The Thumbnail Book Reviews
by John Q McDonald --- 23 May 2024
by Karl Ove Knausgård
The notion of Nordic Noir in literature and other media has been fairly common, recently, but Nordic artists have been at it for a couple of centuries, at least. After all, it has become an expectation that Nordic literature be gloomy and heavy with existential meaning. Lately, of course, that translates into dark and wintry police procedurals, mysteries, and surreal and vaguely supernatural stories. Karl Ove Knausgård, a prolific author of long dense novels and a highly regarded 21st-century Norwegian writer, brings us into a world in which a mysterious celestial event may (or may not) be affecting the very nature of being alive (for humans, anyway, and sadly not so much for cats and dogs).
Now, this book is the third volume of a projected five-volume series. This reader started in the middle, for no good reason, and so must acknowledge that a lot of story has gone by before we get to the first page of this one. On the other hand, the author's episodic character studies allow the book to stand on its own. We have hints of things gone on before, but the book does not feel like it is missing anything in its own right, despite vague beginnings and even more vague endings.
The book is crowded with characters; a mentally-ill artist, an architect, a teacher, a police officer, a whole crowd of death-metal music enthusasts, a minister, adults, kids, the living and the comatose; and evem, peripherally, an astronomer. It is a series of chapters showing the state of their lives, and they are more or less loosely connected between the death-metal bands, a trio of murder victims, and the unexplained appearance of a very bright star in Earth's sky (day and night). Do not expect any definitive answers. Knausgård has at least two subsequent novels planned and so plenty of time to resolve these things. The result, however, is a strangely compelling almost everyday depiction of lives in modern Norway, each scene with its own dramas and tragedies. Along the way, we catch a glimpse of the larger mystery at work. Who so brutally murdered these kids? Is it true that nobody has died in Norway for a week? What lies within a comatose victim of a stroke? Are there more strokes here than you'd expect? What the hell is that object in the sky? (As an astronomer himself, this reader was keenly interested in the answer to that.) Is there some greater supernatural thing at work? Is it Satan? WHAT murdered those kids?
But, the everyday dominates and Knausgård has the kind of gift in telling those stories that has earned him comparisons to Marcel Proust (but Karl has a finer gift of keeping a story moving, too). So, one wants to go back and read the previous novels. One looks forward to the subsequent ones. It's still a worthy investment of one's precious reading hours.