Hergé is the world-renowned Belgian artist and author of the 23 Tintin “comic books,” as we call them here, a genre he standardized. A year after the occupying Nazis hired him to draw for the collaborationist and antisemitic Le Soir, the largest French-language Belgian daily, Hergé serialized The Mysterious Star. It is the seemingly apolitical story of a huge star’s appearance like a belly button in the Big Bear and its meteoric crash on Earth. Two rival teams of scientists greedily race toward its Antarctic landing zone, somehow aware that it embeds a new metallic element.[1]
Norwegian writer Karl Ove Knausgaard reinterpreted the first pages of Mysterious Star for The Morning Star, his first novel since the My Struggle series (2009-11), down to the sudden appearance of a bright star, the heat, the scurrying rats–Knausgaard adds crabs, hawks and other enormous birds–and minor characters who go around saying we’re all doomed. I could not detect the least winking acknowledgment to Hergé
In Morning the star never crashes and there is no meteor chase per se, but chase there is: for nothing less than the meaning of life and death. Spoiler: there’s no answer. But get ready for a wild, dense, addictive ride. For most of its coyly numbered 666 pages the novel is difficult to put down, as is so often the case with Knausgaard. It is also ultimately unsatisfying, not just because he sets himself up for an impossible task. He’s an excellent architect of labyrinths and an even better companion through them. But he’s a poor guide. He invariably gets us lost.
As is also often the case with Knausgaard, the closer he gets us to the nonanswer, the more he bogs us in incoherent meanderings, narrative goofiness posing as magic realism, threads to nowhere, and high school prose posing as theological dialogue or as one of those tedious essays he loves to drop into his fiction. In this novel the essay, as ponderous as its title, is called “On Death and the Dead.” It is written by one of the characters, Egil, a lazy man and terrible father who lives at his father’s expense and lectures others about the mysteries of life and death.
Egil is just one of nine characters whose stories Knausgaard tells, each in the first person. It all takes place through two August days in southwest Norway. The appearance of the mysterious star unhinges a normalcy never quite in its hinges to start with. The characters are ordinary middle-class Norwegians, some more upper than lower. Each sounding only marginally different from the Knausgaard of My Struggle. This is Their Struggle.
Turid is hooked on uppers. You can’t blame her. Her college-aged son has failed out and returned home to gaming and non-verbal self-isolation. She works in an asylum for very disturbed people. Her husband Jostein, the book’s center of gravity (I mean the term more along the lines of graveness and graveyards than along its Newtonian sense), is a boozing, womanizing, resentful reporter who thinks he was unjustly yanked from the police beat and made to interview insufferable artsy people instead.
After a fling with one of the insufferables, he triumphs his way into a scoop about the grisly murder of three of four members of a rock band he’d written about before. Knausgaard is very good at evoking the grisly without describing it, terrifying by absence. We don’t know what happened to the fourth band member. The void keeps teasing you the way the Medieval church tortured its poor victims by slowly lowering them and raising them over flames, as an odd character scared out of his wits scurries in and out of some of the first-person narratives. His identity is never revealed. Is it the fourth band member? Knausgaard doesn’t tell. He is one of the many threads left dangling in this moss-smothered book.
When Turid reaches Jostein after he files his scoop to tell him his son has shot himself, Jostein calls his son an idiot. The parenting in this book is not inspiring. Jostein then somehow falls into a 13-day coma–again, we never know why–the set-up for Knausgaard taking us on a nightmarish trip through the underworld in search of the idiot son. You can read this culmination either as a sumptuously imagined journey to the border between life and death or as interminable metaphysical claptrap. I really wanted to be part of the journey. Heaven knows we can all use a convincing preview. But I kept finding myself claptrapped.[2]
Knausgaard fills Jostein’s coma with nonsense like “this is the land of those who are not,” or “Two more Ox-heads stepped forward, each with an axe,” or “But you think. You’re a Denier, not an Undead.” Jostein is lucid enough to break the fourth wall: “Was I dead? It didn’t make sense.” No shit.
We also have Arne, in his paunchier 50s, married, twin boys, a surly teenage daughter and a mentally unstable wife, Tove, on vacation by seaside. Tove paints and seems to be something of a seer, and also a sadist. She paints a picture of the mystery star of the title before it appears in the sky, rips off the head of the family kitten after it appears, and leaves a note for her husband to see that reads: “I want to fuck Egil.” You know, Egil the lazy neighbor and author of that essay on death.
