Review
------
"If you still haven’t tried Knausgaard or have been
unsatisfied with his helplessly casual New York Times travel
essays, try Spring. It’s 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
“Spring features Knausgaard unbound, writing for the first time
without a gimmick or the crutch of extravagant experimentation. .
. Spring refuses contrivance; it refuses to parry. Instead, over
the course of one day, we watch Knausgaard care for the children
and home, his wife mysteriously absent. He changes diapers, makes
meatballs, desultorily enforces some discipline and does a
harrowing a of laundry. He sneaks off for a and
writing time. And the book’s blunt, unforced telling brings the
larger project’s meaning into sudden, brilliant focus…This series
is the rejoinder to his her’s diary. Knausgaard has assembled
this living encyclopedia for his daughter with a wild and
desperate sort of love, as a way to forge her attachment to the
world, to fasten her to it — to fight the family legacy of
becoming unmoored and alienated. Fall in love with the world, he
enjoins, stay sensitive to it, stay in it.” — The New York Times
"Knausgaard’s assets are on full display, including his precise
writing style and his unerring sense of detail. He is constantly
attuned to his surroundings, noting the changing weather and the
colors of flowers, which may account for why he is so successful
at what he does: transforming quotidian life into drama. . . For
anyone who is curious about this writer but has not felt the urge
to invest in the full 3,500 pages of his autobiographical
series, “My Struggle,” “Spring” makes for an excellent
introduction. It is the shortest book he has ever written, but it
is all muscle, a generous slice of a thoughtful, ruminative
life.” — The Washington Post
“This volume is a novella that more directly recalls his epic My
Struggle series, driven by the same intensely analytical
impulses… If we neglect simple things, how else are we
neglectful? And how much harm are we unwittingly bringing upon
others, especially those we love most? A fine stand-alone
meditation on mortality and herhood.” — Kirkus, starred review
“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 accled My Struggle series… 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.” — Publishers Weekly, starred review
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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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One
You don't know what air is, yet you breathe. You don't know what
is, yet you . 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.
You are three months old and as if swaddled in routines you lie
on a bed of sameness through the days, for you don't have a
cocoon like larvae do, you don't have a pouch like the kangaroos,
you don't have a den like the badgers or the bears. You have your
bottle of milk, you have the changing table with nappies and wet
wipes, you have the pram with the pillow and the duvet, you have
your parents' large warm bodies. Surrounded by all this you grow
so slowly that no one notices, least of all yourself, for first
you grow outwards, by gripping and holding on to the things
around you with your hands, your mouth, your eyes, your thoughts,
thereby bringing them into being, and only when you have done
this for a few years and the world has been constituted do you
begin to discover all that grips you, and you grow inwardly too,
towards yourself.
What is the world like to a newborn baby?
Light, dark. Cold, warm. Soft, hard.
The whole array of objects in a house, all meaning deriving from
the relations within a family, the significance that every person
dwells within, all this is invisible, hidden not by the darkness
but by the light of the undifferentiated.
Someone once told me that heroin is so fantastic because the
feelings it awakens are akin to those we have as children, when
everything is taken care of, the feeling of total security we
bask in then, which is so fundamentally good. Anyone who has
experienced that high wants to experience it again, since they
know it exists as a possibility.
The life I live is separated from yours by an abyss. It is full
of problems, of conflicts, of duties, of things that have to be
taken care of, handled, fixed, of wills that must be satisfied,
wills that must be resisted and perhaps wounded, all in a
continual stream where almost nothing stands still but everything
is in motion and everything has to be parried.
I am forty-six years old and that is my in, that life is
made up of events that have to be parried. And that the moments
of happiness in life all have to do with the site.
What is the site of parrying something?
It isn't to regress, it isn't to withdraw into your world of
light and dark, warm and cold, soft and hard. Nor is it the light
of the undifferentiated, it is neither nor rest. The
site of parrying is creating, making, adding something that
wasn't there before.
You were not there before.
Love is not a word I often use, it seems too big in relation to
the life I live, the world I know. But then I grew up in a
culture that was careful with words. My mother has never told me
she loves me, and I have never told her I love her. The same goes
for my brother. If I were to say to my mother or my brother that
I love them, they would be horrified. I would have laid a burden
on them, violently upsetting the balance between us, almost as if
I had staggered around in a drunken fit during a childÕs
christening.
