Karl Ove Knausgård and his seasonal books: transformation is everything – culture

On July 24, 2016, the weather in Southern Sweden shows its most wonderful side, as it has always been for weeks, and Karl Ove Knausgård noticed in the car looking for a program radio that it can receive some German channels. He recalls that during his childhood in Norway during periods of high summer pressure, Danish programs were on television. He had something of an adventure for him: "Signals from another country found their way into the television in our living room.Every father was upset."

Knausgård just got "the copy of the short texts in this book that day", thinking about what the next week will bring him, who will come to visit him, and is happy that his youngest daughter sitting behind him begins to describe his environment. "The fact that the language has come to you is something that I look forward to every day, which I did not take for granted."

Even before the birth of his fourth child, the Norwegian writer had begun to explain the world to him, his wife Linda and the three siblings are how and where they live, in the form of. a four-volume book focused on the seasons. With "In summer" is now the last published, which formally differs as the predecessor "In the spring" of the first two volumes. These consist almost in the manner of a lexicon of three, four pages of considerations on many things of human life and phenomena of nature. Miniatures on watering cans or chairs, apples or trees, but also on his readings of Flaubert or August Sander. "Spring", on the other hand, is the romantic description of a day in Knausgård's life with his three-month-old daughter at the time, and "In summer" now contains half of these thumbnails and two longer log entries of July 2016

What do mackerel look like?

There is something unspectacular at first, as is known from long passages from Knausgård's six-volume book, Min Kamp . Knausgård writes about the weather and what he does to his children – but he also describes how he writes what we read, as there was no time, as the past and present coincide, the time of narrative and writing, and his readers look over his shoulder. He explains what is a seagull or a bicycle, what is a Drosophila or a narrow-leaved willow, looks like mackerel, what he keeps dogs ("I always have carried the fear of the aggressively aggressive dog "), or how a barbecue is made and works:" A grid is made of metal and often has the shape of a sphere, with the upper hemisphere being a lid with handle while the bottom serves as a shell or pit in which the coal is found. "

Wikipedia, Knausgård's prose is here as simple and technical. Nevertheless, the father, who is constantly occupied with everyday affairs, is not only anxious to make the world as easy as possible for his daughter, but tries to penetrate his nature, to rise to the surface of time. which he in turn achieves with admirable and effortless language.

Ice cubes alone, which are mainly used in summer, are a symbol of the great cycle of water, the "wheel," which deliberately turns between the earth and the sky and keeps everything in place. the cold and almost unfathomable look of a seagull with that of his grandmother, who feeds the seagull and recognizes in their eyes motherhood and warmth, both because "we endure the burden of consciousness." Also , Drosophila is worth considering, it seems to be a really meaningless being from another time, another space, "a grain of dust that has crossed the boundaries of biological material". However, as he recognizes a little jealously, neither reflects the meaning of their existence nor the inevitable death.

How true can literature be?

Knausgård can not help but draw new layers of reflection., In the newspaper passages, there are also essayistic passages. Knausgård is concerned with painting and literature, the relationship between art and beauty. He tells how he visits Anselm Kiefer, who brought colorful watercolors to this volume. Or he tries to discover how true literature can be. If it, because of an antisocial activity, is not even the only place of truth. And he asks: "Is not literature ruthless, and cruelty is not its core and legitimacy?"

However, during these seasons, the books, which consist of these miniatures of world clarification, are also narrative. , All pulls something from a crisis management saga. "In the springtime", her deepest structure concerns the depression of Knausgård's wife, Linda, her stays at the hospital, her being a single father for weeks.

In "In the Summer", it is now about the relationship with his adult children, their abnerative processes, as they become aware of their own ego, and how they and their ego-writer begins to fall back on themselves in the face of these processes of maturation

and a sort of revelation seems to be "absolutely true". not so ruthless when Knausgård tells the end of a love story in two short consecutive chapters titled "Summer Night" and "Summer Afternoon". First of a night spent together, "the most beautiful I have ever experienced". And then from the day before, from his light, for him already a memory of life, "because I saw him with her."

Inevitably, one wonders: What lovers does Knausgård talk about? And his marriage? His own reality, which Knausgård unleashes like no other in his work, so-called formal, thoughtful, and even pitiless, he seems to make in this particular case a decidedly fictitious. He remains discreet to continue writing.

After finishing "Min Kamp", Knausgård says he wanted to convince himself "that I can write about something other than myself." Nevertheless, annual volumes have become typical Knausgård books. They are interspersed with many fragments of memory of the life of the Norwegian author, his childhood and his youth. Be it to the father, whose dreaded shadow still exists, at the time when Sting was the most important and important musician on the planet for the young Karl Ove. Or he's trying to figure out what it may be like to look at something in the present while seeing something completely different in the past.

However, Knausgård is also trying something different. In the long entries of the newspaper, he tries, hesitantly, to slip into another me. In that of a woman who falls in love with an Austrian member of the Wehrmacht at the time of the German occupation of Norway, she leaves her family and later she is recalled this time by an old woman living in Malmö. In the end, Knausgård tells this story about 40, 50 pages, and it seems like he's started a new novel here.

The seasons books are by no means inferior to the "Min-Kamp" saga in their poetic quality. They are not an afterthought, not finger exercises, but they have the character of a major work, and "In summer" is their crowning conclusion.

Karl Ove Knausgård: In the spring. From the Norwegian by Paul Berf. With photos of Anna Bjerger. Luchterhand Verlag, Munich 2018. 250 p., 22 €. Karl Ove Knausgård In the summer. From the Norwegian by Paul Berf. With watercolors by Anselm Kiefer. Luchterhand, Verlag, Munich 2018. 490 p., 24 €.