“The Morning Star” by Karl Ove Knausgaard, translated by Martin Aitken, Penguin Press, 688 pages, Sept. 28, 2021.

It is August. Literature professor Arne and artist Tove are with their two sons at a. resort in Sørlandet. Arne has a drinking problem and Tove was diagnosed as bipolar. Their friend, Egil, a driver by day, is staying in a cabin nearby.

Kathrine, a Church of Norway priest, is on her way home from a seminar. She is struggling with her marriage.

Members of a death-metal band are found massacred. Reporter Jostein gets a tip about the killer. His wife Turid, who is an assistant nurse, has a night shift.

Above them all, a huge star suddenly appears in the sky. No one, not even the astronomers, knows for sure what kind of phenomenon it is. Is there a star burning itself out? Or is it a brand new star?

The book is full of ideas and it really rambles. There are a lot of characters and the connections between them aren’t strong. This is dark, eerie and was difficult to get through.

In accordance with FTC guidelines, the advance reader's edition of this book was provided by the publisher via NetGalley in exchange for a review.

As I picked up “The Morning Star,” I was thinking about how in every conversation I ever had about his writing, going back to the first volume of “My Struggle, I could not quite explain its appeal. Why does it work? Why do the slowest parts feel so dynamic? Why do the cliches, whether of language or narrative, fail to grate or offend? How can it be that such unadorned, aimless fiction, sprinkled with what often comes across as warmed-over, second-hand insight, can feel so magnetic?

I am still not entirely sure, but one possibility that occurred to me early in this (nearly 700-page) book is that it must be some kind of profound, elemental authenticity. I do not mean it in the sense of “brutal” or “radical” honesty -- two actual cliches that are obligatory in any discussion of “My Struggle.” It is not about disgorging the lurid details of family drama or confessing to shameful acts or thoughts. Rather, it seems to be about Knausgaard’s description of a way of actually being in the world, which (speaking for myself here) brims with cliche and clumsiness, with borrowed thoughts and uncertain beliefs, and with feelings that countless other people feel under similar circumstances. What made this sense of authenticity in “My Struggle” still more compelling was that every cup of coffee and smoked-and-stubbed-out cigarette were supposedly autobiographical and somehow more important as a result. It was all a ruse, but it worked.

Well, “The Morning Star” does not claim to be an autobiography, but it still makes for compulsive, irresistible reading, even though -- or because -- now there are as many as nine individual narrators who wash dishes, smoke cigarettes, drink beers, fight with their partners and children. Over the course of two days, they also encounter irruptions of the supernatural, the bizarre, and the magical into their lives. Each is instantly memorable and sharply drawn, but each comes across as a fragment of Knausgaard himself, built up to a standalone character, with a standalone story. Each is a mess, a vortex of broken relationships and frustrations. So much so that when the supernatural, the bizarre, the magical intrudes, it becomes a temporary distraction, a nuisance; even if it shocks, it is quickly swallowed up by what ached them before any of the strange stuff happened. Sure, they think thoughts about God, death, mortality and what-it-all-means, but these are hardly preoccupations. With one important exception.

Knausgaard’s framing of these narratives is reminiscent of the “Wandering Rocks” chapter in “Ulysses” -- some stories run in parallel; others are interpolated. It is a roving frame that alights on one character, then pulls back and focuses on another. Some characters recur; others drop out. One story does not explain another, and any expectation that they will ultimately cohere into a single, unifying narrative is left unfulfilled.

Instead, Knausgaard almost (much will ride on this “almost”) concludes with a vaguely philosophical essay “On Death and the Dead,” which is attributed to Egil Stray, one of the nine narrators, and which is intended to serve as a kind of an answer key or a cheat-sheet that ties the whole thing together. It is a thoughtful and thought-provoking essay, if not quite original in its particulars. One of its purposes is to offer an explanation, an interpretive helping hand for those intrusions of the supernatural and the bizarre in the narrative stories. But what are we, as readers, to make of these explanations? Why are we to regard the essay’s fictional author as an authority on anything? His earlier appearance as one of the nine characters left no such impression. Why do we need to pay attention to his thoughts on death? Is he a reliable explainer?

