Available:*
Library | Call Number | Status |
|---|---|---|
Searching... Bayport Public Library | 839.82374 KNA | Searching... Unknown |
Bound With These Titles
On Order
Summary
Summary
The New York Times bestseller.
"This book is full of wonders...Loose teeth, chewing gum, it all becomes noble, almost holy, under Knausgaard's patient, admiring gaze. The world feels repainted."
-- The New York Times
From the author of the monumental My Struggle series, Karl Ove Knausgaard, one of the masters of contemporary literature and a genius of observation and introspection, comes the first in a new autobiographical quartet based on the four seasons.
28 August. Now, as I write this, you know nothing about anything, about what awaits you, the kind of world you will be born into. And I know nothing about you...
I want to show you our world as it is now: the door, the floor, the water tap and the sink, the garden chair close to the wall beneath the kitchen window, the sun, the water, the trees. You will come to see it in your own way, you will experience things for yourself and live a life of your own, so of course it is primarily for my own sake that I am doing this: showing you the world, little one, makes my life worth living.
Autumn begins with a letter Karl Ove Knausgaard writes to his unborn daughter, showing her what to expect of the world. He writes one short piece per day, describing the material and natural world with the precision and mesmerising intensity that have become his trademark. He describes with acute sensitivity daily life with his wife and children in rural Sweden, drawing upon memories of his own childhood to give an inimitably tender perspective on the precious and unique bond between parent and child. The sun, wasps, jellyfish, eyes, lice--the stuff of everyday life is the fodder for his art. Nothing is too small or too vast to escape his attention. This beautifully illustrated book is a personal encyclopaedia on everything from chewing gum to the stars. Through close observation of the objects and phenomena around him, Knausgaard shows us how vast, unknowable and wondrous the world is.
Author Notes
Karl Ove Knausgaard is a Norwegian author known for his six autobiographical novels called "My Struggle". His debut novel Out of This World won the Norwegian Critics Prize and his A Time for Everything was a finalist for the Nordic Council Prize. My Struggle: Book One was a New Yorker Book of the Year and Book Two was listed among the Wall Street Journal's 2013 Books of the Year. In 2014, Book Three was named a New York Times Notable Book of the Year. His new autobiographical quartet is based on the four seasons. Autumn was relased in August 2017.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (6)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Novelist Knausgaard (My Struggle) eloquently expresses the delights, rewards, and insights of looking closely in this, the first of a projected quartet of autobiographical volumes based on the four seasons. Writing to his unborn daughter-the author and his wife, Linda, already have three other children-Knausgaard revels in everyday items such as tin cans and rubber boots; his perfect deconstruction of an old-fashioned landline telephone is a joy. His thoughts take to the heavens as well, whether contemplating the sun overhead, the arrival of twilight, or the migration of birds each year. He is not shy about exposing the scatological or the cruel in life; there is both softness and hardness in his musings, reverence and irreverence. Most of all, his writing encourages the reader to see the connections between quotidian things and the bigger picture and to appreciate both continuity and change. Autumn hums in the background as apple trees flourish and days get darker, and one looks forward to what associations he will uncover in the remaining seasons of the year. Agent: Andrew Wylie, the Wylie Agency. (Aug.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Booklist Review
The phenomenally prolific author of the best-selling autobiographical sextet My Struggle, as well as Home and Away (2017), Knausgaard returns with the first in a four-part series centered around the seasons. Working with dozens of brief vignettes, he dispenses with the veneer of narrative, adopting a more reflective, essayistic style. The result is a collection of freely associative, often profound installments, unchained by storytelling conventions. Divided into three parts, one for each month of autumn, beginning in late August and spanning through November, each section opens with a Letter to an Unborn Daughter, addressed ostensibly to Knausgaard's soon-to-be-delivered child. Topics under consideration include objects as innocuous as apples, infants, and chewing gum, but also blood, piss, and vomit. On full display is Knausgaard's gift for extracting high drama from even the most mundane daily events: The little tooth, sharply white, dark red with blood at the root, is thrown in to almost obscenely sharp relief against my pinkish palm. This fresh, welcome performance will tide readers over until publication of the much-anticipated finale of My Struggle in 2018.--Báez, Diego Copyright 2017 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
LITTLE FIRES EVERYWHERE, by Celeste Ng. (Penguin Press, $27.) The magic of Ng's second novel, which opens with arson and centers on an interracial adoption, lies in its power to implicate every character - and likely many readers - in the innocent delusion that "no one sees race here." DEFIANCE: The Extraordinary Life of Lady Anne Barnard, by Stephen Taylor. (Norton, $28.95.) Over the course of Taylor's biography, a picture emerges of Lady Anne Barnard as a cleareyed yet self-doubting woman determined to live life on her own terms even as she worried about her right to set those terms. AT THE STRANGERS' GATE: Arrivals in New York, by Adam Gopnik. (Knopf, $26.95.) In his new memoir, Gopnik recalls the decade after he and his soon-to-be wife moved from Montreal to New York, in 1980. Always the elegant stylist, he effortlessly weaves in the city's cultural history, tracing his path from graduate student in art history to staff writer for The New Yorker. HOME FIRE, by Kamila Shamsie. (Riverhead, $26.) In a challenging and engrossing novel full of tiny but resonant details, two families find their fates entwined when a young man travels to Syria to join ISIS, following in the steps of the jihadist father he never really knew. BLUEBIRD, BLUEBIRD, by Attica Locke. (Mulholland/ Little, Brown, $26.) This murder mystery follows Darren Matthews, a black Texas Ranger, as he tries to solve a dual killing in a small town full of zany characters, buried feelings and betrayals that go back generations. THE STONE SKY: The Broken Earth: Book Three, by N. K. Jemisin. (Orbit, paper, $16.99.) Jemisin, who writes the Book Review's Otherworldly column about science fiction and fantasy, won a Hugo Award for each of the first two novels in her Broken Earth trilogy. In the extraordinary conclusion, a mother and daughter do geologic battle for the fate of the earth. AUTUMN, by Karl Ove Knausgaard. Translated by Ingvild Burkey. (Penguin Press, $27.) In this collection of finely honed miniature essays, the first of a planned quartet based on the seasons, the Norwegian author of the multi-volume novel "My Struggle" describes the world for his unborn child. AFTERGLOW (A Dog Memoir), by Eileen Myles. (Grove, $24.) Myles, the poet and autobiographical novelist, turns her attention to the role her dog Rosie played in her life and art. ONE NATION AFTER TRUMP: A Guide for the Perplexed, the Disillusioned, the Desperate, and the Not-Yet-Deported, by E. J. Dionne Jr., Norman J. Ornstein and Thomas E. Mann. (St. Martin's, $25.99.) Seasoned Washington observers examine how Donald Trump's rise reflects long-term Republican trends. The full reviews of these and other recent books are on the web: nytimes.com/books
