Meanwhile, a giant new star has appeared in the sky. Knausgaard’s nine narrators are all working through something: alcoholism, career disappointment, crises of faith and despair. Arne’s artist wife Tove is having a psychotic break Kathrine, a priest, is questioning her tepid marriage Turid, a nurse, works nights on a psychiatric ward while her unfaithful husband, Jostein, drinks and rails against an unfair world. It’s “hot as hell” lawns are “yellow and parched” catastrophe feels imminent. The action takes place over two late-summer days around Bergen, Norway. This time, however, we see them through a glass darkly, and as the pages turn, “The Morning Star” reveals itself to be the evil twin of “My Struggle.” It’s an uncanny, polyphonous, diabolical work that gives Knausgaard’s brand of banal realism a mythical-fantastical twist. At first, it seems familiar: As in his great six-volume autobiographical novel, “ My Struggle,” major subjects include bourgeois anxiety and malaise, the stock-in-trade of middlebrow fiction. “ The Morning Star” finds the bestselling Norwegian author in strange and unsettling new territory. Perhaps it’s a coincidence that Karl Ove Knausgaard’s new novel ends on page 666, but don’t bet on it. If you buy books linked on our site, The Times may earn a commission from, whose fees support independent bookstores.
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