Spring
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4.3 • 10 Ratings
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- $13.99
Publisher Description
“Spring features Knausgaard unbound, writing for the first time without a gimmick or the crutch of extravagant experimentation…Fall in love with the world, he enjoins, stay sensitive to it, stay in it.”
-The New York Times
"Poignant and beautiful…Even if you think you won’t like Knausgaard, try this one and you’ll get him and get why some of us have gone crazy for him."
—Los Angeles Review of Books
You don’t know what air is, and yet you breathe. You don’t know what sleep is, yet you sleep. You don’t know what night is, yet you lie in it. You don’t know what a heart is, yet your own heart beats steadily in your chest, day and night, day and night, day and night.
So begins Spring, the recommencement of Knausgaard’s fantastic and spellbinding literary project of assembling a personal encyclopedia of the world addressed directly to his newly born daughter. But here Knausgaard must also tell his daughter the story of what happened during the time when her mother was pregnant, and explain why he now has to attend appointments with child services. In order to keep his daughter safe, he must tell a terrible story, one which unfolds with acute psychological suspense over the course of a single day.
Utterly gripping and brilliantly rendered in Knausgaard’s famously sensitive, pensive, and honest style, Spring is the account of a shocking and heartbreaking familial trauma and the emotional epicenter of this singular literary series.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Knausgaard's latest is a radical, thrilling departure from the first two volumes of his Seasons Quartet. While Autumn and Winter took the form of short essays, this moving novel stylistically resembles his acclaimed My Struggle series. The lead, an avatar for Knausgaard himself, is alone with his four children in Sweden. Readers do not know why their mother is missing, or how long she has been gone. The lyric prose is addressed in the second person to the protagonist's infant daughter, to read when she grows up. "I am forty-six years old and that is my insight," he reflects, "that life is made up of events that have to be parried." There are frequent insinuations of disaster: a filthy house; fears about the baby's health; a visit to child protective services; blood floating in the toilet. While suspense mounts, the text delves into brief philosophic examinations of Swedish cinema, Russian literature, and the protagonist's desire to return to a 19th-century lifestyle. As he takes his baby to visit her mother, the action flashes back to the fateful day that changed everything. This is a remarkably honest take on the strange linkages between love, loss, laughter, and self-destruction, a perfect distillation of Knausgaard's unique gifts.