Guardian Review
Apples, plastic bags, teeth -- the bestselling Norwegian author brings his forensic attention to everyday objects to explain the world in a letter to his unborn baby August 28. Now, as I write this, you know nothing about anything, about what awaits you, the kind of world you will be born into. And I know nothing about you. I have seen an ultrasound image and have laid my hand on the belly in which you are lying, that is all. Six months remain until you will be born, and anything at all can happen during that time, but I believe that life is strong and indomitable, I think you will be fine, and that you will be born sound and healthy and strong. See the light of day, the expression goes. It was night outside when your eldest sister, Vanja, was born, the darkness filled with swirling snow. Just before she came out, one of the midwives tugged at me, You catch, she said, and so I did, a tiny child slipped out into my hands, slippery as a seal. I was so happy I cried. When Heidi was born one and a half years later, it was autumn and overcast, cold and damp as October can be, she came out during the morning, labour was rapid, and when her head had emerged but not yet the rest of her body, she made a little sound with her lips, it was such a joyous moment. John, as your big brother is called, came out in a cascade of water and blood, the room had no windows, it felt like we were inside a bunker, and when I went out afterwards to call his two grandparents, I was surprised to see the light outside, and that life flowed on as if nothing in particular had happened. It was 15 August 2007, it may have been five or six o'clock in the afternoon, in Malmo, where we had moved the previous summer. Later that evening we drove to a patient hotel, and the day after I went to pick up your sisters, who amused themselves greatly by placing a green rubber lizard on top of John's head. They were three and a half and nearly two years old at the time. I took photos, one day I'll show them to you. That's how they saw the light of day. Now they are big, now they are used to the world, and the strange thing is that they are so unalike, each of them has a personality entirely their own, and they always did, right from the start. I assume that's how it will be with you too, that you already are the person you will become. Three siblings, a mother and a father, that's us. That's your family. I mention it first because it's what matters most. Good or bad, warm or cold, strict or indulgent, it doesn't matter, this is the most important thing, these are the relationships through which you will come to view your world, and which will shape your understanding of almost everything, directly or indirectly, both in the form of resistance and of support. Just now, these past few days, we are fine. While the children were at school today, your mother and I went to Limhamn, and at a cafe there, in the late summer heat -- today was absolutely marvellous, sun, blue sky, with the faintest hint of autumn in the air, and every colour seemed deep but also bright -- we discussed what we are going to call you. I had suggested Anne, if you turn out to be a girl, and now Linda said she really liked the name, there is something light and sunny about it, and that is a quality we want to be associated with you. If you are a boy, your name, we suggested, will be Eirik. Then your name will have the same sound in it as the names of all your three siblings -- y -- for if you say them out loud, they all have it -- Vanja (Vanya), Heidi (Heydi), John (Yonn). They are asleep now, all four of them. I am sitting in my study, which is actually a little house with two rooms and a loft, looking out across the lawn towards the house where they are lying, the dark windowpanes that would be invisible if not for the street lamps across the road and the light they cast, which fills the kitchen with a faint ghostly glow. The house is really three cottages in a row, converted into one. On the other side, behind the house in which I am sitting, there is a large farm building made of red brick, it is beautiful to look at, towering up amid the green foliage. Red and green. They mean nothing to you, but to me those two colours contain so much, something within them exerts a powerful pull, and I think this is one of the reasons why I have become a writer, for I feel that pull so strongly, and I know that it's important, but I lack the words to express it, and therefore I don't know what it is. I have tried, and I have capitulated. My capitulation is the books I have published. You can read them some day, and maybe you will understand what I mean. The blood flowing through the veins, the grass growing in the soil, the trees, oh the trees swaying in the wind. These astounding things, which you will soon encounter and see for yourself, are so easy to lose sight of, and there are almost as many ways of doing that as there are people. That is why I am writing this book for you. I want to show you the world, as it is, all around us, all the time. Only by doing so will I myself be able to glimpse it. What makes life worth living? No child asks itself that question. To children life is self-evident. Life goes without saying: whether it is good or bad makes no difference. This is because children don't see the world, don't observe the world, don't contemplate the world, but are so deeply immersed in the world that they don't distinguish between it and their own selves. Not until that happens, until a distance appears between what they are and what the world is, does the question arise: what makes life worth living? Is it the feeling of pressing down the door handle and pushing the door open, feeling it swing inward or outward on its hinges, always easily and willingly, and entering a new room? Yes, the door opens, like a wing, and that alone makes life worth living. To someone who has lived for many years, the door is