banality . . . Although the final shape of Knausgaard’s latest enterprise is not yet visible, there’s famously no smoke without wildfires. It’s likely something wicked this way comes."
— The Washington Post
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A marvelous and mysterious novel that will stay with readers long after Syvert and Alevtina take their leave of one another.
— Shelf Awareness -
A curiously affecting tale about science and spirit . . .
— Kirkus Reviews -
“Compulsively readable…Knausgaard is acutely in tune with the simultaneity of life’s majesty and banality.”
— Washington Post -
“Knausgaard’s book doesn’t shy away from big questions about the substance of his characters’ inner lives…[and] captures the spirit of a Russian novel.”
— Publishers Weekly -
[Knausgaard] brings to life—even celebrates—the complex and ambivalent give-and-take between men, between women and between men and women. These relationships, full of misunderstandings, concessions and reconciliations, feel real, without agenda . . . The Wolves of Eternity, like some 19th-century Russian novel, wrestles with the great contraries: the materialist view and the religious, the world as cosmic accident versus embodiment of some radiant intention. Is this world shot through with meaning or not? Has there ever been a better time to ask?
— Sven Birkerts, The New York Times Book Review -
Knausgaard is a master . . . guiding us inexorably and irresistibly towards the next installment.
— Financial Times -
Inspired . . . Knausgaard’s book doesn’t shy away from big questions about the substance of his characters’ inner lives . . . [he] captures the spirit of a Russian novel.
— Publishers Weekly -
Not a conventional sequel . . . Revives fiction as an inquiry into the cosmos, re-enchanting the latter with those beguiling secrets science had stolen from it.
— The Guardian -
The range of subjects The Wolves of Eternity explores is fascinating, but the elements of the novel that gave me the most joy were also the most prosaic . . . Perhaps I’ll be in the minority to say it, but I wanted The Wolves of Eternity to be even longer.
— The Sunday Times -
There’s a greater power, I reckon, to be gleaned in the ordinariness of things . . . The less The Wolves of Eternity novel is about, the more it has to say.
— The Telegraph -
Inspired . . . Knausgaard’s book doesn’t shy away from big questions about the substance of his characters’ inner lives . . . [he] captures the spirit of a Russian novel.
— Publishers Weekly
Awards
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A New York Times Book Review Editor’s Choice of the Week
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About Karl Ove Knausgaard
Karl Ove Knausgaard is an award-winning Norwegian author whose autobiographical novel cycle, My Struggle, spans six volumes which have been translated into over fifteen languages. This international success was coined “Scandinavia’s greatest literary event” by Helsingin Sanomat and sold more than 600,000 copies in Norway alone. His debut novel, Out of the World, won the Norwegian Critics Prize for Literature, and his second novel, A Time for Everything, was longlisted for the 2010 International Dublin Literary Award.
About the Narrators
Edoardo Ballerini, an American actor, director, film producer, and multiaward–winning narrator. He has won several Audie Awards for best narration, including for 2019’s Best Male Narrator of the Year. He was named by Booklist as winner of their 2023 Voice of Choice Award, and was named a Golden Voice by AudioFile magazine in 2019. He has narrated over two hundred audiobooks, from classics to modern masters, from bestsellers to the inspirational, from Nobel and Pulitzer Prize winners to spine-tingling series, and much more. In television and film, he is best known for his roles in A Murder at the End of the World, The Sopranos, 24, I Shot Andy Warhol, Dinner Rush, and Romeo Must Die. He is also trained in theater and continues to do much work on stage.
Natasha Soudek was raised in the South, speaks native German, lived in Berlin and Vienna, and finally settled in the Lower East Side of New York City. After honing her stage presence by studying acting and playing hundreds of live music shows (singing and playing bass), she moved to LA to record with Channel/DreamWorks and act on TV. Her voice is as distinct and memorable as the range of characters she’s played on-screen.