Karl Ove Knausgaard’s Haunting New Novel

For much of the past decade, the Norwegian author Karl Ove Knausgaard has been part of a cohort of writers trailing in the long backdraft of W. G. Sebald, whose work derived its force from the uneasy and, at times, fleeting truce between fact and fiction. Sebald was interested in the subjective nature of history and in the tension between the macroscale at which world historical events are understood in retrospect and the individual scale at which they are lived. The contemporary iteration of Sebald’s impulse is a little different insofar as it is vested in a dense, gravitational solipsism. So-called autofiction is the social novel turned inside out; in the hands of an autofictionist, one’s own life is a little world. Knausgaard, in particular, strived for a micro-level re-creation of the events that shaped him. In “My Struggle,” his six-volume autobiographical novel, he achieved an acute, piercing psychological closeness that at times felt suffocating or maddening and at other times utterly sublime. To read Knausgaard was to find even the most mundane action pulsing with, if not meaning, then at least beauty, which can function as its own kind of meaning.

Alongside the great topographical features of Knausgaard’s life—his learning that his parents were fallible, being rejected by his brother and by lovers and friends, discovering literature and music—we experienced the negligibly small. We poured innumerable cups of coffee and tea. We slathered bread in butter or jams. We ate preserved fish. We listened to records. We turned the pages of books. In the midst of these scenes, which were recounted almost in real time, Knausgaard offered digressive ruminations on, among other things, the nature of death and the work of various writers and artists. It was the unity between the experiential and the essayistic that made “My Struggle” so captivating. Reading the novels had the same feel of aesthetic lift and drift as touring a staged room. For shockingly long stretches of time, you felt as though your own excellent taste and sensitivity were powering the novels. You wanted to live in Knausgaard’s brightly illuminated version of a world that you almost recognized as your own. In other words, Knausgaard performed a sly transference, a variety of literary hypnosis.

“The Morning Star,” the first of Knausgaard’s new cycle of novels, marks a departure from the autofictional mode of “My Struggle” and a return to the more purely fictional mode of his previous novels. The new book spans a couple of August nights in Norway as a new star shines eerily in the sky, while animals and people alike stir restlessly, as if before a disaster. I was nervous that the novel would feel phony and uptight compared with the sprawl of “My Struggle” and of the books of essays and criticism that have followed. The premise of “The Morning Star” seemed kind of gimmicky, perhaps derivative of Roberto Bolaño’s downbeat mysticism or Jorge Luis Borges’s freewheeling phantasmagoria. It seemed to me, at first glance, like a drastic overcorrection. Was Knausgaard going pulp? Was he going genre on me? I had seen other literary writers undertake such shifts with a kind of stiff, irritable condescension, with disastrous results. As it turns out, I needn’t have worried. I read “The Morning Star” compulsively, and stayed awake all night after finishing it. I left the novel feeling as I often did after watching a great scary movie as a kid—totally convinced that whatever evil, implausible thing I had just witnessed on the screen awaited me in the next room. Not that this novel offers horror in the conventional sense. Under the mysterious sign in the sky, people go about the sort of stifled, frustrated lives that Knausgaard has made his domain: the creatively blocked, the spiritually starving, the terrifyingly sensitive, the queasily realistic failures.

“The Morning Star” is narrated in the first person by nine characters, whose lives are interconnected in ways both large and small. Arne, a professor on summer holiday with his family, is friends with Egil, a dilettante who has experienced a recent religious breakthrough. Kathrine, an old classmate of Egil’s, is a priest who’s contemplating leaving her husband. The young woman who checks Kathrine into a hotel is revealed to be connected to another narrator, Emil, and, going a little further, she recognizes Kathrine as the priest from her confirmation. Iselin, a student, restless and floundering at university, is renting a room from a couple whose missing son is the only witness to a potential ritual murder being investigated by Jostein, a crude arts journalist who views the case as his way back into the hard-boiled crime reporting that he prefers. Jostein is married to Turid, who works in a psychiatric hospital and ponders ways to illicitly acquire drugs from the pharmacy. “The Morning Star” is a secular, superstitious novel in the spirit of Bolaño’s “2666” or “The Savage Detectives.” The discursive sprawl of the story is trussed up by the matrix of interpersonal connections, giving it form even as the characters rationalize away how spooked they feel by the events that unfold across the two strange days.

As for what happens in the course of the novel, it’s hard to say. Everything and nothing. Arne and his partner, Tove, fight, and later Arne gets into a drunk-driving accident. Egil fails to connect to his son, who is not even remotely interested in trying to know him. Emil, a day-care worker, worries about his band and about a child he let fall from a low table during a diaper change. Iselin works in a convenience store and has an awkward reunion with a teacher from high school, then is terrified when a screaming man appears at her door, demanding to be let in. Turid loses a patient owing to her own carelessness, and wanders the woods at night trying to find him. Jostein is unfaithful and sleeps with a woman before being called to the site of a grisly murder. The novel is difficult to summarize because most of its action and its foreboding flow from the long, slow lines of daily life, as in this passage in which Turid, in the midst of a workday, contemplates a fly:

One of the flies landed on my knee. I sat quite still and watched it crawl about for a bit. When it paused and raised its forelegs to its head, a bit like a cat washing itself, I lifted a hand cautiously toward it. My dad had taught me the method when I was little. If the movement was slow enough, the fly wouldn't see it. Once my hand was just above it, I held still for a few seconds and then struck as hard as I could.