obvious. The house is obvious, the garden is obvious, the sky and the sea are obvious, even the moon, suspended in the night sky and shining brightly above the rooftops, is obvious. The world expresses its being, but we are not listening, and since we are no longer immersed in it, experiencing it as a part of ourselves, it is as if it escapes us. We open the door, but it doesn't mean anything, it's nothing, just something we do to get from one room to another. I want to show you our world as it is now: the door, the floor, the water tap and the sink, the garden chair close to the wall beneath the kitchen window, the sun, the water, the trees. You will come to see it in your own way, you will experience things for yourself and live a life of your own, so of course it is primarily for my own sake that I am doing this: showing you the world, little one, makes my life worth living. Apples For some reason or other, the fruits that grow in the Nordic countries are easily accessible, with only a thin skin that yields readily covering their flesh, this is true for pears and apples as well as for plums, all one needs to do is bite into them and gobble them down, while the fruits that grow further south, like oranges, mandarins, bananas, pomegranates, mangoes and passion fruit, are often covered with thick, inedible skins. Normally, in accordance with my other preferences in life, I prefer the latter, both because the notion that pleasure must be deserved through prior effort is so strong in me, and because I have always been drawn towards the hidden and the secret. Both the labour involved and the fruit's secretive nature, by which I mean its inaccessibility, increase the value of the pleasure one experiences. The apple is an exception to this. All one has to do is reach up a hand, grab the apple and sink one's teeth into it. No work, no secret, just straight into pleasure, the almost explosive release of the apple's sharp, fresh and tart yet always sweet taste into the mouth, which may cause the nerves to twinge and maybe also the facial muscles to contract, as if the distance between man and fruit is just big enough for this shock on a miniature scale to never quite disappear, regardless of how many apples one has eaten in one's life. Last Sunday we went to the beach about 10 kilometres from here, it was one of those early autumn days that summer had stretched into and saturated almost completely with its warmth and calm, yet the tourists had gone home long ago and the beach lay deserted. I took the children for a walk in the forest, which grows all the way down to the edge of the sand, and which for the most part consists of deciduous trees, with the occasional red-trunked pine. The air was warm and still, the sun hung heavy with light on the faintly dark blue sky. We followed a path in between the trees, and there, in the middle of the wood, stood an apple tree laden with apples. The children were as astonished as I was, apple trees are supposed to grow in gardens, not wild out in the forest. Can we eat them, they asked. I said yes, go ahead, take as many as you want. In a sudden glimpse, as full of joy as it was of sorrow, I understood what freedom is. Plastic bags Since plastic takes such an extremely long time to decompose, since the number of plastic bags in the world is so huge and just keeps increasing with every passing day, and since they are so light and can catch the wind both like a sail and like a balloon, one comes across plastic bags in the most unexpected places. Yesterday, as I parked the car after a trip to the shop, a plastic bag was flapping from the roof of the house, the handle had snagged on the climbing plant that grows there. And some days before that, when I was going to plant four redcurrant bushes I had bought and was digging holes for them a few metres from the fence at one end of the garden, I struck a layer of broken roof tiles and strips of plastic, which I realised from the printed logo must be shopping bags. How they had ended up there I don't know, but there was something disturbing about the sight of them, for the thin plastic, so white and smooth against the black and crumbling mould, was so obviously a foreign substance. That property soil has of transforming everything that ends up in it into itself does not apply to plastic, which is made in such a way that it repels everything: the soil slides over the surface of the plastic, finding no hold, no place to penetrate, and the same goes for water. The plastic bag has something inviolable about it, it seems to exist in a place beyond everything else, including time and its inexorable modality. I felt a stab of sorrow at the sight of the buried bags without quite understanding why. It may have been the thought of pollution, it may have been the thought of death, but it may also have been the thought that I wouldn't be able to plant the redcurrants there after all. Presumably it was all of these at once. As I pushed the shovel down with my foot into the soil a bit further away and began digging a hole there, I reflected on why nearly all my thoughts and associations ran in that direction, ending in problems and worries and darkness instead of in joy, ease and light. One of the most beautiful things I have ever seen was a plastic bag adrift in the water beyond a jetty on an island far out at sea, so why hadn't that come to mind instead? The water had been perfectly limpid, the way it gets when it is cold and still, with a faint cool green tinge to it, and the plastic bag had hung at a depth of maybe 10 feet, distended and motionless. It resembled nothing other than itself, no creature, no jellyfish, nor a hot-air balloon, it was just a plastic bag. Yet I remained standing there, looking at it. Why could I hardly take my eyes off the submerged plastic bag? The sight did not fill me with joy, I did not come away feeling happy. Nor was I filled with contentment when I caught sight of it, it wasn't that something stilled within me, as hunger or thirst do when they are satisfied. But it felt good to look at it, the way it feels good to read a poem that ends in an image of something concrete and seems to fasten on it, so that the inexhaustible within it can unfold calmly. Swollen with water, handles up, the plastic bag hung a few feet down in the water on this February day in 2002. This moment was not the beginning of anything, not even of an insight, nor was it the conclusion of anything, and maybe that is what I was thinking as I stood digging holes in the ground a few days ago, that I was still in the middle of something and always would be. Teeth When the first teeth appear, these little stones slowly pushed up through the child's red gums, appearing at first like sharp little points, then standing there like miniature white towers in the mouth, it is hard not to be astonished, for where do they come from? Nothing that enters the baby, mostly milk but also a little