The Iceman Cometh

 The Iceman Cometh by Eugene O'Neill is considered his greatest work. It's pretty good. I haven't read a play for a while, except for the Shakespeare I teach, and reading this one was fun, if a bit disorienting. I'm reminded of how my students must feel confused and frustrated when they begin a play: it's hard to know which characters are important, which stage directions are foreshadowing, etc. After about two acts I was engaged, however. I like O'Neill. He's at once generous to his characters and brutally honest about their human potential for growth. 

At its ending, The Iceman Cometh is bleak and nihilistic. It's an ideas play, and while I admire the craft that it took to get there, I never really felt like I was reading a realistic human exchange. This vague inauthenticity may be the author, or the time period, or the medium itself. I like plays, but they don't strike me as believable as a good novel might. Play It as It Lays, Joan Didion's masterpiece, is every bit as much about our inability to overcome self deception, but it felt true the entire time. But I will continue to appreciate good old Eugene O'Neill. Working within his medium, he clearly has important things to say. 

The Morning Star

 The Morning Star by Karl Ove Knausgaard is a walk-off grand slam of a novel. It hits in several places: emotionally, intellectually, spiritually, artistically. It's huge and bizarre and inscrutable and deeply humane. Because much of the pleasure of the novel came from the sheer surprise of the events of the pages, I hesitate to summarize any of it. A tiny sliver of exposition: after an epigraph from the Bible about people wanting to die, the novel records a few hot summer days when a new star appears in the sky. There are multiple narrators. Things are slightly off in each life's story. Strange things begin to happen . . . And that's enough of that. I demand that every reader of this humble blog drop everything and read The Morning Star so we can get a beer and talk about it. 

Knausgaard is my boy, and I like everything he writes. While he's good in every genre, his novels* are severely underrated. Only two have been translated to English, this one and 2004's A Time for Everything. Both novels are long and weighty. They seriously explore religion, specifically Christianity. His novels ignore the trappings of genre, and realism, and instead immerse the reader in worlds that are absolutely human and absolutely mystical. Knausgaard's sense of pace--deliberate and mundane--lulls the reader into a feeling of normalcy and then subverts it perfectly with chilling details. Early in The Morning Star, for example, a father takes his children fishing in a boat. He looks down and sees the water "teeming with crabs. Not just little stone crabs, but big sea crabs. There seemed to be hundreds of them, creeping and crawling on top of each other . . . It was like a snake pit." His sons don't notice, and they move to open water. Like passengers on that boat, us readers get taken along as well, slowly drifting into much darker waters. 

*Technically, the My Struggle series is a novel, but it's so autobiographical that many reviewers now just call it nonfiction. "Novel" may be the best description in our limited vernacular to describe that piece of art, but for our purposes we won't count My Struggle.