Karl Ove Knausgaard's THE MORNING STAR (tr by Martin Aitken)

I haven't been able to stop giggling since I realized, about 2/3 of the way through Karl Ove Knausgaard's return to fiction writing, that the novel in question has a Tl;dr in the form of an Of Montreal song, but it totally, totally does.

   

I wish I could remember how I even heard of The Morning Star. The pathetic native app on my phone that Alphabet still seems to insist is a reasonable replacement for the much-missed Google Reader has sussed out that I can be induced to read a lot more literary websites than it previously thought so almost every day LitHub or something grabs me with some crazy niche listicle of "new historical fiction coming out this fall" or whatever, so I suspect it was one of those? Or was it somebody on Twitter? Anyway, I owe somebody some half-assed gratitude; half-assed not because the quality of this novel is such -- anything but -- but because it's gotten me sufficiently interested in its author that I might have to track down some of his other work, most of which is massively multi-volumed, Proust style, and some of which rejoices in the stomach churning title of My Struggle in its English language editions.

Good thing that I a) Use an ebook reader and but b) Never go anywhere anyway, so the likelihood that anyone but my family members who share my big river account will actually see me reading such a thing is small.

But anyway, The Morning Star, hilariously and surely intentionally paginated by the Arbitrary Antarctic Avian in its hardcover edition at 666 pages. I see what you did there.

The titular star appears in the sky above the area of Bergen, Norway one night in 2023, shining its weird light over the messy and mundane lives of several characters whose direct experiences we share and an odd assortment of other figurants, including an infamous black metal band, three of whose members turn up butchered in the nearby wilderness, possibly at the hand of the missing fourth, and other strange phenomena like home invading badgers and giant swarms of crabs emerging from the sea to cause traffic hazards on the highway, possibly just confused by the giant glowing meatball hanging in the sky but maybe also drawn by a sinister power inherent in the giant glowing meatball hanging in the sky.

What does it mean, the meatball? What even is it? Is it natural or supernatural? Is it going to be hanging in the sky forever or is it going to burn out in a few days? Our characters barely seem to care, but they've got a lot of bigger stuff going on. Some of it is mundane and painfully ordinary; some of it is bizarre and unexplainable.

I'm mostly going to focus on the mundane, so I don't get yelled at about spoilers. The bizarre and unexplainable stuff is what both of my readers would be most interested in, so I will leave that behind the spoiler wall.

Arne is spending a pleasantish summer with his wife and kids at their summer home -- pleasant-ish because, well, the wife seems to be on the verge of a psychotic breakdown and keeps talking in her sleep about how she would like to maybe have sex with their neighbor Egil.

Egil has been making a documentary film about the black metal band mentioned above (and how can we not think of Aaron Antes & Audrey Ewell's amazing Until the Light Takes Us, here?) and for that alone might be the coolest character in the book but he's also saddled, about halfway through the novel, with a surprise childcare gig when his ex-wife decides to take off on a trip with her new boyfriend and puts their ten-year-old son on a bus to (approximately) where Egil lives before she even tells Egil about it, thus forcing him to scramble to prepare and then to confront the fact that either the ex has really done a great job poisoning their son against him or his little boy is really a foul-mouthed little prick of a child.

Meanwhile, the girl Egil had a crush on in school, Kathrine, has grown up to become a priest, and is suddenly experiencing a troubled marriage after she delays her return from an annual conference because she just doesn't feel like seeing her husband yet (despite the fact they have two kids whom she misses), only to finally come home to accusations from him that she's having an affair.

Then there's Jostein, an arts reporter for the local newspaper who turns a sour interview with a promising young artist into a hostile one-night-stand while his wife, Turid is having her own problems we'll get to in a moment and his son is having his own Dark Night of the Soul (really, this novel is the most like a Bergman film in prose of any I've ever read, and I haven't even gotten to Egil's many intense existential and religious crises which make up at least 25% of the book yet, oy!). The next day, he gets the a tip-off  about to the scene of the crime where the members of the black metal band have been found horribly dismembered, and rushes there, ready to scoop the world. And remember, this is still the mundane stuff.

