Book Review: "The Morning Star" by Karl Ove Knausgaard

Everyone was talking about this book as being the next big book in literary fiction and that is not just because the hardback is absolutely massive. I had heard, before purchasing the book, many things of what to expect. Last year, I read a book that was somewhat similar in style to this one called “City on Fire” in which it covers a bunch of New Yorkers on New Years’ Eve during the 70s and goes around telling each story as they slowly converge on each other in space and time. A beautiful, thick bulk of a book, but beautiful nonetheless. I think that this book by Karl Ove Knausgaard is a bit similar in the fact that we take a group of people that seemingly have nothing in common and we give them something to have in common. As time and space converge, so do the stories and each character seems not so different from the last at all. A book dealing with the idea of togetherness in times of need, when I read this book I honestly could not stop thinking about how each character though reacting differently to a situation realises how they need to do the best thing for themselves in order to move forwards.

Written in a style that some would call ‘post-modern’ I actually think that this book draws on the modernist and realist traditions presented in books like “Mrs. Dalloway” by Virginia Woolf in which worlds collide through the representations of different realities. The unending movement of time means that though we come ever closer to our deaths, we must treat the moments as if they are each active decisions. Whether or not to get on a plane, whether or not to leave a spouse etc. Each slice of time is so very important that one decision changes everything. Kind of like one of my favourite books ever, “Cloud Atlas” by David Mitchell, don’t you think?

My favourite characters were Kathrine and Emile because they were both very different and yet, they both seemed on the verge of a breakdown. Kathrine is a priest who has her marriage come into trouble and wants to leave her husband but cannot for the sake of the children. Emile has gone to babysit a child and that child hit his head but nothing happened. Emile, whilst with friends has been called to work and is terrified that something has now happened to this child in terms of some sort of aftershock. Both of them are in a crisis and both are in very different types of crisis - yet we see that the similarities between them means that they are both trying very hard to make things work out. They can’t be seen to be breaking down though they both have moments where they cry to themselves. They must be seen to be strong as this means that people will respect them in their positions more. It is an affliction of both occupation and gender that follows them and puts almost a haunting atmosphere on to the story.

All in all, I think that this book’s use of multiple characters and multiple narratives all written in first person is a lot better than writing multiple narratives of multiple characters in third person. I feel very strongly about the emotional afflictions in this book in which people are experiencing both great sadness and great anger and yet, even though the experiences of these different emotions are different, they are all brought together by a single time and space under the morning star. It is truly a beautiful and very 21st century book.