Knaussgaard is back in this week's literary fiction: THE SCHOOL OF NIGHT by Karl Ove Knausgaard, THE MERGE by Grace Walker, QUEEN ESTHER by John Irving
By ANTHONY CUMMINS
Published: | Updated:
The School of Night is available now from the Mail Bookshop
Knausgaard, the granddaddy of autofiction, carved his My Struggle series out of his own life, but in recent years he has turned away from navel-gazing to write plottier novels that are sinister and surreal.
His new book is narrated by Kristian, an aspiring photographer who has left family strife at home in Norway to study at art school in south London in the mid-1980s.
Knausgaard brings his usual eye for detail to descriptions of his protagonist drifting around pubs and engaging in casual sex, yet the book’s real driver is the deadly fallout from a street altercation that Kristian seeks to keep under wraps as his career takes off.
A parable of ambition, told with epic heft – and a decent place to start if you’ve been curious about this writer but never read yet him.
The Merge is available now from the Mail Bookshop
This clever and provocative debut introduces us to a near-future dystopia in which the government has rolled out a raft of authoritarian measures under the guise of tackling climate change.
The horrifying policies target the poorest for an experimental process designed to physically ‘merge’ human bodies – two become one.
Our lens on all this is a woman who signs up for the scheme to save her mother from Alzheimer’s.
But there’s a big twist as the premise is swiftly upended and the novel turns out to be a tale not just of filial duty but of a citizen’s responsibilities in a time of tyranny.
While there’s a sense that the dialogue and characterisation here work chiefly to outline the book’s chewy concept, this is smart and engaging – like Nineteen Eighty-Four crossed with Never Let Me Go.
Queen Esther is available now from the Mail Bookshop
Irving’s action-packed narratives are always brimful of miraculous coincidence, eye-popping set pieces and warm-hearted emotion.
He has long been cherished as a heavyweight of US fiction, but his recent novels have tended to misfire, even for his fans.
Queen Esther unwisely evokes his past glories by revisiting the setting of his 40-year-old classic The Cider House Rules, filmed in 1999 with Michael Caine in the role of orphanage director Wilbur Larch.
Spanning the 20th century, the story follows Esther, a Jewish girl born in Vienna in 1905.
Adopted in New Hampshire after arriving at Larch’s orphanage, she later becomes a surrogate mother to Jimmy, an Irving-ish writer who is the novel’s other focus.
The themes are weighty – prejudice, obligation – but they go astray in a hectic plot that feels contrived and overstuffed.
Daily Mail