mashed banana and potato, bears the slightest resemblance to teeth, which in contrast to the food are hard. Yet this must be what happens -- that certain substances are extracted from this partly liquid, partly soft nourishment and transported to the jaws, where they are assembled into the material used to make teeth. But how? That skin and flesh, nerves and sinews are formed and grow is perhaps just as great a mystery, but it doesn't feel that way. The tissue is soft and living, the cells stand open to each other and to the world in a relationship of exchange. Light, air and water pass through them in human beings and animals as well as in plants and trees. But teeth are entirely closed, impervious to everything, and seem nearer to the mineral world of mountains and rock, gravel and sand. So what really is the difference between rocks formed by hardening lava and then eroded by wind and weather over millions of years, or formed by infinitely slow processes of sedimentation, where something originally soft is compressed until it becomes hard as diamond, and these little enamelled stones, which at this very moment are pushing up through the jaws of my children as they lie asleep in the dark of their rooms? To the oldest two, growing and losing teeth has become routine. But the youngest one still finds it a source of great excitement. Losing your first tooth is an event, also your second and perhaps even your third, but then inflation sets in, and the teeth seem to just drop out, loosening in the evening in bed, so that next morning I have to ask why there are bloodstains on the pillow, or in the afternoon in the living room while eating an apple, and it's no longer a big deal. "Here, Daddy," one of them might say, handing me the tooth, which I close my hand around and carry into the kitchen. What am I supposed to do with it? I stand in front of the kitchen counter, the muted light of the autumn sky beyond the windows shines faintly on the tap and sink in front of me. The little tooth, sharply white, dark red with blood at the root, is thrown into almost obscenely sharp relief against my pinkish palm. It feels wrong to throw it away. The tooth is a part of her. And yet I can't keep it, for what are we going to do with it? Put it in a box full of tiny rattling teeth to take out when we are old and reminisce about who they were then? Teeth don't age in the same way as the rest of the body, they are impervious even to time; in this tooth she will stay 10 years old for ever. I open the cupboard under the sink and drop the tooth into the waste bin, where it lands on top of a damp coffee filter, turned grey by the black coffee grounds still inside it. I take a crumpled muesli bag and place it on top, so that the tooth is no longer visible. Piss Of all the things we do, pissing is one of the most routine. At the time of writing this I have been alive for roughly 16,500 days. If we assume that I have pissed on average five times on each of these days, the total number of times that I have pissed comes to about 75,000. Not once have I wondered at the phenomenon, not once has it felt alien to me, as one may feel about other bodily functions and phenomena -- for example, one's heartbeat or thought impulses -- even though for the body pissing is a singular act, since it connects it to the outside world, which through pissing becomes something that flows through us. No, I just position myself in front of the toilet bowl and piss down into the water, which slowly changes both colour and consistency: from being clear and transparent, it turns faintly yellowish green or a dark brown-yellow, depending on how concentrated the piss is, and becomes full of little bubbles. But no matter how routinely we piss, and how easy it is, even pissing must be learned. The last time I peed myself was surprisingly late, which is why I still remember it in detail. I was 15 years old and in the ninth grade. We were on a school ski trip in the mountains doing the elective class in outdoor life. It was late winter, February, March, and when we got to the cabin that night a competition sprang up: who could eat the most tins of pineapple? I won, but winning had a price, I was so stuffed with pineapple and pineapple juice that I could hardly walk, and I still have a problem with both the taste and the smell of it. Eventually we lay down to sleep, 12 young boys and girls in their sleeping bags on the floor in the open loft. I woke up in the middle of the night because I had peed myself. My underpants and long johns were soaked through. I was terrified when I realised what had happened. If this were to come out, no greater catastrophe could be imagined. I was 15, in love with one of the girls there, and I had peed myself. Gingerly, I extracted myself from the sleeping bag, also wet, and on my knees I opened my backpack and took out a new pair of underpants and a towel. The light of the full moon seeped in through the window. Everyone was breathing heavily around me as I tiptoed across the room and down to the ground floor. I opened the door carefully and went out. Stars sparkled in the sky above me, the moonlight shone on the snow, which stretched out in every direction. I walked to the end of the cabin, undressed, dried my wet thighs and crotch with the towel, put on the fresh pair of underpants and rubbed the damp bundle of piss-drenched underwear in the snow over and over again, found a plastic bag in the kitchen, put the clothes in it, climbed back up and lay down again, after first placing my last towel over the Frisbee-sized stain inside the sleeping bag. When I realised that no one had seen me and that no one would ever find out what had happened, the shock and shame disappeared and were replaced by a powerful but peculiar feeling of joy, for once the shame was gone, I could indulge in the vague yet distinct sensation I had had in my sleep: oh God, how delicious it is to pee yourself. Loneliness It's good to be alone. It's good to shut the door behind one and not be with other people for a while. It hasn't always been like this. In childhood being alone was a defect or a failing, often painful. If you were alone it was because no one wanted to be with you or because there was no one to be with. The absence of others was unequivocally negative. Several people together was good, alone was bad, that was the rule. And yet I never asked myself how this applied to my father, who spent so much time alone. He was a supreme being, everything about him was as it should be, it never occurred to me that his solitude too could be a defect or a flaw, something painful. He had no friends, only colleagues, and he spent most evenings alone in the basement recreation room, where he listened to music or worked on his stamp collection. He shunned social intimacy, he never sat on a bus, never had his hair cut at a hairdresser's, he was never one of the parents who drove to football matches with a