Rising drama threatening everything we take for granted, all the little movements of the day, the common conversations and perceptions we barely register, especially all the time we spend trying to connect with loved ones but also find some time alone. Knausgaard proved himself a master of suspense during the rising waters in the Noah section in A Time for Everything, and here it's really the same dynamic on a book-length level.
There are also two sections - one about a young rocker named Emil and the other about a 33-year-old curator mother married to a 60-year-old famous architect - that don't repeat and seem almost like teases for future installments of what seems like it will definitely continue as a series. Structured as a series of first-person stories, each titled by the narrator's first name, many of which repeat, two of which (Arne, Egil) resemble Knausgaard, but also a few are women, a middle-aged priest of Norway, a young convenience-store clerk, a night shift worker at a mental hospital married to Jostein, a hideous man-type journalist whose idfulness and general hatefulness charge the pages through the middle and end like booster rockets whenever he appears. But then it started to take off, thanks in part to cliffhangers at the end of each section either for the new star or minor natural and some major supernatural oddities that began to proliferate, yet never in such a way as to overwhelm the emphasis on character and interiority - and I was in it to win it and very much recommend it, not just to Knausgaard fans. Through the first two-hundred pages I wasn't sure about it, doubted its page count (666), thought it contrived and manipulated with prevalent one-sentence paragraphs like in a Blake Crouch novel.
Theological thriller, philosophical pulp, an extraordinarily well-characterized, dramatized elaboration of the internal/external worlds thematic focus of The Seasons Quartet, perfect for the longer nights and dark mornings of autumn, as neighbors decorate yards with plastic representations of skeletons and ghouls.
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