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In Karl Ove Knausgaard’s apocalyptic new novel, “The Morning Star,” a bird says to a journalist, “chirp, you fat asshole,” or so the journalist thinks. “No chirping and no sleep.”
It’s not the only strange messenger bird. “The more beautiful the death, the more beautiful”, a bright and frightening new star has risen in the Norwegian sky. People are filled with fear and curiosity, mostly the former.
The animals began to behave strangely. Landslides of crabs clatter on the roads; birds with scales are screaming in the forest. Time also behaves strangely. That man over there, wasn’t I at his funeral? What are those big, ox-like, humanoid creatures doing in the forest?
“How can we be modern when there is death around us?” Knausgaard writes in Volume Two of his epic “My Struggle” series. asked. In “Morning Star,” he takes this question as if it were a rugby ball and runs with him off the court.
This is a whimsical, gothic, Bible-obsessed novel with dark hawk themes and horror overtones. It is set for two days at the end of summer. A group of characters stare at the same enchanting sky. There’s Arne, a professor of literature who’s worried he’s getting chubby – Knausgaard’s men hate looking soft – and his wife, Tove, who is an artist.
There’s Kathrine, a priest and Bible translator who wants to break up her boring marriage, and Iselin, a once-promising student who now works at a grocery store. There’s Jostein, a lecherous, disgraced, sultry art journalist, and his wife, Turid, who, like Knausgaard once was, is a nurse in a psychiatric hospital.
(Turid, like Shakespeare’s Titus, is among the names in which it is very important not to skip the second vowel when spelling.)
Fans of the six-book “My Struggle” series – and I’m among them with my reservations about the final volume – will want to know: Does “Morning Star” work the same magic that these novels do? The answer is yes for a long time.
Knausgaard retains the ability to lock you into storytelling as if you were in a hammer beam. He takes the mundane things of life—the need for an infiltration, the joy of killing pesky flies—and misses them. It manages to be twice as absorbent as most other leading brands in the details of everyday existence, without dealing with lyricism.
This is a novel about people in distress, even before a new eye shining in the sky opens. There are many bad dads, health problems, and relationships in decline. His people are blissfully, realistically, disturbed most of the time.
Ray Bradbury said that one way to start writing a short story or poem is to make a list of 10 things you hate and start breaking them down. Knausgaard is a master of this type of messy attack.
He writes to this mundane world, starting to stitch up on aspects of horror. He is adding these details slowly, perhaps too slowly. While gross things happen in the end—members of a death metal band are being swarmed by something worse than the critics—Knausgaard never really gets into his script. Boiling does not boil.
Had this book been “The Shining,” Jack Torrance would have finished his novel. He, Wendy, and Danny would see crazy things through the window and occasionally a screaming madman would bang on the basement door. Scatman Crothers would show up so they could talk to Jack about the fundamental nature of isolation for several hundred pages.
In other words, “The Morning Star” becomes a somewhat programmatic novel of ideas. In the poems of Knausgaard, Kierkegaard, and Nietzsche and Rilke, he violates the concepts of faith, free will, transmigration, the nature of angels, meaning and nothingness.
A woman named Sigrid says this, and it’s absolutely true: “Wrong people talk about God. So it’s not surprising that no one believes it anymore.”
Knausgaard’s death continues to be haunted. One character says: “Our insight into death has not changed. Einstein knew as little about death as the first cave dwellers.”
Knausgaard is among the greatest living writers, but there is something cramped about his work when he approaches ideas directly rather than indirectly. His wrestling with “Mein Kampf” consisting of hundreds of pages gradually capsized. The last volume of the “My Struggle” series.
The most serious wrestling here is how we think about mortality. At some moments you feel it is in close contact with the oldest and deepest wisdom; at other times the stream is shallow.
The translation from Norwegian by Martin Aitken is subtle and precise. I have a complaint. In this novel, no one “sips” or “drinks” a beverage, whether it’s beer or orange juice. Instead, they “slurp” the scene, making it unintentionally funny.
I recently reviewed Joy Williams’ Harrow, another hit-and-run novel about danger, displacement, and end times by a major author. A line from that book fits perfectly with the themes of this book: “Have you ever felt dead,” Williams asked, “and walking among those who may have been dead but not among those who don’t?”
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