Dudley are back in an all-new adventure that will take you through the dark corners of history's most famous fairytales to rescue children trapped in a frightening netherworld! Louis is up to his old tricks as he casts each child in the role of a legendary fairytale character and then creates the visually stunning but twisted worlds in which their stories will play out. I recently reviewed Joy Williams’s “Harrow,” another hit-and-miss novel from an important writer about peril, dislocation and end times.Louis the Clown and Mr. Instead they “slurp” it, rendering scene after scene unintentionally comic. No one in this novel “sips” or “drinks” a beverage, whether beer or orange juice. The translation from the Norwegian, by Martin Aitken, is subtle and seamless. At certain moments you sense he is in close contact with all the oldest and deepest wisdom at other moments, the stream runs shallow. Here the earnest wrestling is with how we think about mortality. His wrestling with “Mein Kampf,” over hundreds of pages, slowly capsized the final volume of the “My Struggle” series. Knausgaard is among the finest writers alive, yet there is something cramped about his work when he approaches ideas straight on, instead of obliquely. Einstein knew as little about death as did the first cave dwellers.” One character says: “Our insight into death has not changed. So it’s hardly surprising no one believes anymore.”
Knausgaard chews on notions of faith, free will, the transmigration of souls, the nature of angels, on meaning and nothingness in Kierkegaard and Nietzsche and Rilke’s poetry.Ī woman named Sigrid says it, and it’s surely true: “It’s all the wrong people talking about God. “The Morning Star” becomes, in other words, a somewhat programmatic novel of ideas. Scatman Crothers would show up so that he and Jack could talk about the essential nature of isolation for a few hundred pages.
He and Wendy and Danny would see demented things out the window, and occasionally a screaming lunatic would pound on the basement door. If this book were “The Shining,” Jack Torrance would finish his novel. Although there are gross-outs by the end - the members of a death-metal band are skinned by something worse than critics - Knausgaard never goes all in on his scenario. He adds these details slowly, perhaps too slowly. To this prosaic world, the author begins to stitch in aspects of horror. Knausgaard is a master of this sort of scattered attack.
Ray Bradbury said one way to begin writing a short story or poem is to make a list of 10 things you hate and start tearing them down. His people are, enjoyably, realistically annoyed a good deal of the time. There are a lot of bad fathers and health problems and relationships in decline. This is a novel about people in distress, even before that shining new eye opens in the sky. Karl Ove Knausgaard, whose new novel is “The Morning Star.” Credit.
(Turid is among those names, like Shakespeare’s Titus, for which it is crucial, when spelling, not to omit the second vowel.)Īdmirers of the six-book “My Struggle” series - I’m among them, with reservations about the final volume - will want to know: Does “The Morning Star” cast the same sort of spell those novels did? The answer, for a long time, is yes.
There’s Jostein, a lecherous, shambolic, reeling arts journalist, and his wife, Turid, a nurse, as Knausgaard once was, at a psychiatric hospital. There’s Kathrine, a priest and a translator of the Bible who is tempted to smash her dull marriage, and Iselin, a once-promising student now working in a convenience store. ‘Red Comet’: Heather Clark’s new biography of the poet Sylvia Plath is daring, meticulously researched and unexpectedly riveting.‘Intimacies’: Katie Kitamura’s novel follows an interpreter at The Hague who is dealing with loss, an uncertain relationship and an insecure world.‘On Juneteenth’: Annette Gordon-Reed explores the racial and social complexities of Texas, her home state, weaving history and memoir.‘How Beautiful We Were’: Imbolo Mbue’s second novel is a tale of a casually sociopathic corporation and the people whose lives it steamrolls.
Editors at The Times Book Review selected the best fiction and nonfiction titles of the year.