This is a novel about people in distress, even before that shining new eye opens in the sky. Karl Ove Knausgaard, whose new novel is “The Morning Star.” Credit. (Turid is among those names, like Shakespeare’s Titus, for which it is crucial, when spelling, not to omit the second vowel.)Īdmirers of the six-book “My Struggle” series - I’m among them, with reservations about the final volume - will want to know: Does “The Morning Star” cast the same sort of spell those novels did? The answer, for a long time, is yes. There’s Jostein, a lecherous, shambolic, reeling arts journalist, and his wife, Turid, a nurse, as Knausgaard once was, at a psychiatric hospital. There’s Kathrine, a priest and a translator of the Bible who is tempted to smash her dull marriage, and Iselin, a once-promising student now working in a convenience store. There’s Arne, a literature professor who worries he’s grown plump - Knausgaard’s men hate to be seen as soft - and his wife, Tove, an artist. A cluster of characters gaze into the same mesmerizing sky. This is a strange, gothic, Bible-obsessed novel, laced with buzzard-black themes and intimations of horror.
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