Strait-laced narrators start questioning reality: “What happened the night before seemed so oddly remote as I went back into the kitchen, as if it belonged to some other reality from the one I occupied now,” wonders the professor. ″⁣It affected everyone who saw it.″⁣ Each character responds differently to it as a harbinger of miracles, ranging from dismissal, awe, superstition, and fear. ″⁣The Star was filled with meaning,″⁣ writes Knausgaard. Its influence on reality is ambiguous and mystical. Infidelity and intoxication are the norm.

The characters include an alcoholic journalist investigating a death-metal band’s disappearance, a professor whose artist wife has gone mad and has incorporated the macabre practice of dismembering animals into her artworks, a documentarian who never releases his footage, a nurse who witnesses a man on the operating table return from death, a priest who must bury a man she met earlier that day, and a drug-addicted warden at a mental asylum who accidentally lets a patient escape. Through the lives of nine characters all told in first-person perspective and thinly connected, Knausgaard imagines what would happen if the star’s arrival suspended death. The novel begins when the appearance of a new star in the night sky coincides with strange occurrences across Norway. So the book has an added layer of intrigue: can Norway’s famous confessionalist write about something other than himself? A good old novel, reminiscent of his book about angels, A Time for Everything. But these works feel like appendices to My Struggle: the graphomaniac motors along, but treads water.Īlong comes The Morning Star, a social realist novel. Since the My Struggle series, the Norwegian oversharer has remained bound to autofiction, publishing extensively - the seasonal encyclopaedia, a book about football, a study on Edvard Munch, and a collection of essays. So begins the sprawling, messy behemoth, The Morning Star.

Knausgaard new book