I was an unexpected fan of The Wolves of Eternity, Knausgaard's most recently translated book. The final section of that book revealed it to be a sequel of sorts to The Morning Star, so I chose The Morning Star as my locale-appropriate "loose baggy monster" to read during our trip to Norway.
The Morning Star is more conventional than The Wolves of Eternity. It has a more conventional plot and the key event of the story, the emergence of a new star, happens on page 45 (of 666 pages). There are strange, possibly supernatural events such as unusual animal behavior and the continued survival of people who should have died. The point-of-view characters are mostly interesting people.
These virtues should provide more traditional reading pleasure than The Wolves of Eternity's drawn-out tale. For some reason, though, I was not as engaged with The Morning Star. The sections devoted to each of its loosely connected characters are a mere 50 pages long, which doesn't provide the same level of immersion as the 400 pages granted to Syvert in The Wolves of Eternity.
The book makes a surprising turn away from realism in the final 80 pages, with Jostein having an extended... dream? vision? hallucination? It ends with a cliff-hanger:
"So much has happened these last two weeks [while Jostein was in a coma] that I'm not sure anyone cares anymore..."
"What do you mean?" I said. "What's happened that could possibly be bigger than that?"
No comments:
Post a Comment