Et is a moment in the stories of American writer Stephen King when a group of ordinary people, beset by a horror they can’t explain, realize it’s real. That he can no longer be explained away from the world. That the devil really has moved into their small town. The vampires are coming. The dead rise. And that no one imagined.
“Perhaps the most frightening question is how much horror the human mind can endure without sacrificing its alert, open, undiminished sanity,” says King’s 1983 Pet Graveyard. “At a certain point, it all becomes almost comical , and that can be the point where sanity either triumphs or bends and collapses, the point where a person’s sense of humor begins to reassert itself.”
In his new novel, the Norwegian writer Karl Ove Knausgård steers towards this point at which the unreal becomes reality and everyone agrees on this new reality for a long time – but then skips it. Jostein, one of the group of people The Morning Star is about, a rather disgusting journalist, wakes up in the hospital after being in a coma for thirteen days.
He’s been working on a crazy story and wants to get back into it immediately, it’s about a satanic heavy metal band that has been ritually killed; Jostein had reported from the crime scene before everything got dark around him. “You can take it easy,” says his doctor now, but with a smile. “So much more has happened in the last two weeks that I’m sure no one is interested anymore.” What, Jostein asks, what could be bigger than my story?
We won’t find out. Because at this point, after eight hundred pages, about very hot days in the Norwegian coastal city of Bergen, days when people run screaming through the streets or speak in tongues, birds with scales and children’s faces fly through the air, crabs from the sea into the forests flee, a pastor buries a man with whom she was on the plane the night before and whom she sees again after the funeral, days when a giant with a bull’s head and three pigtails on his bare skull appears in the undergrowth and, above all, a new one Star appears in the sky, bright and big and dominant, Knausgård breaks off his action.
An essay at the end
And then ends the novel with an essay of almost a hundred pages: “About death and the dead”. One of his characters wrote it, Egil, who lives privately in a summer house by the fjord, where he does his research on Kierkegaard and the Bible, and whose insights are now included in the essay.
It only revolves around three questions – “What is it Tod? What is the Body? What is the Dream?“ – only to become a story again, a memory of an unknown man, Frank, whom Egil met by chance on the train, and then accompanied him to his daughter’s funeral, who then appears to both of them again. This memory then concludes with the appearance of the morning star in the sky above Bergen. What happens in the thirteen days after is left unsaid.