Summer
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4.4 • 5 Ratings
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
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.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The sights, sounds, and family activities of a Norwegian summer spark Knausgaard's imagination in this expansive, engrossing meditation on everything, the final volume of a series loosely inspired by the seasons. Norwegian novelist Knausgaard (My Struggle) offers 54 short essays about deceptively mundane topics, from lawn sprinklers and cats to ice cream, bicycles, and "repetition," each one opening out from naturalistic observation or scientific lore into grand metaphor. "Ice Cubes," for instance, begins with the "rustling or clinking sound when the glass they are floating around in is moved," and concludes that "motion and heat cannot be preserved, only reborn, only projected ever further, which gives life its hysterical and manic aspect." Interspersed throughout are diary entries that recount domestic minutiae the weather, landscapes, shopping, barbecuing, and the constant chauffeuring of kids before expanding into ruminations on, among other things, Swedish mystic Emanuel Swedenborg, the difference in perspective between adults and children, and a narrative about a Norwegian woman falling in love with a German officer during WWII. Knausgaard's writing is rambling, pensive, and neurotic he's ashamed of his narcissism, and of being ashamed of his narcissism but also ruthlessly frank about himself and endlessly curious about the world. Always intriguing despite its seemingly banal subject, Knausgaard's prose evokes universal themes from intimate specifics.