carload of kids. At the time I didn't notice this. Not until he died and we found his diary was I able to see his life in that light. Loneliness concerned him, he had thought about it a great deal. "I have always been able to recognise the lonely," he wrote in his diary. "They don't walk the same way as other people. It is as if they don't carry any joy, any spark within themselves, whether they are women or men." In another entry he wrote, "I am looking for a word for the opposite of loneliness. I would like to find a different word to love, which is far too overworked and inadequate. Tenderness, peace of mind and soul, togetherness?" Togetherness was a good word for it. It is the opposite of loneliness. Why he never felt it I don't know. It is one of the good feelings in life, perhaps the best. And yet I often do as he did, close the door behind me to be alone. I know why I do it, it's good to be alone, for a few hours to be exempt from all the complicated bonds, all the conflicts, great and small, all the demands and expectations, wills and desires that build up between people, and which after only a short time become so densely intertwined that the room for reflection and for action are both restricted. If everything that stirs between people made a sound, it would be like a chorus, a great murmur of voices would rise from even the faintest glimmer in the eyes. Surely he too must have felt this? Perhaps more powerfully than I do? For he started drinking, and drinking muffles this chorus and makes it possible to be with other people without hearing it. Yes, that must be it. For the sentence he ended that diary entry with, I could never have written. He wrote, "In brief, what I have just now so clumsily tried to express is that I have always been a lonely man." Or, the thought strikes me now with horror, maybe it was the other way round? Maybe he simply didn't hear this chorus, didn't know it existed and therefore didn't become bound by it, but remained forever standing on the outside, observing how all the others were bound by something he didn't understand? Beds With its four legs and its flat, soft surface, the bed gently accommodates one of our most basic needs: it is good to lie down in bed, and it is good to sleep there through the night. The bed is placed in the bedroom, which is often the innermost room in the house or apartment, and in two-storey houses the bedroom is usually on the upper floor. This is so because we are never as vulnerable as when we are asleep, we lie defenceless in our beds at night without knowing what is going on around us, and to withdraw from sight at such a time, to conceal ourselves from other animals and human beings, is an instinct that runs deep in us. The bed is also a place we retreat to in order to get some peace, since with most people sleep requires quiet and seclusion. So the bed, then, is a kind of hiding place, but inasmuch as everyone has one, not one associated with secrecy but rather with a sort of discretion. Just how fundamental the bed, the bedroom and sleep are to our lives is not something we usually give much thought to, since they are saturated with lifelong habit and are always associated precisely with discretion. But if it were possible to see everyone who has retired to their beds in a great city at night, in London, New York or Tokyo, for example, if we imagined that the buildings were made of glass and that all the rooms were lit, the sight would be deeply unsettling. Everywhere there would be people lying motionless in their cocoons, in room after room for miles on end, and not just at street level, along roads and crossroads, but even up in the air, separated by plateaus, some of them 20 metres above ground, some 50, some 100. We would be able to see millions of immobile people who have withdrawn from others in order to lie in a coma throughout the night. Sleep's vertiginous link to primordial times, not just with human life as it first unfolded on the plains of Africa 300,000 years ago, but with life on earth in its very first form, rising out of the sea and coming ashore 400 million years ago, would become apparent. And a bed would no longer be merely a piece of furniture acquired from a shop, but a boat that every human being has and which we board every evening to let ourselves be carried through the night. Faces It is difficult to imagine anything we have more knowledge about than faces. It is also difficult to imagine a knowledge that is more equally distributed. Seeing is not only registering, it is also differentiating. While everyone can see that what is growing in the meadow is a tree, and while almost everyone can see that it is an apple tree, only a select few are privileged to see what kind of an apple tree it is, how old it is, what condition it is in. Almost all areas in our lifeworld require some form of competence and experience in order to be seen and understood. Not so with faces. The moment we see a face, we know whether we've seen it before, even though it may have been only once, a long time ago. We know what it expresses, whether it is joy or sorrow, surprise or indifference, eagerness or sluggishness. We also know straight away how old it is and whether it could be considered beautiful or ugly, plain or special, and whether we like it or not. And even if we find that it resembles another face, we rarely mistake it, we perceive every single face as being unique, even the most ordinary of the ordinary. In a way this is peculiar, since all faces are made up of the same components, which are not many at all. Forehead, eyebrows, eyes with eyelashes, nose, cheeks, mouth with lips and teeth, chin. We differentiate out of necessity, we need to be able to distinguish between edible and inedible plants, for example, and also out of interest, which when it is great, comes naturally: anyone with the slightest interest in art is able to tell at first glance whether a painting is by Van Gogh or Gauguin, Morisot or Pissarro. That everyone has equal knowledge about faces is due to necessity and interest as well as closeness, and what this tells us is that our real lives are not lived in landscapes, nor among objects, but in the human realm, in the light of the human face. But since the face not only belongs to the human realm, unlike an arm or a finger it also expresses it, it cannot be captured. Whatever is human is changeable, it is mobile, and it is unfathomable. Just this morning I was sitting in the living room and cast a glance at my oldest daughter's face, which is by far one of the faces I know best, in all its phases, ages and expressions. Her face lay with its cheek pressed against the armrest of the sofa, eyes turned towards the television. In it I saw something new: it resembled my mother, which it had never done before. The next time I glanced at it, the resemblance was gone. As for me, these days I look almost exactly like my father. - Karl Ove Knausgaard.