The fly was squashed and some yellow matter came out. I picked it up by one of its thin legs and dropped it in the bin.

Dad used to say too that flies were the dead. That was why there were so many of them, and why they stayed close to us in our homes. They were dead souls. I’d never known whether he meant it or not. But ever since the first time he said so I hadn’t been able to look at a fly without thinking about it.

As in “My Struggle,” Knausgaard is preoccupied with the ways in which we care for the vulnerable and the infirm, and with the kinds of self-effacement that caregiving requires. To look after others, one must, for a time at least, forgo looking after oneself. Characters fight over the balance of labor in tending to children, to the home, to shared family life. Meals have to be cooked. Homework done. Teeth brushed. Kids shepherded to school, gangly teen-agers shaped and loved and fed and also, somehow, left alone to become independent. Early in the novel, Arne wonders to himself, about Tove, “When the hell are you going to care about anyone but yourself?” He feels that Tove, an artist who arrives home in the middle of the night, flushed with inspiration, is behaving in a selfish way. The reader is inclined to side with Tove—women are too often expected to forgo their own creative and professional lives for the sake of their partners’ pursuits. The reflex is to think that this is another instance of a selfish, spoiled man trying to get around taking on familial labor. Yet we soon discover that Tove is not well, and that her expansive self-centeredness is a warning sign of a looming mental-health crisis, which will, by the novel’s end, have brutal consequences for all involved.

My favorite sections of the book involve Kathrine, the priest, whose home situation is stable, for better or worse. Her partner, Gaute, is supportive. He does his share of caring for their home and children. Things are in order. Yet Kathrine is being summoned by something outside of the home: the sense that she might be satisfied if she were free of Gaute. The bourgeois comfort of her life chafes against some sensitive, incandescent part of her, and she gives off sparks of irritation. She made me think of Henrik Ibsen’s or Kate Chopin’s restless women. She also represents a classic Knausgaardian paradox. Early in the first section that she narrates, Kathrine encounters a man at the airport, who guesses that she is going to Bergen. She lies and says that she is not, only to find her cover blown when she is seated two rows behind him on the plane. Had she changed her plans? the man asks. “No,” she answers. “Just trying to keep my private life to myself.” The thing about Knausgaard is that you detect, in his desire to tell you everything, an equally robust desire to reveal nothing about himself. In a way, his memoiristic impulse is a strategy to short-circuit a deeply rooted reticence born out of shame.

“The Morning Star” is attuned to the uncanny. Early in the novel, hundreds of crabs scuttle in the dark through forests and onto roads. Tove steps on a pet kitten, killing it, and Arne must bury it in the garden, though he wonders if it’s actually dead. Later, Turid glimpses a terrifying, human-headed bird flying through the dark. The screaming man who arrives at Iselin’s door is nowhere to be found when the police arrive. A patient wakes up just before his organs can be harvested. A man is seemingly dead, then alive, then dead again. There are more quotidian forms of the uncanny, too, as when Arne glimpses some of Tove’s writings and sees that she’s expressed a desire to fuck Egil. There are those deeply odd moments, as the writer Katie Kitamura told me during a recent interview, when you look at the person with whom you share your life and, for just a moment, see someone you don’t recognize. Who is this stranger? This is the most unsettling thing about “The Morning Star”—not the creatures stalking the woods, nor the peculiar star in the sky, nor the man running through the streets screaming for his life. The novel’s revelation is not that something terrible is coming for us all but that it is already in our midst, and it has only been waiting for its signal to begin in earnest.

It strikes me that this is an apt description of how we experience the fact of our own mortality. There is a certain point in your life when you realize that death awaits you. From that moment on, you’re simply preparing to die. Death, like the astronomical object that haunts “The Morning Star,” hangs over you while shining its strange light. What you do is what all of us must do, which is learn to live with it. You ignore its presence at some times and feel oppressed by it at others. I can’t help but think that, in the world of Knausgaard’s novel, the shared awareness of the new star in the sky is analogous to our own hyperawareness of the mortal threat of the pandemic or of the ever-expanding climate crisis. The apocalypse is a kind of mass cultural event, an extinction in which each of us is queasily perched between the roles of observer and participant. It’s fitting, then, that at the end of Knausgaard’s novel we are treated to a long, roaming essay, by Egil, on the subject of death, which hovers above the surface of the fiction and then swallows it whole. The essay concludes with Egil announcing the opening events of the novel: the arrival of the star and all that it portends, the summons to the end of the world—though, of course, we’ve been watching it unfold all along.