Book Review: ‘The Morning Star’ by Karl Ove Knausgaard
When the going gets bizarrre, life goes on and on
The epigraph to The Morning Star by Karl Ove Knausgaard gets straight to the apocalypse by quoting Revelation 9:6: “And in those days shall men seek death, and shall not find it; and shall desire to die, and death shall flee from them” (KJV). I’ve always taken that passage to mean that the sufferings visited on humankind at the end of days would be so bad that people would prefer to die, but I’m not sure that’s congruent with Knausgaard’s designs. The Morning Star is a mysterious book, slice-of-life with a dash of horror and the philosopher’s tendency to favor questions over answers.
Knausgaard is a Norwegian author most known for his six-volume series of autobiographical novels titled My Struggle. Yes, that is a reference to Hitler’s Mein Kampf, but no, it is not out of sympathy for Hitler. Evan Hughes, examining that title’s justification for The New Yorker, describes Knausgaard’s work as apolitical. Nonetheless, Knausgaard does appear to have an interest in the lack of empathy that accompanies unspeakable crimes. Hughes remarks that Knausgard has spoken of a connection between Mein Kampf and the writings of Ander Breivik, who committed terrorist attacks in Norway in 2011: “I” and “we” loom large in their thought, but they have little conception of “you.” Original observations of this sort recur throughout The Morning Star.
The Morning Star is a collection of first-person accounts. Arne is afraid that his wife’s manic episodes are turning violent. Kathrine is a priest who has lost faith not in God but her marriage. Iselin is estranged from her family and pretty much everybody. Solveig meets an old classmate while working at a hospital and is drawn to him. Jostein is a reporter looking to reinvigorate his career when he gets a scoop on a serial killing. His wife Turid gets into trouble working the night shift at a psychiatric care unit. Egil is living a solitary life of reflection when Arne calls and asks for help getting out of a tight spot. Much of The Morning Star consists of these characters and others relating the affairs of their lives.
Not all, however, is mundane. Over these lives rises a new star — although no one is sure if that’s what it is. It arrives amidst an unprecedented heat wave and strange phenomena, some seemingly hallucinatory. Wildlife is swarming in vast numbers. The dead may not be staying dead . . . or is that guy a doppelgänger? The creature making odd sounds in the forest — kalik kalak — might be a large bird with a human face or it could be whatever just shed an awfully large reptilian skin. The new star may be good or evil — the Bible equates both Jesus and Satan with the morning star — but one of Turid’s patients lapses out of psychosis to pronounce doom with apparent lucidity. Are the end times at hand?
The characters note these events, but often as if they’re mere background noise. The first page raises the ceaselessness of reality: “That nothing ever stopped, that everything only went on and on . . . ” Thus, when the going gets bizarre, the kids still need breakfast, pregnancy tests need peed on, text messages read, addictions satisfied, coffee brewed, loneliness assuaged, bosses tolerated, and pets buried . . . even if they may not stay that way. The everchanging river of the quotidian constitutes the novel’s foreground, yet Knausgaard keeps it gripping.
In part, that’s due to a kind of steam-of-consciousness style. One thought or event flows to the next to the next to the next, the paranormal tucked amidst the everyday, the momentous swathed in the insignificant, but The Morning Star’s prose is a far cry from anything in Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway or James Joyce’s Ulysses. Each sentence is grammatically correct and coherent, aided by an astonishingly smooth translation by Martin Aitken. At 666 pages, The Morning Star is on the hefty side, but readers are likely to find themselves tearing through as questions mount.
They won’t find many answers. Some characters are introduced and nothing more, their lives suspended. Numerous plotlines break off never to return, some of them integral. Then, as things heat up toward the end, the novel shifts to a dream sequence, drops a cliff-hanger that feels world-historical, and ends with an essay on death. This leaves The Morning Star lopsided and incomplete but also open-ended and suggestive of all that might be going on outside the pages. That’s crucial for a book that reads like the big novels of the 19th-Century that sought not a window into life but a panoramic view. As such, the novel’s flaws are by design and thus perhaps not flaws at all.
When I purchased The Morning Star, I was afraid it would turn out to be the sort of pretentious literary fiction for which I have little patience anymore. Too often, literary fiction today is where writers without the imagination of genre writers go to deliver real insights into real life that amount to nothing but the clichés of their peers. After one chapter, I knew The Morning Star was better than that, so I’m looking forward to the next book in the cycle. The Wolves of Eternity is scheduled for release by Penguin Press this September.
Note: I wrote this for Medium.com. If you are reading this on another platform, it has been pirated. I quit the Medium Partner Program, so I’m not doing this for money. It is nice, however, to know someone’s reading, so please clap or comment to let me know somebody’s out there. Gladius adhuc lucet.