Tove is never given a voice of her own. It’s either a missed opportunity to let us into the real underworld on this earth–hell having nothing on the furies of mental illness–or a subtle message: the one character having a mental episode is left mute while all the other supposedly rational characters drone on, as if that mental balance may be a miscalculation. The decapitated cat suggests it is not. Even if confusion is the point, there is too much of what Poe called “the overstepping of the real” to make us believe in Knausgaard’s world or to make us care much.
When we do, it’s in fragments, as with the story of Kathrine, the priest married to a man she thinks she no longer loves. She feels stalked by a man who turns out to be the corpse at whose funeral she is presiding–one of the many dislocations of reality that jar the novel–but this thread, too, goes nowhere. There are many others: absorbing in themselves, because the reader assumes they’re telling us something. But each is abruptly abandoned. Death does that to our lives, too. We’re always in mid-sentence, doomed never to put a bow on our own undiscovered country. This book is all lives in mid-sentence.
Morning Star is Knausgaard’s first return to fiction after My Struggle, the cerebrally absorbing but often dull and gossipy six-volume, 3,691-page confession he passed off as fiction between 2009 and 2011. When he was done he told an interviewer he’d stop writing. He did not stick to his pledge.[3]
Published in Norway in 2020 and in Martin Aitken’s English translation in 2021, when we were all too bedraggled by Covid’s morbid lechery, Morning Star is only the first in a new epic cycle, this one planned as a seven-volume series for now. For now, because you never know with these Scandinavian sagaists (not that we don’t have our share of undraggable Brandon Sandersons). Jon Fosse, the Norwegian who won the literature Nobel in 2023, has a Septology under his belt and just started a trilogy. Knausgaard wants his Nobel medal too, and Maria Corina Machado is out of them to give out. Morning Star won’t buttress his case. Onto, warily, The Wolves of Eternity.
Notes and amplifications:
[1] The Mysterious Star may have been inspired by Jules Verne’s The Meteor Chase (La chasse au météor, one of a half dozen novels Verne left unpublished at his death in 1905. His son Michel rewrote it for publication, what amounted to a forgery, in 1908. The Société Jules Verne published the original in 1986 and Gallimard, France’s leading publisher, did so in 2004, under the Folio imprint. There is a David Petault English translation produced as The Golden Meteor Hunt, available on Kindle, since January 2025, but savvy readers have raised questions about its authenticity, attributing it to that new phenomenon of AI-generated translations. I could not find any credible credentialing footprints for the alleged David Petault. If you want to chase down the meteor, you can stick with the 2006 translation, also on Kindle.
[2] The segment reminded me of the Covid season of “Gray’s Anatomy,” nearly fatal to the show for its nonsense, when a comatose Meredith Gray (the title character) is dreaming about all the characters the show massacred in its previous 16 seasons. She appears at her healthiest, as do all the characters the producers resuscitated for her, at her physical best, on the same stretch of California seashore for what seemed like the entire season in a reverse No Exit: instead of the dead–“the others”–being hell, they make you wonder why Gray doesn’t just let go or off herself. It’s certainly more pleasant there than Covid’s here.
[3] Tiden Norsk Forlag (Out of the World) was Knausgaard’s first novel, published in 1998, but you won’t find it in English just yet: it is about the teacher-protagonist’s “unlawful sexual activity with a minor,” as the story would be described in Flagler County’s circuit court docket. The teacher is a young graduate posted to the northernmost reaches of Norway. Knausgaard when he was 18 taught in the Norwegian fishing village of Fjordgaard, one of the northernmost inhabited villages on the planet (pop. 213 at the time). Book 4 of My Struggle is about that year, and grazes on the protagonist falling in love with 13-year-old Andrea, though what sexual contact occurs is with Andrea’s older sister Ine, and it’s not much of one as Karl moans that “A naked breast or a hurried caress across the inside of a thigh was enough, I came long before anything had begun. Every time!” As he did the moment Ine undressed. His second novel, En tid for alt (A Time for Everything, 2004) is also self-referential, if not self-reverential, and now looks like a thematic preface to The Morning Star. An author writes about the nature of angels and goes off on long, dull dissertations on theology and the divine. The book strays into the surreal so Knausgaard can invent terrifying encounters with his imaginary angels or, more interestingly, recast biblical stories as contemporary tragedies. The book is a fair introduction to Knausgaard’s genius for combining beauty and bunkum.
Pierre Tristam is the editor of FlaglerLive.
Pogo says
Laurel says
Pogo: Yeah, that’s more of my experience.
Those people are the very people I would step away from. Life is challenging enough!
The Norwegians I knew, where more of vanilla ice cream, white bread, potatoes and hard work.