When you were born I knew nothing about you, yet I was filled
with feelings for you, overwhelming at first, for a birth is
overwhelming, even to someone who is merely looking on - it is as
if everything in the room grows denser, as if a kind of gravity
develops that draws all meaning towards it, so that for a few
hours it can only be found there, later becoming more evenly
spread out, subjected to the everyday, diluted with the
eventlessness of all the hours of the day and yet always there.
I am your her, and you know my face, my voice and my ways of
holding you, but beyond that I could be anyone to you, filled
with anything. My own her, your grandher, who is dead,
spent his last years with his mother, and their existence was
pitiless. He was an alcoholic and had regressed, he no longer had
the strength to parry anything, he had let everything slide, just
sat there drinking. That he did so in his mother's home is
significant. She had given birth to him, she had cared for him
and carried him here and there, made sure he was warm, dry, fed.
The bond this created between them was never broken. He tried, I
know that, but he couldn't do it. That's why he stayed there.
There he could let himself go to ruin. No matter how crippled, no
matter how hideous, it was also love. Somewhere deep within there
was love, unconditional love.
Back then I didn't have children, so I didn't understand it. I
saw only the hideousness, the unfreedom, the regression. Now I
know. Love is many things, most of its forms are fleeting, linked
to everything that happens, everything that comes and goes,
everything that fills us at first, then empties us out, but
unconditional love is constant, it glows faintly throughout one's
whole life, and I want you to know this - that you too were born
into that love, and that it will envelop you, no matter what
happens, as long as your mother and I are alive.
It may happen that you don't want anything to do with it. It may
happen that you turn away from it. And one day you will
understand that it doesn't matter, that it doesn't change
anything, that unconditional love is the only love that doesn't
bind you but sets you free.
The love that binds one is something else, it is another form of
love, less pure, more mixed up with the person who loves, and it
has greater force, it can overshadow everything else, even
destroy. Then it must be parried.
I donÕt know what your life will be like, I donÕt know what will
happen to us, but I know what your life is like now, and how we
are doing now, and since you wonÕt remember any of it, not the
least little thing, I will tell you about one day in our life,
the first spring you were with us. You had thin hair, it looked
reddish in the light, and it grew unevenly; there was a circle on
the back of your head with no hair at all, probably because it
was nearly always pressing against something, pillows and rugs,
sofas and chairs, but I still found it strange, for surely your
hair wasnÕt like grass, which grows only where the sun shines and
air is flowing?
Your face was round, your mouth was small, but your lips were
relatively wide, and your eyes were round and rather large. You
slept in a cot at one end of the house, with a mobile of African
animals dangling above you, while I slept in a bed next to yours,
for it was my job to look after you at night, since your mother
was sensitive when it came to , whereas I slept heavily,
like a child, no matter what happened around me. Sometimes you
would wake at night and scream because you were hungry, but since
I didn't wake up or only heard it as a sound coming from far, far
away, you learned the hard way not to expect anything while it
was dark, so that after only a few weeks you slept through the
night, from when you were put to bed at six in the evening until
you woke up at six in the morning.
This morning began like all the others. You woke up in the
darkness and started to scream.
What time was it?
I fumbled around for my phone, which should be on the windowsill
just above my head.
There it was.
The light from the screen, no larger than my hand, filled nearly
the entire dark room with a vague glow.
Twenty to six.
'Oh, it's still early, little girl,' I said and sat up. The
movement set off a rustling, wheezing sound in my chest, and I
ed for a while.
You had gone quiet.
I walked the two steps over to the cot and bent over you, placed
a hand on either side of your little ribcage and lifted you up,
holding you close to my chest and supporting the back of your
head and neck with one hand, even though you were already able to
hold your head up by yourself.
'Hi there,' I said. 'Did you well?'
You breathed calmly and seemed to press your cheek against my
chest.
I carried you down the hall and into the bathroom. Through the
window I saw a narrow band of light just above the eastern
horizon, reddish against the black sky and the black ground. The
house was cold, the night had been starlit and the temperature
must have dropped, but fortunately the dryer had been on all
night, and some of its heat, which at times seems almost
tropical, still lingered in the room.
