And then you write a novel and then you use everything that you have available. They could be in those books or in my thoughts or for a very long time, and I've never done anything about it. No, but you know, when you write a novel there are elements that are very old. When you say a very long time, how long are we talking? Like four years? Before My Struggle ? And I also worked on all of the characters for a very long time, but it didn't start to become a novel until very recently, really. And this has been a thing in my mind for quite a while. I wanted to make a novel with many characters, many voices and I had the morning star. There will be things happening later and this is a part of that universe. I was at a reading of yours four years ago in Brooklyn, and you mentioned that you were writing a book about the devil. It clocks in at a charmingly satanic 666 pages.

That might not sound like a good time, but The Morning Star, with its wide cast and spooky undertones, is easily Knausgaard’s most fun project to date. Much as Sally Rooney is the literary authority on millennials who can’t talk about their feelings, Knausgaard is the great author of dads who drink too much and behave badly. For my money, no one today writes as well about shame or funerals. My Struggle was rooted in such a grandiose concept that it could distract from Knausgaard’s undeniable talent. They all try to hold their lives together as their world becomes unnerving, then creepy, then worse.Īnyone even slightly familiar with Knausgaard will notice one big difference right away-he’s not writing about himself (though fans will notice autobiographical qualities in many of the characters). There’s a priest stuck in an unfulfilling marriage, a literature professor struggling to care for his wife, an arts journalist whose main problem seems to be that he’s a huge asshole, and several others. It follows a number of characters grappling with the challenges of everyday life, which seem to be worsened by a bright star that mysteriously appears in the sky. If you went to Sunday school or watched Chilling Adventures of Sabrina, that title might ring a bell. That book, The Morning Star, comes out in English this week. It took him nine years to publish another novel.

Regardless, Knausgaard emerged from the project divorced and acclaimed. You might find it brilliant you might find it preposterously self-indulgent.

The books explored his life in excruciating detail, with frequent detours into history, philosophy, and the arts. The Norwegian author’s My Struggle, a six volume series of autobiographical novels named after Hitler’s memoir, was widely hailed as, in the Guardian’s words, “perhaps the most significant literary enterprise of our time,” launched intra-familial feuds, and induced its fair share of eye-rolling. Not many authors are successful enough to become a problematic fave, but Karl Ove Knausgaard is one of the few.

Karl ove knausgaard the morning star