Time and nature are out of joint as Knausgaard draws on the Christian apocalyptic tradition of purgatory, catabasis, resurrection, and the vanity of Ecclesiastes. The Morning Star opens a door to the nonhuman (animals that verge on the superhuman) and the collective (multiple points of view), but above all lets in the cataclysmic, leading us to reflect on how and whether it is possible for the human mind to comprehend and effectively respond to something radically outside of the ordinary. My first review covered Joy Williams’ Harrow, which takes the extractive mindset of Christian dominion to its logical conclusion, the loss of the nonhuman world that makes us human. The four novels I consider, while they touch on more than one of these elements, foreground each in turn. In The Great Derangement, Ghosh identifies four elements ripe for exploration in novels serious about wrestling with climate change: the nonhuman, the cataclysmic, the extractive mindset, and the collective. Considering how its characters struggle to assimilate a cataclysmic event, this review makes part two of a four-part series in conversation with Amitav Ghosh’s 2016 critique of climate fiction. Another contender for a literary novel that may offer an adequate appraisal of and response to our climate crisis is Karl Ove Knausgaard’s The Morning Star.
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