Review
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“The author casts the world in a holy glow of
surprise and compassion… A winningly interior journey into the
most interior of seasons.” —Kirkus Reviews, starred
“One of the most satisfying elements of [Knausgaard’s] writing is
the rendering of what it is like to be alive, to be a person in
the world, whether alone or among people, to walk around as
thoughts develop, or to hatch plans with others and participate
in activities as a separate being and as part of a whole. His new
series, a four-volume autobiography based on the autumn and
winter seasons, offers a glimpse at how these effects are
accomplished.” — David Varno, The Brooklyn Rail
“I’d have to say that he’s awakened a tempest in me. . .
Knausgaard wrote these essays, he said in an interview, “for
fun.” And they are fun ... and stunning and glorious. . . it’s
the seemingly endless stirring of his thoughts about the wide
world out there that helps to stir ours.” — Bob Blaisdell, The
Christian Science Monitor
“The few winter-specific entries offer some lovely evocations of
the snowbound Scandinavian landscape that will resonate with
Knausgaard’s latitudinal neighbours. Even when discussing other
subjects, though, the essays as a whole reflect the season’s mood
of quiet introversion. Most relate to Knausgaard’s daily
surroundings and follow a similar arc, beginning with a
borderline-irritatingly simple statement (“Pipes transport
flowing liquids” or “A chair is for sitting on”) before veering
off on tangents that are by turns philosophic, funny, and
personal. . . I loved the weird helter-skelter of its ramblings.
Autumn and Winter don’t quite present things “anew,” but they
give their subjects a uniquely Knausgaardian cast; the fun is in
seeing where we end up, Plinko-style, from where we began. “ —
The Toronto Star
“Every child should be as fortunate as Knausgaard's daughter will
be some day to have stories like these to usher them into the
world. But since few will be that lucky, they and their parents
might want to savor WINTER and its seasonal companions instead.”
– Bookreporter.com
“Unlike the long passages in My Struggle that ruminated on a
single idea, the essays in this quartet each last only a handful
of pages. This lightness of touch may surprise his longtime fans,
especially considering the weight of some of the topics he covers
in ”Setting Limits, “Sexual Desire,” “Atoms,” and “The Brain.”
But his ability to weave questions, reflections, and conclusions
into such small spaces is often beautiful… When reading these
essays, I sometimes paused to ask if Knausgaard was pulling the
wool over my eyes with the beauty his prose alone. But no, he
doesn’t….Winter reaches at emotions and common experiences that
lay dusty in all of us.” — Chicago Review of Books
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About the Author
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Karl Ove Knausgaard’s first novel, Out of the World,
was the first ever debut novel to win the Norwegian Critics’
Prize and his second, A Time for Everything, was widely
accled. The My Struggle cycle of novels has been heralded as a
masterpiece wherever it has appeared, and the first volume was
awarded the prestigious Brage Prize.
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Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
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Letter to an Unborn Daughter
2 December. You have lain inside the belly all summer and all
autumn. Surrounded by water and darkness, you have grown through
the various stages of foetal development, which from the outside
resemble the human species' own evolution, from a prehistoric,
shrimp-like creature, its spine shaped like a tail and the skin
covering the centimetre-long body so thin that its insides show
clearly through it - like one of those rain jackets of
transparent plastic, which you will see one day and perhaps
think, as I do, that there is something obscene about them, maybe
because it seems to run counter to nature to see through skin,
and that kind of rain jacket is like a skin we put on - to the
first mammal-like shape, when the spine is no longer the dominant
feature, but rather the head, enormous in contrast to the narrow,
curved lower body and the extremely thin, twig-like legs and
arms, to say nothing of the fingers and toes, narrow as needles.
The facial features are not yet developed - eyes, nose and mouth
can barely be discerned - as with a sculpture on which the finer
work remains to be done. And that's how it is, I suppose, except
that the work isn't done from the outside in, but from the inside
out: you change yourself, you emerge through the . This,
with vague and indistinct features, is how you looked at the end
of June when we were on holiday on Gotland, in a house that lay
deep in the forest on FŒrš, in a small clearing among the pines,
where the air smelled of salt and the sounds of the sea soughed
through the tree trunks. We went swimming before noon, on one of
the long, narrow beaches of the Baltic Sea, ate dinner at an
outdoor restaurant there, watched movies at the house in the
evenings. Your oldest sister was nine years old then, your
next-oldest sister was seven, and your brother was five, nearly
six. They cause so much fuss, especially the two girls, who are
so close in age that they feel they continually need to readjust
the distance between themselves, and keep getting into quarrels
and sometimes fight, but never when they're at the beach, never
when they go swimming; then they're together in everything, and
that's how it's always been: in the water all conflicts
disappear, all problems, there they forget everything around them
and just play. They are also terribly fond of their little
brother, they think he's so sweet and sometimes say they would
marry him if he wasn't their brother. Two months later he had his
first day at school, then it was the end of August, and you were
still lying, tiny, in your darkness, your head gigantic compared
to your body, your legs like little branches, but with nails on
your toes, and on your little fingers, which you were now able to
move, and you probably did, putting your thumb in your mouth and
sucking it. You had no concept of anything, you didn't know where
you were or who you were, but vaguely, very vaguely you must have
known that you existed, since there were differences between your
various states, for if you didn't feel anything when your hand
floated beyond your head, you must have done so when you put it
in your mouth, and that difference - that something is something
and something else is something else - must be the starting point
of consciousness. But it can't have been more than that. All the
sounds that made their way in to where you lay, voices and the
hum of engines, gulls squawking and music, thuds, rattling,
shouts, must simply have been there, like the darkness and the
water, something you didn't distinguish as being separate, for
there can't have been any difference between you and your
surroundings: you were just something that was growing,
stretching itself out. You were the darkness, you were the water,
you were the bumping when your mother walked down a staircase.
