The Morning Star: The exhilarating new universe from the Sunday Times bestselling author of the MY STRUGGLE series

I’ve read lots of Knausguaard and actually preferred his Seasons Quartet to ‘My Struggle’. His books keep getting better and I think he is growing as a person, in wisdom and also growing philosophically and spiritually. I enjoy his insights into life, the spiritual and mundane, most, but it’s great to have a story happening as well to keep you reading. The story seems a mix of Norwegian folk-tales, mythology, a bit of The Stand, current day apocalypse writing and most of all lots of exploring family and family responsibility. It’s the mundane and sublime on nearly every page. Loved it! Can’t wait for part 2.

I wasn't quite sure what to expect with this book, being a lover of his My Struggle books, this was a different departure, although i had read his early books before My Struggle.For the first time, i listened to the audiobook instead of reading and i got drawn in to the many first person stories. It was different, a little experimental, but it works.I can see how some people say it seems unfinished, they are not wrong, but i still got to experience Knausgaards candid style of writing that i enjoyed so much.I think if you are familair and like the authors previous writing, chances are you will like this book.

The first half of Karl Ove Knausgaard’s latest book offers a string of short life stories of local characters in a Norwegian town. Although multiple life issues are raised, from mental health, through family tensions, sexuality, to cosmic change, neither the stories nor their potential meaning are resolved. The writing is flat, endless, and unengaging, and might almost have been written by chatgpt.The book improves in the second half, particularly the chapter on Egil, but then concludes with an imagined after-death experience for Jostein, and a heady philosophical chapter on death by Egil who meets the enigmatic Frank struggling with the death of his young daughter. This last story might have been expanded to make a better book than the myriad unresolved stories interspersed with the meaningless cosmic morning star.Knausgaard’s musings on death, human and animal consciousness, are inadequate. It’s possible that we lack senses beyond our known paradigm, but death is as certain a phenomenon as any other fact we face. Rehearsing a brief history of the awareness of death in earlier civilisations is interesting but already well-known. Proposing an interpretative multiverse is highly speculative, and probably of little value if we can’t access it.

Interstates my and unusual read. Arrived promptly and as described

The Morning Star is Karl Ove Knausgard's first major novel since the conclusion of the landmark My Struggle series and an astonishing, ambitious, and rich novel about what we don't understand and our attempts to make sense of our world nonetheless. The action takes place a few days in late August. The professor of literature Arne and the artist Tove are with their children at the resort in Sørlandet. Their friend, the rich man's son Egil, is in a cabin nearby. The priest Kathrine is on her way home from a seminar, the kindergarten assistant Emil is rehearsing with his band, the journalist Jostein is out on the town, his wife Turid who is an assistant nurse has a night shift. On this a seemingly normal night in August, a huge star appears suddenly in the sky. No one, not even astronomers and weather experts on TV can explain this alarming celestial phenomenon. Is it a newly discovered dying star? Or something new? Eventually, the interest in the news subsides and life goes on, but not quite as before. Reports of shocking portents and unsettling happenings pour in from the fringes of human existence. Creatures that previously existed only in nightmares, mythology, and computer games stalk through the forest, while animals and the environment itself appear to be behaving in strange new ways. Over several days, a cast of idiosyncratic characters will come to understand what is happening, each in their own way, and all face new struggles in their own lives.Unusual things are starting to happen on the fringes of human life, strange natural phenomena are increasing and people are trying to interpret their message. Eventually, interest in the star dilutes and life goes on, but not quite as before. This is a beguiling and exhilarating return to fiction from one of the most acclaimed and talked-about global literary stars, and The Morning Star is a novel about what we do not understand--a cosmic, existential drama filtered through the lens of regular human lives. At its heart, it's about what happens when the dark forces in the world are set free - liberated and allowed to roam unabated. It has a rich and extensive gallery of characters and action that ranges from the everyday recognisable to the great cosmic contexts, and from the quantum, infinitesimal to humongous events wreaking havoc on the entirety of our home planet and solar system. It's about great drama viewed through the limited lens of the most mundane elements of quotidian life. Following nine people over two crucial days in their lives this is a deeply atmospheric work with a sinister undertone throughout but it has a wonder to it and is an exploration of the nature of life and death, the ephemerality of living and an examination of our temporary home on this planet where not everything that surrounds us do we comprehend. Touching, original, emotionally resonant, it manages to be both sprawling and intimate. An ode to the fleeting impermanence of a life we don't truly understand but that is beautiful all the same. Highly recommended.

Then it became pretentious twaddle. Strangely it was unputdownable and I read it in just a few days, the guy can write, but there was no closure for so many characters I had invested in and the Egil chap was just an excuse for the author to express his views. In all honesty it felt like he couldn't work out where to go roughly half way through and just decided to go for 666 pages in order to appear clever using unconnected and meaningless set pieces to get there. Very disappointing.

I have just finished this book and feel like it has been an absolute waste of time. There are so many characters that fail to develop, it makes you wonder what was even the point of including them. I appreciate building an atmosphere and there is certainly anticipation, but there is just no pay off to justify 650 pages of absolute drivel. Avoid.

Cannot fault the passages obviously relating to his marriage to Linda. Stunning. At his best when avoiding existential questions which I found tedious and much too long.

