Bruce
Bawer is the author of While Europe Slept, Surrender,
and The Victims' Revolution. His novel The Alhambra
was published in 2017.
In
Karl Ove Knausgaard’s spellbinding new novel, The
Morning Star (Morningstjernen), we follow the fortunes
of several protagonists—all living in various places
in western Norway—over the course of a few warm days
in August 
2023
that will prove earth-shakingly momentous, not just for them
but for all of humanity. Arne, a literature professor preparing
to teach The Divine Comedy, is vacationing at a summer
home with his three kids and his wife, Tove, a bipolar artist
who’s entered a manic phase. Egil, Arne’s eremitic
childhood friend, who has directed one documentary about a
Christian fundamentalist sect and another (never completed)
about a Satanic death-metal band, lives year-round on the
road from Arne’s summer home and spends his time reading
Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, and Heidegger.
In
the city of Bergen, there’s Emil, a young day-care worker;
Iselin, a recent college dropout and convenience-store cashier;
Solveig, a hospital nurse; Jostein, a cynical, hard-drinking
newspaper reporter who’s been put on the arts beat but
longs to return to crime reporting, at which he’s a
virtuoso; Turid, his wife, to whom he’s casually unfaithful,
and who works at a depressing night-shift job at a residential
home for the mentally impaired; Vibeke, an ambitious young
art curator whose husband, Helge, a prominent architect, is
turning 60; and Kathrine, a pastor in the Church of Norway,
who’s tired of life with her husband, Gaute, and who,
when we’re first introduced to her, is flying back home
from Oslo, where she’s been serving on a committee producing
a new Bible translation.
As
in Knausgaard’s bravura six-volume autobiographical
novel My Struggle (Min Kamp), published in Norway
to staggering success between 2009 and 2011, the leading characters
here spend a not-inconsiderable part of their lives pondering—well,
life. Over beers, Arne and Egil debate faith, mortality, the
meaning of existence, the relation of man and nature. Kathrine
reflects on youth: “We squandered our time and thoughts,
and only when it was over did I understand that it had all
been unique and would never return. That is what life is like,
is it not?” Solveig, driving home after her shift, muses
that young people living near the hospital never think about
what goes on there: “Of course not, why should they?
Death was always somewhere else.”
But
whereas in My Struggle the characters’ ontological reflections
take place within a thoroughly realistic context—indeed,
the book, translated into three-dozen odd languages, gave
Knausgaard a worldwide reputation as a master of the mundane
and quotidian—in The Morning Star we soon enter the
realm of the creepy, the weird, the awful. A man at Burger
King tells Iselin that he’s the Son of God. Jostein
gets a grisly tip: members of a Satanist rock band (the same
one Egil filmed for his unfinished documentary) have been
found murdered, their skins removed. Then things transpire
that are downright extraordinary. At the Oslo airport, Kathrine
has a brief encounter with a man who, the next day, at a funeral
at which she’s officiating, turns out to be none other
than the deceased—though the service was arranged over
a week earlier. A patient of Solveig’s, a famous politician,
is declared dead—no heartbeat or brain activity—only
to prove to be alive, after all.
Freakish
things happen involving animals. Tove, descending into madness,
decapitates the family cat. Arne runs across hundreds of sea
crabs on an inland road. While Kathrine is sitting at an outdoor
cafe in the heart of Bergen, a massive bird swoops down and
snatches a tiny sparrow pecking at crumbs on a table. Turid,
chasing an escaped patient into the woods, ends up face-to-face
with something that she first takes for human, only to look
into its yellow eyes and realize: “It wasn’t a
man.”
Most
remarkable of all, a dazzlingly bright light suddenly appears
in the night sky. Is it a comet? A supernova? A new star?
Arne finds it beautiful: “As beautiful as death was
beautiful.” Kathrine’s reaction: “Something
terrible was going to happen.” Egil decides that it’s
the Morning Star from the Bible, which in Latin, he reflects,
“was called Lucifer,” though in some passages
of the New Testament the term “Morning Star” is
applied to Jesus. “Not that I believed the star to be
Lucifer or Christ,” Egil maintains. “The star
was a star. But I had no doubt that it was a sign of something.”
The
next morning, the astral body’s still there—and
the odd events continue. Thousands of ladybugs appear on Vibeke’s
terrace. Egil’s son, Victor, swears that some creature
has peered into his window; Egil comforts him, but when he
hears inhuman sounds coming from the woods, he thinks: “Had
the gates of hell opened?” Solveig’s hospital
takes in victims of a horrific bus crash, one of them a girl
who’s “nothing but blood and bone,” but—perplexingly—they’re
still alive. Jostein and Turid’s depressed son, Ole,
shoots himself, and looks as if he surely must be dead—but
he, too, clings to life. When Turid locates her lost patient,
who previously couldn’t utter a coherent sound, he tells
her: “You . . . are . . . doomed.” And when Atle
checks the now certifiably psychotic Tove into a psych ward,
she says: “Everyone’s dead . . . We’re all
dead.”
My
Struggle was, in my estimation, a masterpiece—and was
all the more impressive a feat because it was cobbled together
purely out of Knausgaard’s own memories. The Morning
Star is a gem, too, but Knausgaard’s accomplishment
this time is imaginative: he’s created no fewer than
nine fully rounded characters and given them storylines that
work together to deliver, ultimately, one hell of a wallop.