Meanwhile, Turid works in a mental institution where she has the usual employee issues with a bitchy boss and a dispiriting job until suddenly one of her most problematic patients waltzes right out of the facility and into the night. Meanwhile, she and Jostein have both gotten faintly worrying messages from their son Ole, but are each assuming that the other is having a more ordinary night and will deal with their boy.

Then there's Solveig, a young woman fresh out of high school and working a dead-end job in town, living in an attic apartment whose landlords, a nice family who occupy the rest of the house, are away on vacation BUT their crazy drug-addict of a son has shown up to terrorize whomever he finds there, even if he's never met 'em before, but of course disappears by the time the police appear.

And there are still more characters, each of whom gets at least one turn in the first-person spotlight, giving you their excuses for bad behavior, disappointment with other characters, misunderstandings of loved ones' meanings, and, every once in a while, reactions to the giant glowing meatball hanging in the sky.

And slowly, things get weird, but never quite as weird as a genre fiction reader might be expecting, for while some possibly supernatural things happen that occasionally might seem like modern takes on, say, the biblical plagues of Egypt or stuff out of Revelations, mostly they're pretty tame by weird fiction standards, because Knausgaard isn't interested in weird fiction; he's interested in god and the afterlife and what it means when we both believe in these things and yet also know they probably aren't true. I didn't bring up Bergman films for nothing, is what I'm saying. I mean, the last 50 or so pages of the book is just Egil's essay about the meaning of death. Though the essay contains maybe a clue or two about some of the dangling plot threads in other people's stories, I'm not sure.

It's all almost farcically, stereotypically Scandanavian. But we like that stuff, don't we? We do. And while ultimately this is kind of a frustrating read -- the plot-before-the-essay ends with someone telling a character who has awakened from a coma that all of the stuff he's worried about -- with what he's worried about being the entire plot of the novel, including so many unresolved questions like who killed the black metal band -- is no longer of concern to anyone compared to what happened in the two weeks he was comatose, and do we get to find out what happened in the two weeks he was comatose? Do we buggery. Perhaps we can go back and tease it out, Gene Wolfe Reader style, someday by re-examining the narrative of his coma experiences, but not right now; the book (the actual, physical book printed on dead trees, which means reading it was a physically painful experience that is the main reason I'm not interesting in going back and teasing out dangling plot threads Gene Wolfe Reader style) is due back to the library where others in my city are anxiously waiting to be frustrated the way I am right now.

Reviewers who have referred to this as a shaggy dog story are not wrong. BUT, it's a really good and interesting shaggy dog story, with lots of good character drama, scenery porn and quality speculations on natural philosophy (are the laws of nature actually immutable laws, or are they merely reflections of matter's habits of "thought"?), theology, eschatology and whether or not a guy can actually drive his recently-crashed-in-an-unreported-drunk-driving-accident car clear across Norway with one headlight and no blinker without getting stopped by the police. So while I'm kind of shaking my fist at Karl Ove Knausgaard, I'm also impressed enough to, as I indicated above, want to read more.

Just not on dead tree. Oh, my aching hands.

Nancy Marie Brown's IVORY VIKINGS: THE MYSTERY OF THE MOST FAMOUS CHESSMEN IN THE WORLD AND THE WOMAN WHO CARVED THEM

More people, I imagine, recognize the Lewis Chessmen than realize that they do. They're the models for the set Harry Potter and pals use in their films. Some illustrations for Lewis Carroll's works draw on them. Etc. Or, like me, they heard of the set on the amazing History of the World in 100 Objects podcast and looked them up and spent untold hours just admiring them. The beserker rooks as they bite their shields, the elaborately enthroned kings with their swords on their knees, the knights astride their stocky little ponies, the queens with their faces resting pensively (or worriedly?) in their hands...

