The Morning Star by Karl Ove Knausgaard

I am not quite sure what to make of this book. I have not read his opus magnum, My Struggle, is a series of six autobiographical novels totaling 3600 pages that were published between 2009 and 2011 and caused quite a stir. So I do not have a measuring stick against which to judge this. On the one hand, at times the book seems more like unlinked contemporaneous stories. The action takes place over two late-summer days around Bergen, Norway. There is an element of climate change woven in. All is going poorly and catastrophe feels imminent. Arne’s artist wife Tove is having a psychotic break; Kathrine, a priest, is questioning her tepid marriage; Turid, a nurse, works nights on a psychiatric ward while her unfaithful husband, Jostein, drinks and rails against an unfair world. Everyone is working through something: alcoholism, career disappointment, crises of faith and despair, and in the midst of it bad things are happening.. Meanwhile, a giant new star has appeared in the sky. Is it a supernova? A biblical portent? Or something else entirely? The last chapter does attempt to tie it all together, but I am not sure what it all means--and perhaps it is in fact the first installment in a series, which might explain that. In any case, this is a thoughtful, highly readable novel, packed with ideas and exciting flourishes, with interspersed scenes of domesticity and horror, in equal parts.