Gone is Knausgård himself as subject and device. The Morning Star, then, feels like an event – Knausgård’s return to the novel, huge and self-consciously serious. Mining his recall rather than his imagination, he bypassed the need for invention. His autofictional epic, My Struggle, was followed in turn by several works of nonfiction. Knausgård has leant further into this small space between the everyday and the transcendent, the beautiful and the wearyingly drab, largely by eschewing the novel form. Others would argue that this is his fatal flaw: he strains for dazzlement, but paints in primary colours. Is this really Knausgård’s idea of “unprecedented clarity”? His admirers might say this is precisely his point: with clarity comes simplicity. The vividness of those “quivering lattices of light” clashes dissonantly against the flatness of that yellow sun and blue sky. Beneath the surface of the quotidian, we sense the outline of the ineffable yet the mundane never quite disappears from view.
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