You were the warmth, you were the , you were the tiny
difference that appeared when you woke up.
One day you will get to see the photographs from your brother's
first day at school; one is hanging on the wall in the dining
room, the three of them are standing there smiling each in their
own typical way, with the garden, green and glimmering in the
light of the morning sun, as a backdrop, in their new school
clothes, beneath a blue late-summer sky.
This sounds idyllic and joyful. And so it was, both the time
spent at the beach on FŒrš and the first day of school were good
times. But when you read this some day, my little one, if
everything goes well and the pregnancy proceeds normally, as I
hope and believe it will, but for which there is no guarantee,
you will know that that isn't what life is like, that days of sun
and laughter are not the rule, even though they too occur. We are
at each other's mercy. All our feelings and wishes and desires,
our whole individual psychological make-up, with all its curious
nooks and corners and its hard carapace, hardened some time in
early childhood, almost impossible to crack, confront the
feelings and wishes and desires of others and their individual
psychological make-up. Even though our bodies are simple and
flexible, capable of drinking tea out of the finest and most
delicate china, and our manners are good, so that we usually know
what is demanded of us in various situations, our souls are like
dinosaurs, huge as houses, moving slowly and cumbersomely, but if
they get frightened or angry they are deadly, they will stop at
nothing to harm or to kill. With this image I mean to say that
though everything may seem dependable on the outside, very
different things are invariably going on on the inside, and on a
very different scale. While on the outside a word is just a word,
which falls to the ground and vanishes, a word can grow into
something enormous on the inside, and it can stay there for
years. And while an event on the outside is just something that
happened, often innocuous and soon over and done with, on the
inside it can become all-important and generate fear, which
inhibits, or create bitterness, which inhibits, or on the
contrary give rise to overconfidence, which doesn't inhibit but
may lead to a fall that does. I know people who drink a bottle of
strong spirits every day, I know people who pop psychoactive
drugs like candy, I know people who have tried to take their own
lives - one attempted to hang himself in the attic but was found,
another took an overdose in bed and was found and taken to
hospital in an ambulance. I know people who have spent long
periods of time in psychiatric hospitals. I know people who have
been schizophrenic, who have been manic depressive, who have had
psychoses, and who are totally unable to cope with life. I know
people who are bitter and who blame their stagnation or their
decline on others, often on account of things that happened ten
or twenty or thirty years ago. I know people who abuse their
loved ones, and I know people who put up with everything because
they expect no more of life.
All this hardening and misery, all this suffering and loss of
meaning is also a part of life, and it exists everywhere, but it
isn't as easy to see, not just because it originates within but
also because most people try to hide it, and because it is so
painful to admit: life was supposed to be full of light, life was
supposed to be easy, life was supposed to be laughing children
running along a beach by the water's edge, who stand smiling into
a camera on the first day of school, brimming with expectation
and excitement.
Taking one's child to school for the first time, which we will
hopefully do with you one day, is a memorable moment for the
parents, but also heart-rending, because in there, where they
will spend most of their days for the coming fifteen years, they
will have to fend for themselves. That is the main thing they are
supposed to learn, I think, how to be with others - for the
knowledge itself isn't that important, they'll pick that up
anyway, sooner or later. A few years ago one of your sisters was
going through a difficult time, I saw it but couldn't do anything
about it. There were some girls she wanted to be with. Sometimes
they played with her, then she was full of joy, sometimes they
didn't play with her, then she walked around the school
playground by herself, sat alone in the library and read all
through the main break. There was nothing I could do. I could
talk to her, but first she didn't want to talk about it, and
second, what could I say that would help? That she was immensely
nice, immensely beautiful, and that all this was just an
insignificant episode at the very outset of a life which would
unfold richly in ways neither she herself nor we could foresee?
It didn't help that
I thought she was wonderful if the others didn't. It didn't help
that I thought she was funny and smart if they didn't. One
evening we were out taking a walk together and she wondered
whether we could move somewhere else. I asked where. Australia,
she said. I thought, that's as far away as it's possible to get.
I asked, why Australia? She said they have school uniforms there.
Why do you want a school uniform? I asked. Because then everyone
wears the same thing, she said. Why is that important? I asked.
Because no one says that my clothes are nice when I have new
clothes, she said. They say that to everyone else when they have
new clothes. Aren't my clothes nice? she said, looking at me.
