Karl Ove Knausgård

Ingvild Burkey

Winter, written to introduce his youngest daughter to the wonders of life, is one of the most profoundly moving and beautiful of Karl Ove Knausgaard's beloved works. While it stands alone for readers, it is also the exquisitely interwoven, second volume of the Seasons quartet--his new landmark literary project: written by a father to his unborn child. Winter is the continuation of Karl Ove Knausgaard's personal encyclopedia and record of the world that will soon make up the close reality of his yet unborn child. Comprising sixty short, surprising, and incredibly rich meditations on everything from the moon to fireworks to aquatic apes, Winter finds Karl Ove waxing philosophically and meaningfully on the big things that hide behind smaller things: the sublimity of bonfires, the strange mechanics of the inner ear, the evolution of our solar system, and the fearsome beauty of the Norse myths.

Winter

Karl Ove Knausgaard

A love letter to his unborn daughter, Autumn is for every reader who thinks about what the world holds for their child, and is the first book in a surprising, deeply personal and humane quartet: The Seasons--the new project from the always fascinating, original, global literary superstar. 28 August. Now, as I write this, you know nothing about anything, about what awaits you, the kind of world you will be born into. And I know nothing about you... I want to show you our world as it is now: the door, the floor, the water tap and the sink, the garden chair close to the wall beneath the kitchen window, the sun, the water, the trees. You will come to see it in your own way, you will experience things for yourself and live a life of your own, so of course it is primarily for my own sake that I am doing this: showing you the world, little one, makes my life worth living. Autumn begins with a letter Karl Ove writes to his unborn daughter, showing her what to expect of the world she will soon come into. He writes one short piece per day, describing the material and natural world with the precision and mesmerizing intensity that have become his trademark, a riveting personal encyclopedia of everything from chewing gum and tin cans to the migration of birds and the stars. Through close observation of the objects and phenomena around him, Karl Ove shows us how vast, unknowable and wondrous the world is.

Autumn

The grand finale of Karl Ove Knausgaard's masterful and intensely-personal series about the four seasons, illustrated with paintings by the great German artist Anselm Kiefer. 2 June--It is completely dark out now. It is twenty-three minutes to midnight and you have already slept for four hours. What you will dream of tonight, no one will ever know. Even if you were to remember it when you wake up, you wouldn't have a language in which to communicate it to us, nor do I think that you quite understand what dreams are, I think that is still undefined for you, that your thoughts haven't grasped it yet, and that it therefore lies within that strange zone where it neither exists nor doesn't exist. The conclusion to one of the most extraordinary and original literary projects in recent years, Summer once again intersperses short vividly descriptive essays with emotionally-raw diary entries addressed directly to Knausgaard's newborn daughter. Writing more expansively and, if it is possible, even more intimately and unguardedly than in the previous three volumes, he mines with new depth his difficult memories of his childhood and fraught relationship with his own father. Documenting his family's life in rural Sweden and reflecting on a characteristically eclectic array of subjects--mosquitoes, barbeques, cynicism, and skin, to name just a few--he braids the various threads of the previous volumes into a moving conclusion. At his most voluminous since My Struggle, his epic sensational series, Knausgaard writes for his daughter, striving to make ready and give meaning to a world at once indifferent and achingly beautiful. In his hands, the overwhelming joys and insoluble pains of family and parenthood come alive with uncommon feeling.

Ingvild Burkey

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