The Morning Star

July 15, 2021
A new heavenly body sends the lives of a handful of Norwegians off-kilter. Nobody's sure what to make of the emergence of a new bright light in the sky. A star? A sign of a miracle? A distant supernova? Regardless, Knausgaard's cast of characters soon faces domestic disruptions to match the astral one. A man despairs of helping his wife, so racked with madness she's seemingly torn the head off a cat. A pastor presides over the funeral of a reclusive man who bears an uncanny resemblance to one she's recently met. Members of a death-metal band are found massacred; a boorish, arrogant journalist tries to cover the story while his wife, a caretaker in a prison, tries to locate an escapee. A nurse starts helping with an autopsy only to discover the corpse isn't dead. Knausgaard circulates through these characters and a handful more, not to connect them plotwise so much as to achieve a symphonic effect: Everybody is experiencing a sense of both fear and wonder, though some are better at dealing with those emotions than others. Each character is rendered with a detail-rich but cool, plainspoken register that's Knausgaard's trademark. And, much as he did in the final volume of his autofiction epic, My Struggle, he concludes with a philosophical longueur, here a contemplation about how myth, religion, and folklore address a porous boundary between life and death. (The abundance of religious references throughout the book, from Bible quotes to tree of knowledge references, sets the table for that somewhat.) For Knausgaard fans, this mix of pointillistic domestic drama and New Age woo-woo will feel familiar, though the lack of a strong narrative arc feels more ungainly in an explicitly fictional setting. A sui generis metaphysical yarn, engrossing in its particulars if broadly rambling.

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Starred review from August 9, 2021
Knausgaard’s first traditional novel since the 2008 translation of A Time for Everything offers a dark and enthralling story of the appearance of a new star. The action, which verges on horror, teems with brutalized people and animals behaving unpredictably. Arne, a teacher with a drinking problem whose bipolar wife, Tova, often disappears on long walks, observes a horde of crabs crossing the road toward the glare of the star. He and eight other narrators alternately react to the astrological event—and yet the turbulence of their home lives overrides their capacity to grasp its shocking effects. Among the players are Kathrine, a Church of Norway priest who is struggling with her marriage; Solveig, a nurse who recognizes a patient from when she was young; Jonnstein, a caustic reporter who gets a tip on a serial killer after committing adultery; and Egil, who is connected to many of the threads, and whose interpolated essay provides a dose of philosophy and one of the strongest narrative beats. Knausgaard wheels wildly and successfully through various forms. His focus on the beauty and terror of the mundane will resonate with fans of My Struggle as they traverse this marvelous, hectic terrain. For the author, it’s a marvelous new leap. Agent: Andrew Wylie, Wylie Agency.

August 1, 2021
One ordinary night in August, a strange new star appears in the sky over Norway. This engaging, if protracted, novel follows a group of Norwegians whose narrative orbits mostly avoid one another, except in their mutual experience of this odd astronomical happening. As dark and bizarre events unfold--members of a death metal band are murdered, other individuals thought to be dead return--the gravitational weight of religious and supernatural explanations strain against the conventions of secular society. Astronomically prolific Knausgaard's relentless attention to the minutiae of everyday life defines the prose, and readers will recognize the novel's realist texture from the author's autofictional magnum opus, My Struggle. While this novel is explicitly fictional, Knausgaard wrote most of it during the pandemic lockdown, and the quick turnaround is a testament to the small-scale industry that producing and translating the author's oeuvre into English has become. Readers hungry for more of this author's immersive storytelling will burn through this tome, while those new to Knausgaard may find it a compelling point of entry to his other works.

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