For such people, I wouldn't call Ivory Vikings essential reading, as such, but it's pretty interesting nonetheless. The book explores the set -- or rather, sets, for bits of four sets of chessmen were dug up on that Scottish beach in 1831 -- piece by piece, beginning with the knights, modeled after late Viking warriors, and in the process makes a particular argument as to their nature and origin, a nature and origin intimately tied to some of the later and lesser read Bishop's Sagas of Iceland, as well as to some of the more famous Family Sagas, on which author Nancy Marie Brown draws for ideas of legendary/historical characters that might have inspired these personality-filled bits of walrus ivory and whalebone.

By the way, if you're not familiar with these sagas, you can pick them up pretty cheaply in "Saga Six Packs" over at Amazon, or, and I highly recommend this even if you're not going to read them (though you should read them!), go have a listen to the Saga Thing podcast, in which a pair of scholars summarize, dissect, and rate the sagas in terms of "best bloodshed" and "nicknames" and "notable witticisms" and such. Trust me. It's even more fun than it sounds!

But back to Ivory Vikings, which I wanted to like a lot more than I actually did. The problem is structural; while the idea of building the arguments as though one were slowly setting up pieces on a chess board is an intriguing one, the execution of same is very sloppily done, here. For instance, the final chapter, ostensibly considering the pawns, outlines the known history and provenance of the pieces since their discovery in 1831, and thus feels like it belongs at the book's beginning (especially since offhand references to stages in their journey from the island of Lewis' Uig Bay to various museum exhibits are made throughout the rest of the book, and phrased as though the reader is merely being reminded of something already discussed, to baffling and annoying effect). Too, and perhaps more irritatingly, anecdotes from the history of the North Sea in the ninth through 13th centuries are often repeated almost verbatim in several places, while others are fragmented and scattered throughout the book's chapters. The resulting narrative is rather more like a fever dream than a thoughtful work of non-fiction.

Still, these anecdotes and ideas -- that the famous/infamous Gunnhild the Grim may be the model for the queens (and now I can't but picture her holding her hand to her face as she considers what curse would be best for her lover Hrut, for instance), that Pall Jonsson not only might have commissioned the pieces but is also a living avatar of the modern chess bishop that was no bishop in the original Arabian game that became our modern chess, that a woman referred to briefly in a saga of his life might have been the carver of the set -- are fascinating and fun to consider, even as one realizes, through one of the more coherent threads in the book, that the mystery of these remarkable chess pieces might not ever be solved. Locations that might hold the answers to our questions are also locations of existing archaeological digs that would be damaged, if not destroyed, if we wanted to go deeper, as we'd have to, say, in Iceland's Skaholt, where an important 16th century site may sit right on top of the 11th or 12th century site we'd want to examine.

The reader who can be patient with the book's weird structure, and has an interest in chess, history, art history, commerce, archaeology, craftsmanship -- anything, really -- will enjoy this excuse to think about all of these things while admiring these whimsical, enigmatic, arresting little works of art. The reader who can't, will probably want to skip this one.









As for me, I'm off to read or re-read some sagas. Even as I shake my fist that a lot of the ones I'm now most curious about have not yet been translated into English. Ah, me.

Sigrid Undset's THE WILD ORCHID

Wow, does it seem criminal that this book, and its sequel, The Burning Bush, seem to be out of print, at least in English. I know Sigrid Undset is best known for her great sprawling historical fiction (Kristin Lavransdatter, The Master of Hestviken, etc) but she didn't just get a Nobel for being the Dorothy Dunnett of Scandanavia, you guys.*

The Wild Orchid is little read now, I suspect, because its theme is very much out of fashion. It is, at bottom, the first half of a novel of conversion, specifically conversion to Catholicism, which was just re-establishing itself as a valid, legal religion in Undset's native Norway during her lifetime. As such, it's perhaps more than a little autobiographical, this book, in spirit if not in fact. Undset herself converted to Catholicsm as an adult, after years and years of dwelling emotionally and mentally in the pre-Lutheran Norway of her most famous novels.