Kirkus Review
The acclaimed author delivers a host of brief but insightful observations about the small matters of everyday life.In the My Struggle series, Knausgaard mined his life but called it fiction, crafting an epic story with a novelistic shape. This book, the first in a quartet with seasonal themes, is explicitly autobiographical but less personally revealing, looking outward instead of inward. Contemplating the upcoming birth of his daughter, the author asks, "what makes life worth living?" The answer: details. The book is built on an assortment of short essays on a wide range of topics, including frogs, photographs, beds, and tin cans. "Autumn" is a framing device, but not every essay engages with the season. What truly unites these pieces is Knausgaard's sensibility, which is one part Montaigne (an urge to address big issues), one part Nicholson Baker (an eye for picayune detail), and one part Annie Dillard (an admiration for nature and an elegant prose style). Watching beekeepers, he finds an intersection of man and nature that "shows human beings at their most subservient and perhaps also at their most beautiful." "Fever" triggers memories of his parents doting on his childhood illnesses. ("With fever came privileges. Meals in bed. Grapes. New comic books.") "Forgiveness" is a sketch about his wonderment at how humans could culturally arrive at a capacity for mercy. Considering bird migrations, he finds not a clichd sense of freedom but evidence of nature's boundaries. Because each chapter is brief, usually about three pages, Knausgaard can't deliver more than glancing consideration of any one subject, and three pages each on female genitalia and vomit is more than plenty. But in the aggregate, the pieces feel remarkably substantive, a call to pay closer attention to the routine stuff in our lives and to allow ourselves to be thunderstruck by their beauty. An engagingly wide-ranging set of meditations. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Library Journal Review
This book by Knausgaard (My Struggle), the first in a four-part series, has the author shifting his focus from the mundane events of his life that made up his earlier work to the objects in the world around him. Written in the form of a letter to his unborn daughter, this book hopes to show her the world she will soon inhabit. The objects described vary from material items (apples, beds, vomit, gum) to the abstract (loneliness, forgiveness, experience). Throughout, the author highlights how certain articles blur the line between the internal and external. For example, he discusses certain fruits, such as oranges, as having a thick skin separating the inside from the outside and how when eating an orange we must first work to remove the skin. Apples, however, have thin, edible skin. Thus, the boundary between the internal and external is diminished in an apple. The focus on internal and external worlds is primarily what connects the items throughout the book. While the subject matter is banal, the attention given to each item, and the insights gleaned from such attention are fascinating. VERDICT Fans of Knausgaard's earlier books as well as anyone with an interest in creative nonfiction should be satisfied. [See Prepub Alert, 2/13/17.]-Timothy Berge, SUNY Oswego Lib. © Copyright 2017. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Excerpts
Excerpts
28 August. Now, as I write this, you know nothing about anything, about what awaits you, the kind of world you will be born into. And I know nothing about you. I have seen an ultrasound image and have laid my hand on the belly in which you are lying, that is all. Six months remain until you will be born, and anything at all can happen during that time, but I believe that life is strong and indomitable, I think you will be fine, and that you will be born sound and healthy and strong. See the light of day, the expression goes. It was night outside when your eldest sister, Vanja, was born, the darkness filled with swirling snow. Just before she came out, one of the midwives tugged at me, You catch, she said, and so I did, a tiny child slipped out into my hands, slippery as a seal. I was so happy I cried. When Heidi was born one and a half years later, it was autumn and overcast, cold and damp as October can be, she came out during the morning, labour was rapid, and when her head had emerged but not yet the rest of her body, she made a little sound with her lips, it was such a joyous moment. John, as your big brother is called, came out in a cascade of water and blood, the room had no windows, it felt like we were inside a bunker, and when I went out afterwards to call his two grandparents, I was surprised to see the light outside, and that life flowed on as if nothing in particular had happened. It was 15 August 2007, it may have been five or six o'clock in the afternoon, in Malms, where we had moved the previous summer. Later that evening we drove to a patient hotel, and the day after I went to pick up your sisters, who amused themselves greatly by placing a green rubber lizard on top of John's head. They were three and a half and nearly two years old at the time. I took photos, one day I'll show them to you. That's how they saw the light of day. Now they are big, now they are used to the world, and the strange thing is that they are so unalike, each of them has a personality entirely their own, and they always did, right from the start. I assume that's how it will be with you too, that you already are the person you will become. Three siblings, a mother and a father, that's us. That's your family. I mention it first because it's what matters most. Good or bad, warm or cold, strict or indulgent, it doesn't matter, this is the most important thing, these are the relationships through which you will come to view your world, and which will shape your understanding of almost everything, directly or indirectly, both in the form of resistance and of support. Just now, these past few days, we are fine. While the children were at school today, your mother and I went to Limhamn, and at a cafZ there, in the late summer heat - today was absolutely marvellous, sun, blue sky, with the faintest hint of autumn in the air, and every colour seemed deep but also bright - we discussed what we are going to call you. I had suggested Anne, if you turn out to be a girl, and now Linda said she really liked the name, there is something light and sunny about it, and that is a quality we want to be associated with you. If you are a boy, your name, we suggested, will be Eirik. Then your name will have the same sound in it as the names of all your three siblings - y - for