I enjoyed this novel. It's slowly paced, sometimes to the point of tedium, until a shocking revelation or a stunningly rendered piece of insight sucks you right back in. I have heard there are to be more books to this series, and I eagerly await them. I fear without a sequel, my rating may drop to 3 stars.

Norwegian author Karl Ove Knausgaard is one of the most critically acclaimed authors in world literature in recent years. He became quite famous for his six-volume series of autobiographical novels entitled My Struggle (Min Kamp). His novel The Morning Star (Morgenstjernen), also received a heap of accolades upon its publication in 2020. This is my first experience with Knausgaard, so I can’t comment on My Struggle, but The Morning Star definitely left me feeling like maybe it doesn’t deserve all the awards it’s won.The novel follows the lives of several Norwegian characters, each of whom narrates their own chapters in the first person. The story takes place in Western and Southern Norway over the course of two days. An abnormally large star unexpectedly appears in the sky. Scientists conjecture that it may be a new supernova or similar astronomical phenomena, but Knausgaard leads the reader to suspect there may be a more supernatural reason for the star’s sudden appearance. The star seems to have sparked strange behavior and abnormal activity among Norway’s wild animal populations, and some of the characters are troubled by unsettling hallucinations.The bulk of the book is comprised of the characters describing their daily lives. Knausgaard does a great job of crafting compelling characters and painting authentic pictures of real life. I don’t believe there’s a single character in the book that I couldn’t identify with in some way. None of them are boring, and each individual’s psychology is believably rendered. They often express profound and provocative thoughts. In a typical chapter, you read about one character’s activities for a half hour to an hour. A minister performs a funeral service. A teenager throws a party in the hope of making friends. A jerk cheats on his wife. A caregiver performs her shift at a mental hospital. Then, on the last page, there’s a hint of something that belongs in a Stephen King novel. Then you move on to the next character. All the little bread crumbs of horror that Knausgaard drops at the end of each chapter don’t add up to much of a story. Thus, the book is mostly a series of disconnected scenes, admirably well-drawn, that never coalesce into anything resembling a plot. Many of the book’s chapters end in cliffhangers that are never followed up. That makes for the kind of ambiguity that literary critics praise as deep, but most readers will just find annoying.Knausgaard makes a halfhearted attempt to tie things together in the last two chapters. The penultimate chapter is an overdone piece of supernatural fantasy that feels familiar and clichéd. The final chapter is written in the form of an essay, and spends a lot of its length lecturing the reader on ancient Greece. I enjoyed the character of Egil in his earlier chapter, where he really showed a unique way of looking at life and had some interesting things to say. In that last chapter, however, he bored the devil out of me.The fragmentary, half-baked, and arbitrary style of the narrative was surely intentional on Knausgaard’s part, and may even be a savvy marketing ploy. The Morning Star feels incomplete, like it’s just begging for a sequel. Sure enough, Knausgaard published a sequel, The Wolves of Eternity, in 2021. A third novel in the series has since been published in Norway, and a fourth is on the way. Perhaps when all is said and done, the complete saga will be a masterpiece. This book does indeed deliver some beautiful passages of writing. On its own, however, The Morning Star leaves one feeling like they’ve been cheated out of a complete novel and left wanting more.

Some excellent chapters and others that are much too wordy. Book could’ve been half as long. Not worth the money.

“In darkness my god is woven like a fabric/From a hundred routes that drink in silence.” This line from Rainer Rilke’s Book of Hours, which is shared with us by one of the soul-searching characters in KOK’s Morning Star, presages the general theme of the novel. The ten or eleven characters, who recount their experiences during the two day period when a new star appears the sky, have lost their faith, lost their way, in life and cannot find meaning from relationships, chance events, or any of the silent objects in the external world. The new star, and the strange events that accompany its arrival, functions like a non-fungible token in the story for each character in that it is completely singular but also meaningful solely because its meaning is unknown and unknowable. Even though, course, we know that Morning Star is Lucifer, the fallen angel, and this is a novel of belief and possibly even some redemption.We also know, from My Struggle, all six books of it, that KOK reconstructs human experience in a minute by minute narration. Just as KOK’s inner monologue was mesmerizing in Struggle - somehow straddling the mundane and the poetic - it works for each character here too, but it also fits the plot. Each character is so hyper focused on what is in the moment, whether it is simply a view of the ocean or an existential musing, that he or she fails to internalize or even question the magic that is unfolding all around. And magical realism abounds in the novel - synchronicity, insane coincidences, terrifying apparitions - but the characters normalize it the way we all do when we are involved with ourselves.But this novel is not just about the fact that self-involved people can’t find meaning in life. That might be one from Franzen. The theme is darker, more fun, and more expansive. Look at the work of Anselm Kiefer, a KOK favorite. The shapes, movements, landscapes, and evolution of the world is dark and unknown. When you drill on human experience, minute by minute, and our stilted and distracted dialogue with the silent objects in the external world, you don’t find meaning or answers; you find opacity. You find death. But if we really try to peer into the darkness and listen carefully enough, maybe we can find some meaning? Maybe something is happening all around us?For millennia, of course, humankind has sought meaning. I think, however, that KOK Is under the impression that we have abandoned that project of late in favor of a more smug approach to existence. In that sense, he is always trying to get us back to the story of our vulnerable and mysterious circumstance.