The Starless Sea: A Novel (udgave 2020)

My interest in this book waxed and waned. There were pockets of the story that were exciting, but the momentum stalled again and again. As a side note: the depictions of libraries/librarians at the beginning of the book made me question if the author has been to a library in recent years. So many tired stereotypes. ( )

Even in the exhausted and addled-minded state in which I began reading this novel, I knew from the outset that it was brilliance, that it was poetry, that it was magic. A book that opens the world - not this world, but one infinitely more which in turn makes you want to believe and remake this world in its image. Those of us who read Morgenstern’s first novel, The Night Circus, will not be at all surprised that she has once again brought her talents to bear in a new fantasy of epic proportions, but even so she has changed the game again. In the last story we were immersed in a magical circus and a deadly competition, but this time the stakes are even higher as we are set on a quest to uncover the Starless Sea and the story that has built it (or was built by it). Morgenstern strays away from a lineal narrative, with chapters spinning circularly amongst a large cast of characters, which may lead to some confusion, but which all works out as much as it possibly can by the finale. By the end of the book we’re left with so much poetry, so much story, and so much wonder that it’s almost impossible to actually sum up the novel and do it justice so I’ll just end this review with a quote: “A girl lost in the woods is a different sort of creature than a girl who walks purposefully through the trees even though she does not know her way.” We may not know where we’re going with this story, but we know that if we walk its pages we will get somewhere wonderful. ( )

Morgenstern, Erin. The Starless Sea. Doubleday, 2019.
Reading the wildly divergent reviews of Erin Morgenstern’s The Starless Sea, I thought for a while that she might have done well to include a disclaimer something like Mark Twain’s famous notice at the beginning of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn: “PERSONS attempting to find a motive in this narrative will be prosecuted; persons attempting to find a moral in it will be banished; persons attempting to find a plot in it will be shot.” Certainly, a number of reviewers struggled in vain to find meaning, motive, or plot in it. Others were entranced by the book’s dark and mysterious ambience. It begins with a young man being drawn into a magical underground realm beneath the streets of Manhattan. He is attracted to a young man who calls himself Dorian after the character by Oscar Wilde. After that, every element of the novel shouts at us that it is all a self-referential metaphor. It is a book about books, about the writing process, about the endless exploration of one’s own motives and identity. The symbols are mythic (Morgenstern has said she was influenced by reading about the Egyptian Book of the Dead as a child); they are often vaguely Freudian and Jungian. The starless sea is sometimes made of paper, sometimes honey. It is the personal unconscious and also the collective unconscious. Characters construct their personas as they go along and keep running into their animus or shadow. Their lives are constructed like a computer game with different paths through the narrative. Does it all work? For me, not quite. One character says, when he sees a wardrobe he eventually disappears into, that he never really liked the Narnia stories. I get why. Me either. The novel works best when it stays above ground and gives an eerie weirdness to the quotidian world. Four stars just barely. ( )

Zachary Ezra Rawlins finds a book in his university Library called Sweet Sorrows. It contains a series of stories about pirates, lost love, the Starless Sea, and himself. In trying to find out the book’s secrets, he becomes entangled with a secret society and learns that Myth and Stories have more power than he could possibly have known.
This book reminds me a bit of The Neverending Story, with its dual level of a boy reading a book whose story includes him. Yet The Starless Sea goes several layers deeper than that. It explores the worlds of myths and fairy tales in a way that is itself a myth. It may be difficult to follow what is real and what isn’t in this book, but I think that’s the point: to simply fall into the beauty of storytelling, to revel in a story well-told, and try to find ourselves within the story. If you read Morgenstern’s The Night Circus you will be well-pleased by this book. If you enjoy magical realism and falling down rabbit-holes, you will enjoy this book. ( )

https://nwhyte.livejournal.com/3591882.html

Another rather good liminal fantasy, about a quest for stories and truth originating from a mysterious library book. Kept me absorbed, and I'd look for more from this author. ( )