THE MORNING STAR

KARL OVE KNAUSGAARD

Harvill Secker, 666pp, £20

Karl Ove Knausgaard's six-volumes of auto fiction, My Struggle, were one of the last decade's literary sensations. Now he has returned to novels with a huge tome of 666 pages. ‘The sign of the devil may not be accidental,' reflected Andrew Anthony in the Guardian. ‘The book is divided into discrete chapters,' wrote Anthony, ‘that are first-person accounts by nine different narrators, all of whom experience disturbances or strange happenings that coincide with the sudden appearance of a large brilliant star in the sky, which may be a supernova.'

In the New Yorker, Brandon It has that beguiling quality that Knausgaard seems to have made his own Taylor was intrigued. ‘Under the mysterious sign in the sky, people go about the sort of stifled, frustrated lives that Knausgaard has made his domain: the creatively blocked, the spiritually starving, the terrifyingly sensitive, the queasily realistic failures.' Anthony found ‘a shaggy dog story full of loose ends and narrative flaws, but it has that beguiling, elusively compulsive quality that Knausgaard seems to have made his own'.

But in the Spectator Stuart Evers was disappointed. ‘Men and women, young and old, speak with the same voice: they “slurp” their tea or coffee or beer; they light “fags”; they tell you what music they are listening to; they overuse one-sentence paragraphs; they ask a lot of rhetorical questions; they have interesting conversations pertaining to the key themes of the book. They have different names, different purposes and characteristics, but the prose is rigorously, unbendingly that of Knausgaard.'