if you say them out loud, they all have it - Vanja (Vanya), Heidi (Heydi), John (Yonn). They are asleep now, all four of them. I am sitting in my study, which is actually a little house with two rooms and a loft, looking out across the lawn towards the house where they are lying, the dark windowpanes which would be invisible if not for the street lamps across the road and the light they cast, which fills the kitchen with a faint ghostly glow. The house is really three cottages in a row, converted into one. Two of them are of red-painted wood, one is of whitewashed brick and plaster. Once upon a time families who worked on one of the big farms in the area lived here. Between these two houses there is a guest house, which we call the summer house. Within the horseshoe shape the buildings form there is the garden, which extends for maybe thirty metres to a white wall. There are two plum trees there, an old one, one of the boughs of which has grown so long and so heavy that it has to be supported on two crutches, and a young one I planted last summer, now bearing fruit for the first time, and a pear tree too, also old, much taller than the houses, and three apple trees. One of the apple trees was in pretty bad shape, many of the branches were dead, it seemed stiff and lifeless, but then I pruned it earlier this summer, which I've never done before, and I grew so eager I kept cutting and cutting without stopping to look how it was turning out, until finally, late in the evening, I climbed down and took a few steps back to look at it. Maimed was the word that came to mind. But the branches have grown back, densely covered with leaves, and the tree is loaded with apples. That's the experience I've gained from working in the garden: there's no reason to be cautious or anxious about anything, life is so robust, it seems to come cascading, blind and green, and at times it is frightening, because we too are alive, but we live in what amounts to a controlled environment, which makes us fear whatever is blind, wild, chaotic, stretching towards the sun, but most often also beautiful, in a deeper way than the purely visual, for the soil smells of rot and darkness, teems with scuttling beetles and convulsing worms, the flower stalks are juicy, their petals brim with scents, and the air, cold and sharp, warm and humid, filled with sunrays or rain, lies against skin, accustomed to the indoors, like a soothing compress of hereness. Behind the main house lies the road, which ends some hundred metres further on, in a sort of abandoned little semi-industrial area, the buildings have corrugated tin roofs and the windows are broken, engines and axle shafts lie rusting outside, almost disappearing into the grass. On the other side, behind the house in which I am sitting, there is a large farm building made of red brick, it is beautiful to look at, towering up amid the green foliage. Red and green. They mean nothing to you, but to me those two colours contain so much, something within them exerts a powerful pull, and I think this is one of the reasons why I have become a writer, for I feel that pull so strongly, and I know that it's important, but I lack the words to express it, and therefore I don't know what it is. I have tried, and I have capitulated. My capitulation is the books I have published. You can read them some day, and maybe you will understand what I mean. The blood flowing through the veins, the grass growing in the soil, the trees, oh the trees swaying in the wind. These astounding things, which you will soon encounter and see for yourself, are so easy to lose sight of, and there are almost as many ways of doing that as there are people. That is why I am writing this book for you. I want to show you the world, as it is, all around us, all the time. Only by doing so will I myself be able to glimpse it. What makes life worth living? No child asks itself that question. To children life is self-evident. Life goes without saying: whether it is good or bad makes no difference. This is because children don't see the world, don't observe the world, don't contemplate the world, but are so deeply immersed in the world that they don't distinguish between it and their own selves. Not until that happens, until a distance appears between what they are and what the world is, does the question arise: what makes life worth living? Is it the feeling of pressing down the door handle and pushing the door open, feeling it swing inward or outward on its hinges, always easily and willingly, and entering a new room? Yes, the door opens, like a wing, and that alone makes life worth living. To someone who has lived for many years, the door is obvious. The house is obvious, the garden is obvious, the sky and the sea are obvious, even the moon, suspended in the night sky and shining brightly above the rooftops, is obvious. The world expresses its being, but we are not listening, and since we are no longer immersed in it, experiencing it as a part of ourselves, it is as if it escapes us. We open the door, but it doesn't mean anything, it's nothing, just something we do to get from one room to another. I want to show you our world as it is now: the door, the floor, the water tap and the sink, the garden chair close to the wall beneath the kitchen window, the sun, the water, the trees. You will come to see it in your own way, you will experience things for yourself and live a life of your own, so of course it is primarily for my own sake that I am doing this: showing you the world, little one, makes my life worth living. SEPTEMBER Apples For some reason or other, the fruits that grow in the Nordic countries are easily accessible, with only a thin skin that yields readily covering their flesh, this is true for pears and apples as well as for plums, all one needs to do is bite into them and gobble them down, while the fruits that grow further south, like oranges, mandarins, bananas, pomegranates, mangoes and passion fruit, are often covered with thick, inedible skins. Normally, in accordance with my other preferences in life, I prefer the latter, both because the notion that pleasure must be deserved through prior effort is so strong in me, and because I have always been drawn towards the hidden and the secret. To bite a piece of the peel from the top of an orange in order to work one's thumb in between the peel and the flesh of the orange, and feel the bitter taste spurting into one's mouth for a brief second, and then to loosen piece after piece, sometimes, if the peel is thin, in tiny scraps, other times, when the peel is thick and loosely connected to the flesh, in one long piece, also has a ritual aspect to it. It