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Fiction

Knausgaard’s Seasonal Book Series Continues With a Wintry Mix

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By Sarah Manguso

Jan. 18, 2018

WINTER
By Karl Ove Knausgaard
Translated by Ingvild Burkey Illustrated.
254 pp. Penguin Press. $27.

“Winter,” the second collection of essays in Karl Ove Knausgaard’s “four seasons” quartet, comprises 60 short pieces, punctuated by three letters addressed to his youngest daughter. Framed as a “lexicon for an unborn child,” the collection evokes the shape of nondirected, unbounded thought, and an artist’s sensibility, free from conventional judgments of what’s worth noticing. They are impressionistic records, a constellation of bits that accumulate in an appealing miscellany of objects and concepts — the moon, the 1970s, winter sounds, manholes. Each essay is about three pages long.

A short essay isn’t just a truncated long essay; it has its own distinct pacing, prosody and form. A three-page essay is intensely interested in constraint. It depends on its final moment of arrival, which is sometimes preceded by one or more smaller or more temporary arrivals. Knausgaard seems to recognize this — the placement of several of the best essays, at the end of the book, indicates a sense of the ceremony of endings — but most of the essays in “Winter” read like excerpts from, or preambles to, longer essays. They read not just as though their initiating subjects were noticed quickly but as though they were written quickly; they seem uninterested in pursuing the goals of the short essay, which are precision, originality and speed.

It is impossible to read this book without also considering “My Struggle,” Knausgaard’s six-volume, oceanic work of autofiction, its thousands of pages translated, published and admired around the world. “My Struggle” is fearlessly expansive. It probes the banal content of life to the point of exhaustion. It takes its time. It is interested in endurance. It is less interested in omission, compression, silence.

Fans of “My Struggle” will find some finely articulated passages in “Winter,” written by a gentler, more mildly tempered narrator than that of the longer books. Knausgaard realizes while fishing that “the expectation of an answer runs so deep that it is presumably fundamentally human, the most characteristic trait of our nature.” He turns a painterly eye to fields “covered by a thin layer of snow, with the brown soil showing through in places, as when a wound is visible through strips of gauze.” In one of my favorite passages, his shame about his messy house “flaps around in me like one of those large hollow figures through which air is blown and which sometimes flutter about outside shopping centers or fast-food restaurants.” “Windows,” the last essay in the collection, ends: “How ambivalent we are in relation to these categories of ‘inside’ and ‘outside’ becomes apparent if we consider the coffin, which by virtue of being our final dwelling, our last defense against the elements, our final ‘inside,’ in large measure denies our true nature, but not entirely: In that case, the coffin too would have windows.”

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Knausgaard’s strongest writing tends to concern childhood and parenthood. In “Setting Limits” he scrutinizes the external signs of his daughter’s tantrum. After reacting to it in the moment, he realizes he has crossed the razor’s edge between healthy discipline and humiliation, and broods that he has channeled his disciplinarian father. So he decides to “make things right again,” though he knows a simple apology won’t cut it. The piece ends with a gentle redirection, an act of self-comfort expressed as parental comfort: “So what I am going to do is to get out a hammer and some of those little staples that one uses to fasten cables to the wall, and put up the lamp that for several months now I’ve been promising to hang from the ceiling of her room. It is made up of a long row of little round paper lanterns in various colors and will hang above her bed like a garland.”

Quite a few of the sections feel stereotypically Scandinavian, with their focus on darkness, snow, quiet, emptiness and depression. One of the best (and most Scandinavian) is “Loki,” which retells the myth of the Norse god and ends with an exquisite description of anticipated horror. Sometimes an essay doesn’t proceed very far beyond setting a Scandinavian mood: “The Funeral Procession” concludes with Knausgaard’s report of watching an ambulance boat float away, carrying a corpse: “As the boat was swallowed up by all the gray, I thought that that is exactly how death is.”

In a collection of 60-odd pieces, not every one can be a home run, but too many of these essays anticipate a point of arrival that never comes. “Cold” begins to discuss the physics of entropy, but it barely restates the general principle, meanders a bit, then stops before it discovers anything unfamiliar. Twenty more pages would have allowed “The Nose,” a clinical consideration of the facial feature’s essential qualities, to proceed to a worthier climax. More concerning are the essays that indulge in lax thinking, which is hard to hide in a 750-word piece. In “Hollow Spaces,” “all the thoughts we produce are organized like clothes in a wardrobe, with trousers on one shelf, sweaters on another.” That isn’t the way memories are laid down in the brain; it’s faux science deployed in support of a convenient metaphor. Elsewhere, “the Milky Way might be the comma in a sentence in a newspaper that hasn’t been picked up yet.” This familiar idea doesn’t elevate itself above its familiar context. I could blame the translator for deadening the prose, but I think the larger problem is that three pages just isn’t enough space to hold a complete Knausgaardian thought.

With few exceptions, mature writers each carry the burden of an individual style. I frequently suspected, while reading this book, that Knausgaard doesn’t consider the three-page essay even to possess form; just size. The form doesn’t seem to interest him, and his prose is poorly suited to it. To do it right he’d have to write all new, non-Knausgaardian sentences and paragraphs. He’d have to stop being Knausgaard.

The “four seasons” quartet started as a completely private project, apparently unintended for publication. As I read “Winter” I wondered whether its author had grown bored by his facility with very long prose; whether he wished to elude being pigeonholed as a certain type of writer, or worried that he’d discovered the limits of his interests or, perish the thought, of his talent. After all, “My Struggle” ends with the avowal that he will never write again.

It’s easy to give advice, even if I wouldn’t take it myself, so when my graduate students write labored work out of some misplaced sense of obligation, I tell them to write after pleasure and relief; to let writing come to exist as a byproduct of pure need; and not to let an idealized end product twist them away from what they must write, or what they’d write anyway, without a teacher or even a reader — in other words, to be the writers they already are. Or perhaps I should be less judgmental of an artist who tries new things and works against his natural style. Perhaps I should admire Knausgaard for daring to become an amateur again.