About a third of the way through the book, she presents what I think must have been her own feelings about her decision in a nutshell, as her protagonist witnesses a historic event, somewhat bemused:

"If one could only reach out with one's soul and come in contact with an invisible one -- who would help one to a deeper or higher vision of all that was irritating and disturbing, to look past the stupidity and platitudes and ridiculous expressions, into what was valuable in those one associated with, a common charity, a common vow which bound one to them."

Hell, it's enough to make me miss organized religion myself!

But a religious journey isn't the only thing that's going on here; The Wild Orchid, first volume of a two part novel published as The Winding Road (the second book, The Burning Bush, is one I'm planning to read very soon, if not indeed right away. We all know what a fickle reader I've become) is also a portrait of its age, the turn of the last century (ca. 1905 as the novel opens), that is, perhaps startlingly, not all that unfamiliar to a 21st century reader.

Paul Seller is the child of divorced parents. His father remarried a blowsily bourgeois woman for whom Paul has no respect, preferring his own mother, Julie, who is a distractingly awesome character that surely any son would prefer to a fussy, conventionally motherly showoff like Paul's stepmother. Julie, finding herself divorced with four children to raise, cheerfully struck off for the country, found a nice plot of land, built herself a house and furnished it very simply, and set about planting and raising crops and carpentering and turning herself to all sorts of other traditionally masculine tasks, never once, it seems regretting not having a man about the house to whom she didn't herself give birth. Oh, I would gladly read a novel just about Julie Selmer! But as it is, she merely serves as background, as the early example of womanhood against whom Paul will compare other women, to their detriment; more importantly, as establishing Paul's starting position of regarding religion as a quaint folly of days gone by, not to be taken at all seriously.

At times The Wild Orchid, in its long passages of dialogue between its hero and various avatars of Catholocism, chiefly a woman of his own age whom he has known since childhood who grew up in the faith that  he only ever observed from the outside, reads almost like a religious tract as the woman holds forth for pages and pages about the necessary role dogma plays in human society and how non-Catholics are always more interested in the one priest who breaks his vows than in the 200 who uphold them and how it wasn't really the Church that burned heretics but Society. A reader with zero skin in that game, as I am, is challenged to read through such passages with patience and sympathy, but it's good to make that effort once in a while, no?

And that effort is quite often rewarded, in this book, for it is still Sigrid Undset after all, which means lovely prose and an infectious love and enjoyment of her native land, its seascapes and wildflowers and saeders and farms and little towns and pieces of folk art and buildings old and new, which she shares with her characters and thereby with her readers. I now want to visit Norway almost as much as I want to visit Iceland. Fjord.

*Though really, chronologically, I suppose Dorothy Dunnett was kind of the Sigrid Undset of Scotland?

**It's pretty hard not to think of Scotland's current efforts to secede from the United Kingdom, reading about this. I don't think Scotland will offer to take on, say, Prince Andrew to be their replacement king the way Norway took Hakon, though.

Francis Bengtsson's THE LONG SHIPS

As anyone who follows me on GoodReads already knows, I spent the first few chapters of The Long Ships pretty much just giggling at the character names. I kept imagining Danish King Harald Bluetooth* wandering around the tenth century equivalent of a supermarket looking like he was talking about himself, for instance. Toke, well, that's pretty self-explanatory. And then there's Brother Willibald, the Christian monk who comes home with Orm from his adventures in Ethelred the Undready's England. Heh. Willibald. And there's another man named Ugge the Inarticulate. I mean, come on.

But then there's our hero, Orm. My reaction to this name only makes sense to fans of Walter Moers' Zamonia books, in which "Orm" is the name of the universal source of creative power, especially in literary terms. Here, of course, it merely means "serpent", and is usually accompanied by the epithet "red" because of his hair.

So, the cover and the era in which this book is set and the ethnicity of its characters should give away that this is, in fact, a Viking novel, but what they won't necessarily tell you is that it is regarded as a veddy veddy literary work, bearing the aegis of no less an entity than the New York Review of Books, who published it as one of its NYRB Classics series,** which is how I came across it. And there is good reason for it to get this stamp, for it's an ambitious and interesting work; more than just an adventure tale (though it's a very good adventure tale), it's also the story, really, of how Scandinavia went from the rough, violent, pagan land as depicted in the sagas to the more settled, orderly, responsible and overwhelmingly Christian one of, say, Sigrid Undset's work.