is almost as if first one is in the temple colonnade and moving slowly towards the innermost room, but there the teeth pierce the thin, shiny membrane and the fruit juice runs into the mouth and fills it with sweetness. Both the labour involved and the fruit's secretive nature, by which I mean its inaccessibility, increase the value of the pleasure one experiences. The apple is an exception to this. All one has to do is reach up a hand, grab the apple and sink one's teeth into it. No work, no secret, just straight into pleasure, the almost explosive release of the apple's sharp, fresh and tart yet always sweet taste into the mouth, which may cause the nerves to twinge and maybe also the facial muscles to contract, as if the distance between man and fruit is just big enough for this shock on a miniature scale to never quite disappear, regardless of how many apples one has eaten in one's life. When I was a fairly small child, I began to eat the whole apple. Not just the flesh, but the core with all the pips in it, even the stem. Not because it tasted good, I don't think, nor because of any idea I might have had that I shouldn't be wasteful, but because eating the core and the stem presented an obstacle to pleasure. It was work of a kind, even if in reverse order: first the reward, then the effort. It is still unthinkable for me to throw away an apple core, and when I see my children doing it - sometimes they even throw away half-eaten apples - I am filled with indignation, but I don't say anything, because I want them to relish life and to have a sense of its abundance. I want them to feel that living is easy. And this is why I've changed my attitude towards apples, not through an act of will, but as a result of having seen and understood more, I think, and now I know that it is never really about the world in itself, merely about our way of relating to it. Against secrecy stands openness, against work stands freedom. Last Sunday we went to the beach about ten kilometres from here, it was one of those early autumn days which summer had stretched into and saturated almost completely with its warmth and calm, yet the tourists had gone home long ago and the beach lay deserted. I took the children for a walk in the forest, which grows all the way down to the edge of the sand, and which for the most part consists of deciduous trees, with the occasional red-trunked pine. The air was warm and still, the sun hung heavy with light on the faintly dark blue sky. We followed a path in between the trees, and there, in the middle of the wood, stood an apple tree laden with apples. The children were as astonished as I was, apple trees are supposed to grow in gardens, not wild out in the forest. Can we eat them, they asked. I said yes, go ahead, take as many as you want. In a sudden glimpse, as full of joy as it was of sorrow, I understood what freedom is. Wasps The body of a wasp is divided into two parts, of which the hindmost is shaped something like a faintly rounded cone, with a smooth and shiny surface, while the front part is more spherical and only a third of the length of the hind part, and yet the legs, the wings and the antennae all extend from the front. With its yellow and black pattern, shiny surface and rounded conical shape, the hind part resembles a tiny Easter egg, or maybe a miniature FabergZ egg, for if one looks closely, it is striking how regular and beautiful the pattern is; the black stripes divide up the field of yellow like slender ribbons, and where the black dots lie adjacent to the stripes, they resemble painstakingly painted decorative borders. Its hardness - which to us seems not very great, it takes no more than a slight pressure of the fingers for the shell to crack and the soft innards to ooze out, but which must seem like armour plating in the world of the wasp - brings to mind a suit of armour, and when the wasp comes flying, with its six legs, two pairs of wings and two antennae, it is almost like a knight dressed for battle. This is what I thought last week, when the weather was splendid and summery and I decided to seize the opportunity and paint the west wall of the house. I knew there had to be a wasps' nest inside the air vent, for we could often hear buzzing behind the wall when we went to bed in the evening, and it stopped just where the wasps crawled in, and sometimes a few of them even got into the room, though both the window and the door were shut. As I put the ladder up and, with paint can and brush in one hand, climbed far enough to reach the boards below the eaves, I didn't give them a thought, for even though they dwelled only a few feet from our bed, they had never turned against us, it was as if we didn't exist to them or were only a part of the backdrop they lived their lives against. But this afternoon that changed. As soon as I started painting, I heard a faint scratching sound from the air vent and a wasp came crawling out, took off from the edge and with a buzz flew up maybe twenty metres into the air, where it was no more than a tiny speck against the vast blue of the sky, before it came diving straight at me at the same time as another wasp came crawling out of the air vent, and another and another. All in all five wasps circled around me. I tried shooing them away with my left hand, carefully so as not to fall, but of course that didn't help at all. They didn't sting me, but their aggressive movements and their angry buzzing were enough to make me climb down and light a cigarette as I pondered what to do. There was something humiliating about my situation, compared to me they were so tiny, no bigger than my outermost finger joints, and considerably thinner. I fetched the fly swatter from the kitchen and climbed back up. No sooner had I dipped the brush into the oily red paint and applied the first strokes than I heard the scratching noise again. Soon the first wasp was out on the edge of the vent and letting itself drop down into the air before circling me; shortly afterwards I was surrounded again. I struck out at them and hit a couple, but only in mid-air, and all that happened was they were knocked off course. I hardly got any painting done. I gave up, poured the paint back into the larger can and cleaned the brush. A few hours later I climbed the ladder as gently as I could, sealed the air vent with gaffer tape, tiptoed down again, hurried inside up to the bedroom, where I taped shut the inside of the vent as well. When we went to bed that evening, the buzzing outside didn't cease. Nor the evening after. But then it went quiet. Excerpted from Autumn by Karl Ove Knausgaard All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
