Our closest of kin reviewed the new Karl Ove Knausgaard novel, The Morning Star. It’s Knausgaard’s first since his epic My Struggle series, and, as the review suggests, not quite as good. Below are some excerpts from the novel we found relevant to dispatches — as well as a link to the review itself (shoutout Soft Punk Magazine).
TLDR: Start with My Struggle, not The Morning Star. Oh, and the apocalypse is now.
In keeping with our modern day end times, The Morning Star takes as its backdrop the Apocalypse. But it isn’t some future dystopia — it’s here, now, and very ordinary. Revelation, you might say, is well underway. A star appears in the sky (the morning star) above modern Norway, and, basically, a buncha bad shit starts happening in nine different characters’ lives.
You can tell right from the get-go what interests Knausgaard. His epigraph reads “And in those days shall men seek death, and shall not find it; and shall desire to die, and death shall flee from them” (Rev 9:6). And many of the high points in the novel deal with themes of death and the shadowy presence of God in a skeptical, secular world. He mines the Bible and literature broadly to get at what may not be a new 21st century (or 20th… or 19th…) proposition: that something is profoundly wrong. Infra are some illustrative quotes.
Excerpts from The Morning Star
On the loss of our “vertical” (transcendent? soulful? Brahman-connected?) dimension:
Nothing significant has changed in the human realm since biblical times: we are born, we love and hate, we die. But the archaic in us, and in all that we do, is as if soaked up into the quotidian, the culture we have created and which we comprise, where reality is horizontal and the vertical reveals itself to us only exceptionally, and then only in glimpses. All it takes to grasp it really is to look up, for there suspended in the sky is the burning sun, and it is the same sun that burned for Abraham and Isaac, Odysseus and Aeneas.
On death:
Death is on the one hand abstract, dark, and sometimes alluring, gilded with romanticism… on the other hand the most repellent and repulsive of all, for what is a corpse but the stench of rotting, liquefying, infested flesh? It is within this duality, in the space that exists between our gaze, with its beautified sky of images, and our bodies, that we live our lives.
On our attitude toward death:
What is occurring with death is that it is becoming smaller and smaller, and so compelling as this development has been, it is no longer inconceivable that death at some point will reach its zero-point and vanish.
On the power of belief:
People in [the Middle Ages] knew that miracles were a part of life, and they saw them, whereas we today know that miracles are not a part of life, and we see them not.
On Christ’s Sermon on the Mount:
The trees, the forest, the sea, the lily, the bird, all existed in the moment. To them, there was no such thing as future or past. Nor any fear or terror. That was the first turning point. The second came when I read what followed: That which befalls the bird does not concern it. It was the most radical thought I had ever known. It would free me from all pain, all suffering. That which befalls me does not concern me.
Jesus on our lot:
Foxes have holes, and birds of the air have nests, but the Son of man hath not where to lay his head.
Jesus on sending:
And He said unto another, “Follow me.” But he said, “Lord, suffer me first to go and bury my father.” Jesus said unto him, “Let the dead bury their dead: but go thou and preach the kingdom of God.” And another also said, “Lord I will follow thee; but let me first go bid them farewell, which are at home at my house.” And Jesus said unto him, “No man, having put his hand to the plough, and looking back, is fit for the kingdom of God.”
On Jesus’ methods:
The teachings of Christ were practical: he did not write about those he went among, did not write even for their sake, but went among them. Talked with them, listened to them, included them. All were equal, all were a part of something greater, and in that which was greater was God. And in God grace, in God forgiveness, in God the fullness of being.
Rilke on God:
My God is dark and like a web: a hundred roots silently drinking. This is the ferment I grow out of. More I don’t know, because my branches rest in deep silence, stirred only by the wind.
Knausgaard on his gods:
the activities of writing and reading are essentially about freedom, about going out into the open, and it is this striving toward freedom that is fundamental.
Lots to think about, perhaps. Thanks for reading! Here’s another link to the full review:
http://softpunkmag.com/criticism/death-and-the-divine
Until next time,
DVD