So, what we are left with, I think, is, again, the question of authenticity -- except now no longer solely about describing a way of being in the world, but about authorship itself. Is Egil the same as Knausgaard? Or (ugh) what does the author really think? Reassuringly, Knausgaard’s answer seems to be “Who cares?”

I thought (and still think) that this would be a really interesting book, but I can't keep going when almost the first thing that happens is that a kitten gets killed. I'm giving it three stars as a sort of a compromise.

No one makes the mundane moments of life more compelling than Karl One Knausgaard. I, like many, came to know him from his My Struggle series. I found the little details of his life depicted in those pages to be hypnotic. The same knack for depicting everyday life shines through in this book as well. It's hard not to find some autobiography in this, having read so much about the authors life, but the tale of a motley crew of characters all reacting to a new celestial body and the strange happens surrounding it added a touch of the otherworldly that I enjoyed immensely.

Thank you to Netgalley and the publisher for allowing me to read an ARC of The Morning Star in exchange for honest feedback.

The description of this book sounded enticing though bewildering and I asked NetGalley if I could read it. Because of the Scandinavian name of the author, I was expecting a mystery Noir. but got something far different.
I have never heard of this author and his previous books make me think that I would have loved him when I was a university student and contemplating the existence and understanding of everything.

The book is long and slow-going. It consists of chapters describing two or three days in the life of a number of people all living in the same basic area of Norway. A new star has appeared in the sky and each becomes aware of it at some point in the first part of the book. Strange things.happen, verging on Sci-Fi. One reviewer added that it also verged on horror but I didn't find it so. The book ends with a treatise - a very long chapter - on the nature of death and dying. That chapter stood alone and encompassed years of thought and writings as far as Homer up to the present day. It is something I might read in a Philosophy class or Western Civilization class. That is not to say that it wasn't fascinating, it was! Just a very different kind of reading that I choose to read in the second half of my life!

There aren't many reviews on Netgalley but those that did review know of Mr. Knausgaard and admire him. They were excited to read him and knew to batten down the hatches for a long sit. I found his writing to be wonderful, The descriptions of the characters and their lives were compelling, it not exactly attractive, and totally bizarre. What I am not clear on is how much the impact of the new morning star began right from the beginning of the book or began partway through..

I don't know how to rate this book. I admire the effort, the author is clearly an accomplished author but it is not anything I'm interested in pursuing.
If you know of this author and have liked previous writing, you will probably love this book.

I'm not quite sure how I feel about this book. Some parts gave me pause for great reasons and not-so-great reasons. Foremost, I really struggled with how many characters there are and how flimsily they seem to be related to one another. There are so many characters that often I found myself asking what a particular motivation was because I felt as though I knew nothing about the current situation. The stories overlap in such a way that all suspense is lost abruptly and never quite gets picked back up. And when they do overlap, it's to the point of redundancy It feels disjointed, in that way. With all the narrators, it's quite difficult to tell them apart by voice. I wasn't very invested in the characters—they were all quite unlikeable—, and the moments I did care about failed to relate to the later developments. That being said, there were a lot of lines that I enjoyed. The entire premise is rather thought-provoking and confusing in what I think is a good way.

It's been a few years since I last picked up a Knausgaard work as I knew I'd need to be prepared to be entirely consumed by it, and I was not disappointed with The Morning Star. The story felt overwhelmingly dark and oppressive, and yet I felt an excitement reading this story that I've struggled to feel throughout Covid. The genre balance felt to be exactly where it should be - not quite sci-fi, not quite horror, but just enough of each. I feel that each character was fleshed-out and unique, which could have been a struggle given the changing nature of the narratives. I cannot wait to find myself in the world of this work once more.

I love Karl Ove Knausgaard so much!! His writing his just stunning. He could writes his grocery store list and I would read it with excitement. Seriously, amazing writing and a very good story. One of my top author! I recommend it!