Summer

Starred review from June 25, 2018
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.

July 1, 2018
This volume concludes Knausgaard's ambitious cycle of the seasons. Once again, he blends short meditations on everyday objects with extended diary entries, this time resulting in a volume considerably longer than Autumn (2017), Winter (2018), and Spring (2018). As in the earlier works, the encyclopedic entries range from the predictable ( Summer Rain, Mosquitoes, and Ice Cream ) to the unfamiliar ( Clinker-built Double-ender, Gjerstadholmen, and Ekel�f ), and Knausgaard has abandoned the notion that this series is designed as a guide for his newborn daughter. This natural shift of focus enables Knausgaard to elaborate on the theology of Gunnar Ekel�f ( the most bountiful of Scandinavian poets ) and the melancholy topography of Norwegian islets ( full of bluffs and crags, those closest to the water worn to smooth rock ). Perhaps more so than in previous volumes, Knausgaard circles back to interrogate notions of consciousness and authenticity, continually debating the line between fiction and memoir, familiar terrain for anyone who's been able to keep up with this prolific author's impressive output. If not, readers should feel comfortable jumping into this cycle with any of the four books.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2018, American Library Association.)

March 15, 2018

Singular Norwegian author Knausgaard, whose multipart "My Struggle" was celebrated worldwide, now wraps up a four-season project purveying his own unvarnished reflections on fatherhood. Continuing to speak to his new daughter, he also details his troubled relationship with his own father as he recalls rural Swedish summers filled with mosquitoes and barbecues (Swedish barbecues!).

Copyright 2018 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

Starred review from June 15, 2018
Knausgaard closes his quartet of autobiographical meditations on the seasons in an appropriately verdant and optimistic fashion.The author likes a big finish: The concluding volume of his landmark My Struggle series cracked 1,100 pages, and this volume is substantially longer than its three predecessors (Autumn, 2017; Winter, 2018; Spring, 2018). As in Autumn and Winter, the book is rooted in brief essays contemplating and anthropomorphizing objects of everyday existence: slugs, tears, wasps, Sting CDs that reveal the chasm between "myself and the person I was thirty years ago." The riffs are typically light, at times willfully frivolous ("has a single good author ever owned a dog?"), at others more thought-provoking and counterintuitive. Playgrounds, for instance, are imagination-stifling spaces "whose order and formulaic reason is a kind of bureaucratic utopia." The book's serious side--and much of its heft--is contained in lengthy diary entries in which Knausgaard contemplates his health, his children, his work, and especially his family history. Having recently observed a brain surgeon at work for a magazine story, the nature of consciousness is much on his mind (he's reading a lot of Emanuel Swedenborg), and despite having written reams of prose that straddle the line between fiction and memoir, he's still sorting out what defines such writing and how honest it can be. To get out of his own head, the author writes a fictionalization of the courtship between his grandparents after World War II, a story that turns out to be thick with lust, betrayal, and violence of Shakespearean proportions. "I am bad at writing imaginatively," Knausgaard insists, but this is a bluff: He knows that while interrogating the nature of storytelling, he's priming readers for a powerful, straightforward yarn.Breezy reading that's also a commentary on breezy reading. Some trick.

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