Review of The Morning Star by Karl Ove Knausgård

Rather well-balanced weirdness.

Put me in mind right away of Wind-Up Bird Chronicle. Subsequent volumes failed to sustained my pique. But they carry on an intricate tale, interlarded with intrigue. Prevalent are the themes of life and death. How do we find meaning and meaningless in each? Heavy helpings of elegant imagery, rather droll storytelling, and essayistic segments. Karl Ove’s reputation may outstrip the depth of his vision in my eyes, but with several thousands of pages left to peruse, I will possibly revise my opinion in coming days.
The tale exists under this unsettling umbrella of unspelled doom, like the meteor in disc 3 of Final Fantasy VII, the original. The morning star, as the comet or supernova is variously called is little understood by the characters but much commented upon. Give a man a reason to be superstitious and he will be. You have the typical infidelities here and the teenage angst, the sprinklings of first love and signs of social unrest. With story architecture less impressive than Jan Kjærstad’s The Seducer, it nonetheless satisfied on every front and then some. Both of those books and Murakami’s aforementioned delve into that resonating mysteries of the cosmos, that intractable yearning toward excessive ponding. Human relationships are nuanced chaos engines teetering on either side of an abyss.