Karl Ove Knausgaard

A NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK * ONE OF NPR'S BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR "Knausgaard is among the finest writers alive." —Dwight Garner, New York Times The Morning Star is an astonishing, ambitious, and rich novel about what we don't understand, and our attempts to make sense of our world nonetheless. One long night in August, Arne and Tove are staying with their children in their summer house in southern Norway. Their friend Egil has his own place nearby. Kathrine, a priest, is flying home from a Bible seminar, questioning her marriage. Journalist Jostein is out drinking for the night, while his wife, Turid, a nurse at a psychiatric care unit, is on a nightshift when one of her patients escapes. Above them all, a huge star suddenly appears blazing in the sky. It brings with it a mysterious sense of foreboding. Strange things start to happen as nine lives come together under the star. Hundreds of crabs amass on the road as Arne drives at night; Jostein receives a call about a death metal band found brutally murdered in a Satanic ritual; Kathrine conducts a funeral service for a man she met at the airport—but is he actually dead?

The Morning Star

Marek Hnatiak

Could a person simply be a human being on earth, who could go wherever they wished without interpreting what they saw in terms of any kind of system, but thinking quite freely? In other words: seeing what they saw as if for the very first time, in every instance? Could a human being simply exist? Without ambition, without plan, without theory?

His sleeping position looked so uncomfortable, but it was the only way he could sleep, I’d learned. With his head tipped back as far as it would go.

Perhaps it was to give easier passage to sleep’s dark cloud, for he always fell asleep so abruptly. And slept so soundly that I doubted he’d ever actually seen me sleep.

It is never the case that we know what we see, but rather the other way round: we see what we know.

People in those days knew that miracles were a part of life, and they saw them, whereas we today know that miracles are not a part of life, and we see them not.

He stared at me for a long time. His gaze was like the ones you can encounter in clubs and bars late at night when someone has decided they’re looking for trouble.

I’m really sorry to have dragged you into this. But there’s a good chance you’ll remember this day for a while. And that’s something, I suppose.

‘Yes. I had an idea along the way. So I hurried back.”

You were an infant, innocent and doted upon, and then you were a child, growing into the world. You saw the sun and the moon, you saw the trees and the flowers, you saw houses and cars, you saw the sea and the sky. You were an adolescent, filled with the emotions of life, and then you grew into adulthood and became a man, following the path of your life, whether you felt it to be of your own choosing or to have been chosen for you.

‘I was wrong about you,’ she said. ‘You’re not an idiot at all. You’re just an unlikeable man.’

Was everything a person did down to the disposition of their soul?

I had refused to accept it, and yet, lying there on the sofa that winter, with that key in my hand, all doors were indeed opened.

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