The shocking case of Karl Ove Knausgaard’s The Morning Star (2021) and decreasing literary capital

The literary sensation Karl Ove Knausgaard returned to international headlines in 2020 with a new novel, which appeared to address the climate crisis with a supernatural twist. Set during an intense heatwave in Norway, The Morning Star (2021) hints at otherworldly events, linked by a bright star, and strange disruptions of time in the lives of nine protagonists. This paper explores two aspects: first, the novel’s Christian apocalyptic flavor as elements of shock and anxiety in the peritext. It draws on Hartmut Rosa’s socio-philosophical theory of social acceleration (2013) to illuminate the narrative’s view of time in conjunction with its Christian references. Second, it examines the reception of the novel’s apocalyptic elements, which, despite hints from the book of Revelation and satanic imagery, did not garner the expected response of shock. Journals like The Guardian , which had promoted the author’s career with his literary giant My Struggle (2012–2018), now dismissed The Morning Star as a recycled version of his previous novels. By considering both the media discourse and the limited literary capital generated by the novel, the paper raises the question of what went wrong in the promotion of shock elements in the epitext of this literary work.