'' THE SCHOOL OF NIGHT '' : MASTER LIFE ESSAY

CHRISTOPHER MARLOWE'S. ' Doctor Faustus '  is about a man exceeding ambition who makes a deal with the Devil To gain the best of this world and pay for it in the next.

THIS 16th-century play figures in many ways in Karl Ove Knausgaard's new novel ' The School of Night, ' primarily with regard to its protagonist Kristian.

A 20-year-old Norwegian studying photography in 1985 London, Kristian already knows he's a great artist. He's irritated that people around him haven't figured this out, as he lets us know repeatedly and at length.

He has much to say about most everyone he meets and everything he experiences, whether it's the immediate family he loathes, the teachers and fellow students he holds in contempt for their received wisdom and facile criticism, the biddable women, the bands he listens to and books he reads or the cucumber-and-mayonnaise sandwiches he makes.

Kristian's elaborate self-telling should come as no surprise to anyone familiar with Knausgaard's work, whether it is '' My Struggle, '' his six volume work of alpha-male autofiction, or his current Morning Star series, in which '' The School of Night '' is the fourth of an intended six books.

'' My Struggles '' was near-defiant in its exclusive focus on the minute and mundane ;  the Morning Star books disclose a more expansive interest.

By no means is Knausgaard finding God in his fiction as does his old teacher, the Nobel laureate and Catholic convert Jon Fosse.  Instead, his storytelling in these new books is increasingly open to the metaphysical, fused with the macabre.

As much is evident from the opening page of '' The School of Night,'' translated into rich and readable English by Martin Aitken.

Kristian describes a '' despair that night and day rips and tears at me, the bottomless darkness '' that he has decided to put an end to, along with his life.

'' But first,'' he adds, '' I 'm going to write this.'' 

What follows is a 500-page suicide note about how he ended up living fatalistically alone on a remote Norwegian island, envious of the capacity that cats and dogs have '' to halt the advancement of their conscious minds at the ascertainment I am here.

Rather than proceeding, as we have done, to the question of why.'' 

'' The School of Night '' By Karl Ove Knausgaard.

The World Students Society thanks Randy Boyagoda.