Karl Ove Knausgaard, The Morning Star. Trans. Martin Aitken. Penguin Books, 2022. 688pp. Link.
Source: audiobook borrowed from San Diego Public Library

Ensemble genre fiction with Knausgaard’s preternatural skill at character sketch. The vignettes begin to get paint-by-numbers midway through, despite the care and skill. We move into supernatural and horror, with little shift in scrupulousness.

Something feels grotesque, even amoral, about Knausgaard’s works: the detached, equinimical treatment of everything from roadkill to human vivisection to Alzheimer's to alcoholism. Every single thing he describes in exacting detail is wondrous and creepy in equal measure. This is a choice, and it is to let the moral compass spin wildly to see what happens. I think it is sickening.