No, I Haven't Read That: "The Morning Star" by Karl Ove Knausgaard

Binge Drinking, Chain Smoking, and Satan's Celestial Bacchanal.

This book is a perfect metaphor for most¹ of my relationships: it starts out brilliantly, with a lot of hope, alcohol, and good intentions, then as soon as you’re at the point where you’re already too far in to get out without having to see it through to the bitter end, devolves into a mess of best laid plans, bad philosophies, and astrologically motivated satanic rituals.²

My cookies are gonna be so fucked after searching for this image.

Karl Ove Knausgaard is most famous for his multi-volume Magnum Opus entitled: My Struggle,³ a loosely defined memoir of…well, his struggle, I guess, and for absolutely flooding my basement the one time I waited on him at Chateau Marmont. He was smoking a cigarette at 9am at one of the tiny outside tables Chateau insists on employing to great comedy any time a person tries to sit down, and drinking espresso while his daughter colored across from him, and if you’re wondering by now if my type is “Toxic and ill-looking,” you would be correct.

What Knausgaard does well—in fact, with almost unparalleled skill—is write with a searing minimalism about the operatic mundanity of being alive. His prose is sparse, yet cluttered with the interstitial details of living that other novelists tend to leave out. You spend a lot of time with Knausgaard making coffee and cooking meals; putting the kids to bed and driving by fjords and planning parties and pouring drinks. He makes the smallest acts and the most boring necessities of a little life seem motivated by a greater plot, each one pushing the boulder a little further up the hill. I imagine he would agree with Annie Dillard that “How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives.”

In The Morning Star, it seems that Knausgaard is trying to depart from his previous body of stark, observational work—the passive but pointed scrutiny of which spoke for itself in terms of its indictment of humanity—and instead, use his talent to Teach Us A Lesson. What lesson that is, however, I have no idea. And frankly, I don’t think Knausgaard knows, either.

The Morning Star follows multiple different characters across Norway, all living in various prisons of their own creation, and united by their collective witnessing of a singular celestial sensation:⁴ a massive new star that rises suddenly in the sky. The first half of the book follows the myriad cast of characters before they see the star; the second half of the book, after the sighting.

Most characters have some connection to either sins, sainthood, or both: a female priest may or may not be cheating on her husband, and may or may not have immaculately conceived or be pregnant with her lover’s child, all while witnessing apparitions of the same, maybe-dead man. A hedonistic, corpulent journalist misses the night his son commits suicide to fuck a random artist in a hotel room and chase the “story of the century:” the ritualistic flaying of three members of a local punk band. A night nurse at a mental institution (and the journalist’s wife) is doing “noble” work, but can only get through the night if she’s high on pills, to near disastrous results. A local ascetic recluse with a barely managed drinking problem ignores the demands and requests of fatherhood in order to wax philosophic about God and Satan, choosing ideological superiority over recognizing his own considerable human failings. And on, and on.

I’m sure, dear reader, you are thinking (as I did!) that the characters one grew to if not love, then certainly invest in, throughout the first half of this veritable tome would be changed in some meaningful, irrevocable way by the sighting of this massive star; this harbinger of godlike redemption or retribution. That perhaps the sinning and the sainthood and the fascination with what is real and what is God would be tied up in a neat summary of intention and ethos. But alas, the denouement Knausgaard promises to be driving towards never materializes, and what we are left with is a jumble of ideas that—if a through line can be found—seem to point towards the author’s conviction that we are already living in the apocalypse; that humans have borne a hell on earth but simply refuse to acknowledge it, even as our sins and our unhappinesses multiply.

I have, of late, found myself fascinated by our culture’s resurgence of interest in the occult and mysticism. Deus Ex Machina, demonic symbolism, heretical suggestion, ghostly omnipotence, and outright ritualistic pageantry seem to have made it back into mainstream literature and entertainment in a way that feverishly (I think) belies our desire to return to a world in which the ills of humanity could be explained simply, either by demonic possession or the meritocracy of sainthood, and when good and evil were far more starkly defined and easily punishable (relatively, of course. I’m not advocating for witch burning. But while we’re not really on the topic I think the Egyptians kind of got it right. Let’s bring back a little ceremonial embalming, why not!).

Or, perhaps, all this demonic fascination is simply heavy-handed metaphor on the part of our modern day prophets and podcasters—a concatenate notion to Knausgaard’s theory that hell has already broken open and the devil, already arrived. That the second coming has already come, and we are all just…still here. Posting on social media and doing our taxes and reading little books and making little Substacks and getting too drunk and wondering why that person we thought liked us won’t text us back, all while the Morning Star rises, and rises, and rises.

Knausgaard seems to suggest that we are all so fractured that not even a massive, irrefutable event such as a new Morning Star could unite us on a common path, or under a shared truth or an agreed-upon morality. He seems to believe that we are not punished for our sins, but by them, and that such punishment or its opposing grace are random, apathetic to the human yearning for karmic fairness. The Morning Star recalls Nietzsche in that its narrative seems to yearn for God, even as it admits nihilism. Perhaps the most obviously tongue-and-cheek representation of this duality is Knausgaard’s choice to end his novel on page “666,” which, for those of you who just got out of the hermetically sealed house where Jared Leto spent the beginning of the Pandemic, is the sign of the devil’s presence. Here, right now. Right in front of us.

My main takeaway from Knausgaard’s novel, however—besides the massive human capacity for depravity and number of cigarettes + pints of light beer in a night—was that believing we are already doomed does nothing but doom us further. That we as people, and we as readers, will always hope for morality in the face of chaos. Because even if morality isn’t real, even if purpose and goodness and justice and God are just convenient, ordered narratives for our death-fearing brains, without such things we would leave our lives asking the same question I asked myself upon completion of this book: “What was it all for?”

READ THIS BOOK IF: You are the person at the party that everyone figures out how to subtly exit a conversation with. Sorry I ended that sentence with a preposition but this is MY SUBSTACK and I get to do what I WANT!

DO NOT READ THIS BOOK IF: You are a fan of Knausgaard’s other work. I imagine this would tarnish it for you a little bit, as it did for my one, gorgeous, ill-fated Chateau Sighting of him and his dead sexy espresso/cigarette combo.

NORA’S RATING: 4.5/10. I’m still mad the second half of this book wasn’t the first half so I could’ve quit it sooner. But I guess if one is honest, one can always see the end in the beginning, so I only have myself to blame. Wow, look at that, I looped it all the way back around to a relationship metaphor. Now THAT’S good writing!

1. I’m not gonna name names, but you know if I don’t mean you because you’re probably not reading, nor do you care about, this newsletter.

2. Just kidding about the satanic rituals part. I have, in all honesty, turned to astrology before to give me the permission I needed to break up with someone. In my opinion: one of the better uses of that medium. Let the girlies have their star sciences! We need something if we’re not gonna get bodily autonomy and/or equal pay!

3. Every time I’ve mentioned the title of this series to another person, that person immediately comments on the title’s assonant association with a different “memoir” by another, much worse European, so if that is coming to mind for you, too, you’re not alone! It was a weird choice on Knausgaard’s part! I don’t understand it, but I also don’t have the bullish and unearned confidence of a tall white man, so!

4. Say that five times fast.