One neat trick here is that during the opening chapters we’re
lured into thinking that this is going to be an entirely different
kind of book than it turns out to be.
At
the outset, it has the bleak feel of a standard-issue contemporary
Scandinavian literary novel, complete with the usual cast
of ennui- or angst-ridden literary and artistic types, who,
more often than not, have bad marriages, maladjusted kids,
and drinking problems. Soon enough, though, The Morning
Star begins to resemble a Jo Nesbø crime story;
one can almost anticipate the way in which Knausgaard will
explain how that man from the airport got into the coffin
at Kathrine’s church and link it to the slaughter of
the death metal band. Then the book starts to look like a
work of fantasy by Stephen King, complete with such tropes
of the genre as animals acting strangely and not-quite-human
creatures making scary noises in the woods. Finally, we end
up in science-fiction territory, with the sense of wonder
and terror that builds up toward the novel’s end recalling
two powerful and justifiably famous sci-fi stories about cataclysmic
cosmic events—Arthur C. Clarke’s “The Star”
and Isaac Asimov’s “Nightfall”—even
as the book’s mounting dread and unease, culminating
in the transformation of a recognizably ordinary world into
something out of a nightmare, brings to mind some of the more
haunting episodes of The Twilight Zone.
In
the final analysis, however, The Morning Star doesn’t
fall neatly into any genre or strongly resemble any other
literary novel I know of. It’s sui generis. Yet after
some head-scratching, I came up with three works—all
movies, as it happens—that it reminded me of in certain
ways. First, there’s Magnolia, which offers
several protagonists, each with his own storyline, plus a
mysterious windup in which frogs rain down from the sky; second,
2001: A Space Odyssey, in which (discounting the
ape-man prologue) the story begins in realistic, if futuristic,
fashion only to be consummated in a riot of inexplicable but
captivating visual poetry; and third, Close Encounters
of the Third Kind, in which otherwise-unrelated individuals
find themselves compelled—seemingly irrationally—to
seek out Devil’s Tower in Wyoming, where, it turns out,
aliens are about to land their spaceship.
As
noted, The Morning Star is set entirely in Norway.
But thanks to the translator, Martin Aitken, the reader often
feels as if he has been transported to jolly old England.
I’ll accept uncomplainingly car park and at the weekend,
along with uni for university, cigs for cigarettes, maths
for math, and even (at least a dozen times) “Do you
fancy” for “Would you like.” But repeatedly,
where there’s a perfectly good translation available
that sounds neither obtrusively British nor American, Aitken
seems deliberately to toss it aside and reach instead for
whatever option sounds most jarringly British.
Skillelig
sint han var, writes Knausgaard, meaning: “He was really
angry.” Aitken makes it: “A proper rage he was
in.” Tror jeg stikker means “I guess I’ll
be going”; Aitken goes with “I reckon I’ll
be off.” When Kathrine orders a Coke on the plane, one
flight attendant gestures toward another and says: Du betaler
henne—literally, “You pay her”; but Aiken
turns it into “Payment’s with my colleague.”
And then there’s For en utrolig kul fest!—which
means, again literally, “What an incredibly cool party!”
But in Aitken’s hands, it becomes “Absolutely
brilliant party!”
Aggressive
Briticisms aren’t Aitken’s only problem. He writes
theologist for theologian, astronomist for astronomer. The
word fjell—mountain—crops up a lot, and Aitken
consistently renders it as fell—a usage that the 1933
Oxford English Dictionary identifies as obsolete.
(At least twice, moreover, Aitken avoids mountainside and
writes fellside, which doesn’t even appear in the OED.)
Similarly, dal—valley—becomes dell, last
heard from in the Mother Goose rhyme “The Farmer in
the Dell.” Also, Aitken refers to Kathrine throughout
as a priest. In Norwegian, yes, the word is prest; but in
English, a Church of Norway pastor (or, if you prefer, minister)
is never called a priest. In one scene, a stranger touches
Jostein, who, in Aitken’s translation, wonders: “Was
he a homo, or what?” In Norwegian, it’s Var han
homo, eller?—but “homo” in Norwegian isn’t
offensive, and the right word here is, quite simply, gay.
Still,
even translation problems can’t ruin The Morning
Star. If its opening pages make us feel as if we’re
in the midst of something resembling life as we know it, by
the end we’re looking at the whole enchilada sub specie
aeternitatis—from the perspective of the eternal—having
along the way been vouchsafed an acute sense of the fragility
of human existence, the futility of our efforts to fathom
it and do something meaningful with it, and the fallaciousness
of any illusion that we’ve accomplished something remotely
important in the big scheme of things. Arne assiduously plans
his classes in Dante; Egil wrestles day and night with the
great philosophers; Kathrine grapples with word choices in
her Bible translation (even as she pretends, in her funeral
homily, to a confidence about Christian teachings that she
doesn’t really feel). Yet however much we may exert
ourselves to make a mark in this world, how little we truly
appreciate its everyday miracles—among them love, animal
companionship, the beauty of nature, the joy of music and
art; however much we may strive to make sense of life, how
astonishing our capacity to persistently push away thoughts
of mortality. The Morning Star is one of those rare
books that stir and move and unsettle you in a way that isn’t
easily described, and that you keep rolling over in your mind
for a long while afterward.
By Bruce Bawer:
Gender
Narcissism
History of World's Most Liberal City
Global Warning: An Unsettled Science
