Note to young writers: a new star in the sky is a cog, a wheel, it turns the pages on its own. We find them in a seaside town in southern Norway, where one day a star appears in the sky. It is structured in sections, each narrated in the first person by one of nine main characters: Arne, who must bury the kitten Kathrine, a priest in the Church of Norway Jostein, a wildly unedited journalist Emil, the worst young lyricist in the world Solveig, a nurse Turid, addicted to some nice-sounding drug called Sobril Iselin, the teen girl Knausgaard should have been writing about the whole time Vibeke (picture not found) Egil, the writer and documentarian, the near mad, the pillar-sitter.
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It is a book of revelation, full of unlucky numbers on the march a book where animals crawl and die as omens. Within ten pages, however, an actual kitten gets stomped to death by a Scandinavian woman with bipolar disorder, which lets you know what kind of novel this is going to be.
At first it feels like you’re being shot with a BB gun full of cat food, but somehow the rhythm takes hold of you. The long, looping sentences of My Struggle have been replaced with something shorter and sharper, drier and more reportorial. It takes place over two days, and it lasts forever – well, 666 pages, to be exact. This latest novel embodies all of Knausgaard’s known qualities. It is another kind of narrative temptation, actually, to write about The Morning Star without ever mentioning that its author is one of the most endlessly disseminated writers of the age, a man whom most of us encountered staring back at us from the first volume of My Struggle like something both ancient and fresh: a stone-tablet model, a yassified Noah. I could tell you that he’s scared of both snakes and genetically modified Red Delicious apples. I might say he was a Christian, a man who once saw Jesus in the floorboards of his Swedish apartment a writer who, in an essay about art, pondered the unmistakable image of Christ in a photo of a man’s scrotum.
If you had never heard the name Karl Ove Knausgaard before, I might begin by telling you this: a Norwegian Bible translator has written a book about the end of the world. Instead of seeing the author when I opened The Morning Star, the first book in Karl Ove’s new cycle of novels, I saw Norwegian Elvis. At one point he stood and did the hip thing, lit from behind like Christ. The Elvis impersonator’s Norwegian tumbled over me, interspersed with uh-huh-huhs, which represented the exact intersection of our understanding. I could hear the crackling: floors, ceiling, walls. The performance was held in a church and it was impossible, since I was then obsessed with the black-metal documentary Until the Light Takes Us, not to imagine the place burning down. It was my first time in Europe, and I was overcome by a desire to swallow Norway whole and draw its intact skeleton out of my mouth by the tail. I went to see his act on opening night: the narrative temptation was too great, and I’m only human. Oh he was beautiful, with long uncut hair.
Instead of pictures of Karl Ove smoking the cigarette of the camera down to its smouldering butt-end, the newspaper coverage of the event included photographs of a pastorally beefy Elvis in a white rhinestone jumpsuit, gazing through dark glasses into the bright sun. Knausgaard was the headliner, but he cancelled at the last minute and was replaced by an Elvis impersonator. In September 2015 I flew to Norway for a literary festival.
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