And in the essays on friends, Knausgaard fumbles through anecdotes without context. It’s odd that the three pieces on snow - an obvious topic for a book titled Winter - are among the collection’s most frivolous. Not all of the essays hit the mark, and a few repeat themselves. Studying his own habits, he comes to a sharp conclusion: “f habit is allowed into literature and not kept outside, it is no longer literature, merely still scaffolding around life.” He wonders why writers do what they do, and why anyone else would care. This succinctness is most visible in “Habits,” when he considers how often writers are asked about their routines. This lightness of touch may surprise his longtime fans, especially considering the weight of some of the topics he covers in”Setting Limits, “Sexual Desire,” “Atoms,” and “The Brain.” But his ability to weave questions, reflections, and conclusions into such small spaces is often beautiful. Unlike the long passages in My Struggle that ruminated on a single idea, the essays in this quartet each last only a handful of pages.
He promises to hang paper lanterns in his daughter’s bedroom as an apology.
You might remember Knausgaard’s father as a major player in My Struggle, but instead of casting blame for his own shortcomings, Knausgaard shows a willingness to right past wrongs. After making her feel powerless, and potentially humiliating her, he opens up about his insecurities as a father, and sees a correlation with his own childhood. In the essay “Setting Limits,” Knausgaard struggles to get one of his daughters to sit down for lunch. With Autumn and Winter (not to be confused with Ali Smith’s ongoing series with identical titles) he has shifted his gaze from his own navel to the experiences, objects, and settings of daily life. However, he’s faced criticism for the way he treated his family (the subject of the series), as well as his purported self-obsession. Knausgaard has been the talk of the literary world since the 2000s when his six autobiographical novels totaling over 3,000 pages - My Struggle - was heralded as a new Proustian masterpiece. But unlike his meandering autofiction, these books embrace brevity with charming results. Like last year’s Autumn, Winter - the second book in Karl Ove Knausgaard’s seasonal and autobiographical quartet - is a series of meditations and letters addressed to Knausgaard’s unborn daughter, covering everything from dressing up as Father Christmas to toothbrushes and Q-Tips.
0 kommentar(er)
