Kind of like the Richard and Judy book club... except not on TV, and nobody paid me to say anything nice if I don't want to.
Let’s talk about this:
And let’s talk about it because, as I like to do sometimes, I suspect - no, I know - that Knausgaard is one of the two most important writers of my lifetime (the other one being Murakami). It’s not a generational thing, not a 21st century thing, but in the span of time that I happen to be living in, he is The Man (or one of The Men). And it will probably go unnoticed because his name is hard to spell/pronounce for English speakers. I dare say that a lot of people turn away because he’s Norwegian and whoever those ‘lot of people’ are, will miss out. Much like those who never watched Forbrydelsen (The Killing) because it’s Danish or Engrenages (Spiral) because it’s French, will miss out on the greatest crime dramas to hit TV in decades - perhaps ever.
And yet, Knausgaard is not an unknown by any stretch. He came to the public eye with his ‘autobiography’ My Struggle which spans six volumes (1,371,255 words/3,770 pages according to the internet) and is simply mind-blowing. If I recall correctly, several members of his own family tried to sue him for telling what he saw as the truth and he weathered that storm with honesty and integrity but also refused to back down on what he had written.
It’s hard to describe, but his style pretty much amounts to everything being just as important as everything else. So, finding a beer in the back of the fridge and opening it, is just as important an event as your father dying. The attention given to these two events is the same - and it’s fascinating. It’s totally valid to read a little and say it’s not for you, but to not even try just means missing out on genius. If the million and half words puts you off, you’re nothing but a literary pussy.
Here’s a pic of him.
This is what a writer should look like:
Jeans, boots, some kind of band t-shirt, a brown leather jacket with pockets for cigarettes - an image that says you’re as ready to sit on the pavement with homeless people to find out what they’re thinking as you are to go to an award ceremony because you don’t care what the people who are wearing suits are doing. It says - I wrote a great book, I’m not pretending and I have kids I need to pick up later on and a dog to walk.
He’s not even a weird guy. He’s just a regular man who writes. Here’s the best interview I can find with him (and it’s nice to see that place is packed with people):
Cut to present day:
While it might be a worthy task to read those six books, it’s also quite exhausting, so when I was done, I switched off from him and wandered away (because it was like being haunted by the man), until last week when I was back in the mood for something monstrously fulfilling and found The Morning Star - the first book in a trilogy - at least I think it’s a trilogy - there are three so far but I don’t know if it goes beyond that.
I expected more of the same and got more of the same but now this is fiction. That means made up people in made up situations - how will he fare? Man… my mind is blown again. Maybe you shouldn’t read this if you want to be a writer. How do you consistently be This Damn Good?
I’m sure others have put it more eloquently than me but The Morning Star is about a bunch of regular people who have nothing in common (so far as I know) and their lives. A guy with kids who drinks too much and is trying to hold it together as his wife falls apart. A woman who is a care worker in a home for people with serious ‘problems’. A priest with two children and a husband she doesn’t want to go home to. A journalist on the downward slide of the career ladder who knows he is better than covering a local art exhibition… and so on.
But in the cracks, crabs gather in huge numbers for no reason at all, a badger stages a home invasion and a death metal band are slaughtered in the woods… all to the backdrop of a new ‘star’ appearing in the sky.
Thus begins a beautifully disconnected tale about God/Satan. It would be tough to give anything away about the plot because there isn’t one as such. It’s more about the detail of regular people living their lives while the Morning Star does its thing - I guess if you’ve read a few books of a certain genre, you’ll have figured out already what the Morning Star actually alludes to.
Here’s a sample paragraph that shows the kind of stuff you’ll end up thinking about along the way:
That is what life is like, is it not? When we’re young we think there’s more to come, that this is only the beginning, whereas in fact it’s all there is, and what we have now, and barely even think about, will soon be the only thing we ever had. There had been no new abundance of friends… and no new abundance of thoughts; the ones we’d had then were the ones we still have now.
You simply can’t argue with a man who once said “Writing Novels Is Much Better than Being Happy”.
I’ll add to that: “Reading Novels Is Much Better Than Watching Netflix.”
Le Fin.