When a character eats a burger, Knausgård itemises the ingredients (“bacon, beef, bun, onion, tomato, lettuce, ketchup”). This is a book bloated with the inconsequential. This ambient hum of empty gesture is merely one weapon in Knausgård’s vast arsenal of redundancy. I went into the kitchen again, poured the boiling water into a saucepan, put the eggs in, cut some bread and put it in the toaster When the eggs had boiled for exactly four and half minutes, I took the saucepan off the hob, drained the water off, put it down in the sink and filled it up with cold water from the tap before taking the eggs and putting two on his plate, one on mine. But with no aura of performance to protect him, the inadequacy of his technique is exposed: In My Struggle, he had a convenient excuse – his white-knuckle mission statement to write straight through, amending nothing. Knausgård’s fondness for pulverising detail has always been divisive. It’s a literary supernova – the entire Knausgårdian project entering spectacular, all-consuming heat death. That light on the horizon isn’t a new star. We cycle through interchangeable narrators, circle the same static event. Arne is set aside, not to return for 250 pages, and so is any pretence at effort. Or are they? As the book progresses, another possibility presents itself: that they are merely fleeing a sinking novel. The narrator, Arne, rounds a corner in his car and sees first a crawling mass of crabs and then, above him, the fiercely bright new star, towards which the crabs are drawn. Something seismic is just off-frame, advancing. The atmosphere is still and eerily fragile. Initially, Knausgård’s patented accretion of detail feels enriched with a new and welcome undertow: unnamed dread. Instead, a sprawl of narrators, clustered around a heavyweight fictional event: the appearance of a new star. Gone is Knausgård himself as subject and device. The Morning Star, then, feels like an event – Knausgård’s return to the novel, huge and self-consciously serious.

Mining his recall rather than his imagination, he bypassed the need for invention. His autofictional epic, My Struggle, was followed in turn by several works of nonfiction. Knausgård has leant further into this small space between the everyday and the transcendent, the beautiful and the wearyingly drab, largely by eschewing the novel form. Others would argue that this is his fatal flaw: he strains for dazzlement, but paints in primary colours. Is this really Knausgård’s idea of “unprecedented clarity”? His admirers might say this is precisely his point: with clarity comes simplicity. The vividness of those “quivering lattices of light” clashes dissonantly against the flatness of that yellow sun and blue sky. Beneath the surface of the quotidian, we sense the outline of the ineffable yet the mundane never quite disappears from view.

Knausgaard karl ove