Karl O. Knausgaard was born in Norway in 1968 and is the author of Out of This World (Ute av verden) and A Time for Everything, which was nominated for the Nordic Council Prize. The first volume of his Min Kamp (My Struggle) was the winner of Norway's 2009 Brage Prize.In 2008 at the Guardian, he named his top ten angel books. One entry on the list:
The Divine Comedy by DanteRead about the other entries on the list.
Even though no author has given a richer and more complex picture of the angels in heaven than Dante, it is of course his fallen ones that are most memorable. The angels are connected with light andmovement - everything in heaven is moving - in contrast to hell, where each circle restricts movement further. At the bottom of the universe, Lucifer himself reigns over a frozen lake. Hell is immobility, and in the intensity and concentration of this evil, where only the heads of the sinners are above the ice, heaven seems endlessly remote. Which it is.
Inferno appears on Jon McGregor's list of the top 10 dead bodies in literature, John Mullan's list of ten of the best visions of hell in literature, and Peter Stanford's list of the ten best devils in film and literature; The Divine Comedy is one of George Weigel's five essential books for understanding Christianity.
Also see: Ten of the best angels in literature.
--Marshal Zeringue
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