A Time for Everything

Synopsis: A spellbinding pursuit of divine mysteries from My Struggle’s Karl Ove Knausgaard, whose dazzling prose and landscapes evoke Nabokov and Knut Hamsun

In the sixteenth century, Antinous Bellori, a boy of eleven, is lost in a dark forest and stumbles upon two glowing beings – one carrying a spear, the other a flaming torch. This event is decisive in Bellori’s life, and he thereafter devotes himself to the pursuit and study of angels, the intermediaries of the divine. Stretching from the Garden of Eden to the present, A Time for Everything reimagines key allegorical encounters between humans and angels: the glow of the cherubim watching over Eden; the profound love between Cain and Abel despite their differences; Lot’s shame in Sodom; Noah’s isolation before the flood; Ezekiel tied to his bed, prophesying ferociously; the death of Christ; and the emergence of sensual, mischievous cherubs in the seventeenth century. Alighting upon these dramatic scenes ­– from the Bible and beyond – Knausgaard’s imagination takes flight. The result is a dazzling display of storytelling at its majestic, spellbinding best. Incorporating and challenging tradition, legend, and the Apocrypha, these penetrating glimpses hazard chilling questions: can the nature of the divine undergo change, and can the immortal perish?