Lara Feigel in The Guardian:
“Signs are taken for wonders,” TS Eliot’s speaker observes soberly in Gerontion. But what is the difference between a wonder and a sign – and which do we prefer? Such questions flow through Karl Ove Knausgård’s Morning Star series of novels, an ongoing effort to open fiction up into a kind of vast Book of Revelation in which visions of red deer, landlocked crabs and devils stream across a rural Norway populated by Knausgård’s familiar hotel bars and supermarkets.
In the first volume, 2021’s The Morning Star, a disparate group of Knausgårdian characters – a jaded academic with a manic-depressive wife, a doubting vicar with a jealous husband – found their lives illuminated and sent off kilter by a new, preternaturally bright star in the sky. The vicar buried a man she’d seen alive after his death; two characters shared a vision of a ghost. This was followed by The Wolves of Eternity, a tighter story where a funeral director with an unexpected zest for life meets his half-sister, watched over by that same potentially diabolical star, amid a series of disquisitions on resurrection. Both novels had flashes of brilliance, but were unable to find a satisfying structure to blend the everyday with the supernatural and philosophical.
The Third Realm is quite different, even though the characters come from the earlier novels. With breathtaking confidence, Knausgård mirrors The Morning Star, giving us other, richer perspectives on the material.
More here.
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