Yes, I said and looked away because my eyes were moist. Your
clothes are really very nice.
You will meet with difficulties too. But not for a long time! Now
it is December, three months remain until you will be born, and
then a few years will follow when you are entirely dependent on
us and live in a kind of symbiosis, until that August day arrives
when we will send you too to your first day at school. When you
read this, that day happened years ago and has become one of your
many memories.
Yesterday the temperature dropped sharply, towards evening it was
below zero, all the puddles froze, and the car windows were
furrowed with frost. Before I went to bed, I stood out in the
yard and looked up into the sky, it was completely clear and full
of stars. When I came in, Linda was lying on her back in bed with
her belly half uncovered. She was just kicking, she said. 'She',
that's you. Maybe she'll do it again? I looked at her belly, and
then, just a few seconds later, I saw how for a brief moment it
bulged, it was as if a little ripple passed over it, almost like
the ripples in water when a sea creature moves just beneath the
surface. It was your foot, which from the inside kicked up at the
ceiling. If you had been born now, you could have survived,
though the margins would have been narrow. You dream when you
, and you recognise the different sounds you hear.
Maybe you have be to have an inkling of the outside world, and
if you had had the ability to reflect you would probably have
assumed that the world consists of a small dark space filled with
water, which you are floating in, and that everything beyond it
is purely auditive and consists of all kinds of sounds. That this
is the universe, and that you are alone in it. And maybe that's
how it is out here as well, that we are alone in a large black
space filled with stars and planets, and that beyond that space
there are sounds, as if from an even bigger space, which we will
never be able to penetrate, but only, with time, and perhaps from
the very edge of the universe, will be able to hear the sounds
of.
It is strange that you exist but you don't know anything about
what the world looks like. It's strange that there is a first
time to see the sky, a first time to see the sun, a first time to
feel the air against one's skin. It's strange that there is a
first time to see a face, a tree, a lamp, pyjamas, a shoe. In my
life that almost never happens any more. But soon it will. In
just a few months I will see you for the first time.
DECEMBER
The Moon
The moon, this enormous rock which from far out there accompanies
the earth on its voyage around the sun, is the only celestial
body in our immediate vicinity. We see it in the evening and at
night, when it reflects the light from the sun, which is hidden
from us so that the moon appears fluorescent and seemingly reigns
supreme in the sky. At times it appears to be far away, like a
small, distant ball, at times it comes closer, and sometimes it
hangs suspended like a large luminous disc right above the
treetops, like a ship approaching harbour. That its surface is
uneven can be seen with the naked eye; some areas are light,
others dark. Before the invention of the tele it was thought
that the dark areas were oceans. Others were of the opinion that
they were forests. Now we know that the shadows are enormous
plains of lava, which at one time pushed up from the moon's
interior and filled the craters on its surface before hardening.
If one points a tele towards the moon, one can see that it
is completely lifeless and barren and consists of dust and rock,
like an enormous sand quarry. Not even a breath of wind ruffles
it, ever; the moon is ruled by silence, by immobility, like an
eternal image of a world before life, or of a world after life.
Is that what dying is like? Is this what awaits us? It probably
is. On earth, surrounded by abundant, crawling, flying life,
there is something conciliatory about death, as if it too is part
of everything that grows and expands, that this is what we
disappear into when we die. But that is an
illusion, a fantasy, a dream. The interstellar nothing, the
absolutely empty and absolutely black, with the eternal and
endless solitude this entails, which the moon, since it resembles
earth, makes it possible to glimpse briefly, this is what awaits
us. The moon is the eye of all that is dead, it hangs there
blindly, indifferent to us and to our affairs, those waves of
life which rise and subside on earth far down below. But it
didn't have to be that way, for the moon is so close that it is
possible to travel there from here, as to a distant island. The
journey there takes two days. And at one time the moon was much,
much closer. Now it is well over three hundred thousand
kilometres away from us; when it first appeared, it was only
twenty thousand kilometres distant. It must have been gigantic in
the sky. Considering the peculiar kinds of creatures which have
developed on earth from primordial times until today, with the
most remarkable traits to enable them to meet the physical
demands of their environment, it wouldn't have taken that much of
an adjustment for creatures to appear that were equipped with the
qualities required to cross the short distance in space, the way
life on earth has always managed to cross the distance to even
the most distant islands, and thus has brought life there. The
common horsetail, a primitive, primeval , couldn't its
spools have developed a way of spinning that could have taken
them up through the atmosphere and allowed them to drift slowly
through space, landing gently in the dust of the moon a few weeks
later? Or the jellyfish, couldn't they have left the oceans to
float like bells through the air? Air-fish, would that have been
any more remarkable than fluorescent, blind deep-sea fish? Not to
mention birds. Then life on the moon would have resembled life on
earth, but would still have been different, like a radical
version of the Galapagos, and the moon's birds, almost
weightless, independent of oxygen, would have been able to come
in swarms over the earth, visible as tiny specks far, far up
there, slowly growing larger, and gliding with their enormous,
paper-thin wings over the fields, shimmering in the light of the
moon, which for the people of that time was the seat of the
sacred and the terrible.
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