I laid you down carefully on the changing table, which had been
squeezed in between the bath and the sink, ing again. A glob
of mucus came loose in my throat, I spat it into the sink, turned
on the tap to wash it down, saw how it clung to the metal wall of
the plughole, smooth and sticky, while water ran over it on both
sides until it slowly began to slide over to one side and then,
abruptly as if acting of its own volition, disappeared down the
drain. I glanced briefly at the mirror above the sink, saw my own
like face staring at me, turned off the tap and bent over
you.
You looked up at me. If you were thinking about something, it
couldn't have been put into words or concepts, it couldn't be
anything you formulated to yourself, only something you felt.
There he is, is maybe what you felt as you looked at me, and
along with the face you recognised came a whole set of other
feelings associated with what I usually did with you and in what
ways. A great deal must still have been vague and open within
you, like the shifting light in the sky, but once in a while
everything must have fused together and become definite and
unavoidable: those were the basic bodily sensations, the tide of
hunger, the tide of thirst, the tide of tiredness, the tide of
too hot and too cold. Those were the times you started to cry.
'What are you thinking?' I said to distract you a little as I
undid the top buttons of your white pyjamas. But you still thrust
out your lower lip, and your mouth began to quiver. With my index
finger I struck the tail of one of the little wooden aeroplanes
hanging above the changing table so that it began revolving. Then
I did the same with the next one, and the next after that.
'Don't tell me you're going to fall for that same old trick today
too?' I said.
But you did. You stared wide-eyed at all the movement in the air
while I took off your pyjamas. As I put them in the laundry
basket, steps sounded on the ceiling above us. It must have been
your younger sister, since the elder one always slept as long as
she could and your brother was probably up already. I loosened
the flaps of the nappy and pulled it off. As I carried it over to
the waste bin it felt unexpectedly heavy, as nappies often do,
since the material creates an expectation of lightness. That
weight felt good, it told me that you were all right, that your
body was functioning as it should. Everything else seemed to be
falling apart, from the fluorescent tube above the stove, which
had be blinking more than a year ago and then gone out
completely, and which still remained uselessly in its socket, to
the car, which had suddenly be to vibrate whenever it passed a
certain speed and had been collected by a tow truck and taken to
a garage - to say nothing of all the food that got mouldy or
spoilt, shirt buttons that fell off or zips that got stuck, the
dishwasher which had stopped functioning or the kitchen sink
drainpipe which had got clogged somewhere in the garden, probably
with congealed grease, the plumber said when he came to fix it.
But the bodies of the children in our house, so smooth and soft
on the outside, and infinitely more complex than any machine or
mechanical device on the inside, had always functioned perfectly,
had never broken down, had never gone to pieces.
I put on a new nappy, widened the opening of a romper suit with
my hands and pulled it over your head. You moved your legs and
arms slowly, like a reptile. I lifted you up and carried you into
the kitchen just as your younger sister came in, barefoot and
narrow-eyed with .
'Good morning,' I said. 'Did you well?'
She nodded. 'Can I hold her?'
'Yes, that would be great,' I said. 'Then I'll make her some
milk. Here, sit on the bench.'
She sat down on the bench, and I handed you to her. While I
filled the bright yellow electric kettle with water, got out the
milk formula and the bottle, measured out six spoons and poured
them into the lukewarm water, you half sat, half lay in her lap,
kicking your feet.
'She's pretty happy, I think,' your sister said, taking your
little fists in her own, which suddenly seemed big.
She was nine years old and given to thinking more about others
than about herself, a character trait of hers that I had often
wondered about, what had caused it. She had a light-filled soul,
life flowed through her without encountering many obstacles, and
maybe the fact that she didn't doubt herself, didn't question
herself, somehow meant that what was her self didn't demand any
effort or exertion, leaving plenty of space within her for other
people. If I got angry with her and raised my voice even a little
she reacted strongly, she began to cry so despairingly that I
couldn't stand it and immediately tried to take it all back,
usually in one of the many corners of the house which she sought
out to be alone in her misery. But that almost never happened,
firstly because she hardly ever did anything wrong, secondly
because the consequences were so dire for her.
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