But don't let the high culture imprimatur deter you from the great fun to be had here, for The Long Ships has enough fun and fighting, and very funny imagery (like a huge stolen bell from a church in Asturia being hit, gong-style, at regular intervals, to help a bunch of untrained galley slaves row from Spain to Ireland) to satisfy even the guy who only wants to read Terry Brooks and David Eddings and Robert Jordan over and over again until the end of time (and yes, those guys really do exist; there's one on my old bar trivia team).

For me, well, Orm reminds me a little bit of Jack/Bobby Shaftoe, Neal Stephenson's hilariously hapless bad ass adventurer from the Baroque Cycle and Cryptonomicon. He shares the Shaftoes' bumbling heroism, right from the start with how he comes to go a-Viking: he is knocked on the head while defending the family farm from the followers of Krok (Worst Viking Chieftain EVER, is Krok), who are on a provisioning raid. They bear away the sheep and the young man, whose mommy had kept him home for one more season because he was her favorite and was too young and delicate yet.

But, he acquitted himself well before getting knocked out, even killed some of the raiding party, so he is allowed to join Krok, Toke and the gang on their rather slapstick voyage. As I said, Krok is the WVCE. But that's just the first bit of the book, which is basically told as Orm's life story, and once he's free of Krok (but he takes vengeance, oh yes he does, because he is a Danish Raider a-Viking) he starts gallavanting all about the known world, Moorish Spain, Ireland, Aenglaland... and, we learn later, his big brother spent quite a lot of time in Byzantium, which news drives most of the plot of the last quarter of the book.

Really, the only thing I don't like about The Long Ships is the way the narrative is framed, though it's a common enough device. Throughout the story we are treated to authorial/narrative intrusions indicating what Orm said about a given situation as an old man. It's usually something wise and often something witty, but never enough of either to justify the constant intrusion and the robbing of scenes of any sense of jeopardy. See also Doctor Who.

Maybe it's just George R.R. Martin's fault that this bothers me now? That makes me expect primary characters' danger to be real? At any rate, knowing ahead of time that the hero is going to make old bones often robs his story of some, or a lot of, its joy for me these days. I'd probably bitch about Conan the Cimmerian, too, nowadays, though maybe not because Conan!!!

At any rate, Orm's Viking picaresque is still plenty enjoyable. And as an added bonus, depicting as it does a society in which "any man who could not understand poetry would be regarded as a poor specimen of a warrior", there is more than a little bit of what amount to tenth century poetry slams, in which burly, drunken, beardy men strive to outdo each other in witty and lyrical depictions of their adventures and, sometimes, pratfalls. I'm not sure how well their efforts survive this translation into English, but the flavor of them is still there in trace amounts, as is the overall dry wit of the narrative tone; Halldor Laxness did not invent this tone, he just won a Nobel with it. As have so many of his regional fellows over the years.

The Long Ships is not necessarily Nobel material, but it's high quality entertainment -- rendered even more so by my contemporaneous choice to start playing Skyrim at long last. Skyrim is The Long Ships with dragons and lizard men, you guys. Well, sort of. At least it looks and sounds that way. But I haven't even found High Hrothgar yet, so, you know...

*Who is not himself much of a character per se, but the events take place during his reign.

**I had better just get this out right here: I am a big fan of NYRB Classics, and regard them as sort of my highbrow Angry Robot Books (which I doubt they'd appreciate) in that they are a go-to house for quality reading material when I want literary rather than genre fiction. They, like AR, have not yet let me down, at least inasmuch as what I've chosen from their offerings I have always, always liked. And lookie, they've sort of, kind of, taken a page from AR's playbook in that they now have a subscription program! Alas, it is dead tree only, and until my elbow/arm problems are sorted I'm ebook-only. I tweeted them about considering offering an ebook subscription but so far have gone ignored. Tristesse.