Brief impressions of KOK’s comparatively minor yet definitely worthwhile, quasi-Qulipo series published by Penguin Random House, which doesn’t seem to even name the translator Ingvild Burkey on the online pages for each book.
Autumn
Ingvild Burkey, translator; Vanessa Baird, illustrator.
Probably a better introduction to Knausgaard than My Struggle: Book One, especially for those with shorter attention spans or daily subway rides, and certainly easier reading than A Time for Everything. Like his excellent and comparatively very much under-read exchange of letters with another writer about the World Cup in Brazil, Home and Away: Writing the Beautiful Game, this squirms with life.
Squirmy perceptions of life all around the author are contained by the overall volume with the seasonal title, sections named for each month, and each section preceded by a letter to his unborn fourth child, a daughter to whom it seems like all the chapters are addressed, although it’s really specifically just those letters introducing each month. In no way is this a book about autumn; it’s not his take on Keats’s “To Autumn” and seasons of mist and mellow fruitfulness, close bosom friend of the maturing sun-type stuff.
It’s not even really about the chapter titles: apples, plastic bags, frogs, beekeeping, blood, daguerrotype, jellyfish, labia, badgers, Van Gogh, faces, Flaubert, vomit, toilet bowls, chimneys, silence, drums, or eyes (that’s a random selection of about 20% of the short bits in this).
It’s more about how the author’s perception when turned on anything eeks out an essence that relates to an amphibian-type permeability between this and that, between the personal and the social sphere (a great bit about how the Thermos can be used anywhere except in someone else’s house since it’s an extension of one’s home and using it in someone else’s sitting room is a sort of incursion), between inside of the body and outside it (the mouth, the labia, the anus), between heaven and earth (lightning), between the present and the past, between reality and its representation in art. And yet some reviews I’ve seen call this pointless! It’s filled with points, with several “points” per page, all sorts of calmly, elegantly presented insights and impressions of the world. (All the one- and two-star reviews on Goodreads make me love this project more since it confounds or seems “blase” to readers with underdeveloped associative intelligence.)
I don’t think knowledge of the author’s history is necessary but it helped me see the world he effortlessly evokes. Feels less like a “creative writing exercise” as some on Goodreads have said than meditations like those in Kafka’s Blue Octavo Notebooks, or Roland Barthes’s Mythologies (short essays on wrestling, for example), mixed with autobiographical bits about the author’s family in Sweden, growing up in Norway, raising a family of three kids with a fourth on the way.
A great read for me that really hits the literary sweet spot in that it’s about the experience of existence, like Life: A User’s Manual it’s simply about life, and its arbitrary yet totally organic structure barely contains its vitality, that is, lets the life in each section brim over the edges and conceal the light yet not loose structure.
The prose is a little tighter than in My Struggle, a little more carefully composed but not in any way does it feel overworked — it always feels natural to me, casual yet attentive, loose yet not sloppy, and each section for the most part nails its ending.
At times I did sense that the translator was someone else but the same KOK spirit was still conveyed. Excited for Winter to come and then Spring and Summer. The overall project, in a single volume, or a paperback boxed set, could prove to be My Struggle‘s equal, yet in many ways its opposite.
Winter
Ingvild Burkey, translator; Lars Lerin, illustrator.
More of the same, maybe not as tight, definitely not as novel as the first installment Autumn, the significance feels forced at times, the whole project like practice runs, exercises, but still I enjoy reading it for the world evoked and system of associations.
Here’s a quotation toward the end that summarizes the thematic dealio throughout:
“. . . most of all it probably has to do with the dynamics between the visible and the hidden, between what we know and what we don’t know. The more we know about the world the greater the pull of what we don’t know, and every tunnel, every grotto, every subterranean chamber is a confirmation of what we have always felt, that nothing ends with what the eyes can see.”
Spring
Ingvild Burkey, translator; Anna Bjerger, illustrator.
KOK enthusiasts expecting more of the same will come away with expectations undermined but they won’t be disappointed — like spring itself, this one refreshes the overall project (which by the end of Winter had begun to feel, if not cold, than maybe a little rote).
This one strips away the structure in the other two installments but maintains the general conceit of a letter to his fourth child, now an infant daughter. It’s actually structured more like a thriller, propelled by the technique of “withholding.” Like the coming of spring, the story emerges from internal frozen stiffness to loose frenzy in the open air — KOK visits Child Protection Services to discuss a recent incident but he conspicuously fails to reveal what happened. Immediate nondisclosure supercharges everything to come with a sense of oh shit what’s going to happen to his three young kids (the eldest about to turn ten) and the newborn? The inevitability of the revelation of an incident that will ultimately require a Child Protection Services visit elevates the prosaic quotidian mundane etc description — the conventional KOK approach we know and love (as always he also winds up in an uncanny way discussing novels, movies, and bands I consider favorites; in this, it’s Turgenev’s Fathers and Sons, Bergman’s “Scenes from a Marriage,” and QOTSA, who a friend from college drums for now) — and charges life with significance thanks to the threat of endangerment or even death (semi-reminiscent of the section about Noah and the Flood in A Time for Everything).
I won’t reveal what happens since, as in the other installments in the series so far, it’s more about the interpenetration of this and that, movement between external and internal, between life and death, between freeze and thaw, etc. At one point discussing Jens Bjørneboe’s great History of Bestiality trilogy (Moment of Freedom, Powderhouse, The Silence), KOK writes:
“. . . that catalogue of infamies, atrocities, and abuses is true sentence for sentence, but as a whole it is a deception. Certainly evil exists, but it is insignificant in relation to non-evil. Certainly darkness exists, but merely as pinpricks in the light. Certainly life is painful, but the pain is merely a kind of invisible channel that we follow through what is otherwise neutral or good, and which we sooner or later emerge from.”
Whereas the other installments seem almost like exercises in describing dualism (“light and darkness in perpetual round lodge and dislodge by turns” per Ol’ Blind Milton), in this the dualism is dramatized.
Talking about living where he lives in a somewhat remote area he says “what I was looking for was never the new, but the old truths as expressed by the new.”
Again, there’s that interpenetration of opposites (it’s springtime, when the light says summer and the air says winter), which really is what literature is all about — describing and dramatizing the complexity of existence and thereby elevating life via art, instead of reducing it to opposing forces forever in conflict via lies intended to manipulate (e.g., @realDonaldTrump — ah, see how I, a proud Proponent of Complexity, just proposed an oppositional system and reduced the world to THIS versus THAT but then recognized what I’d done and, instead of holding opposing forces apart and deeming one unequal to the other, I decided to parenthetically highlight how my dimwittedness dramatizes interpenetrative dualism?).
Anyway, an unexpectedly refreshing installment that you might want to start with if you’ve been hesitant to try the other seasons so far.
Summer
Ingvild Burkey, translator; Anselm Kiefer, illustrator.
A hybrid of the approaches in Autumn, Winter, and Spring. Diary and meditations. Plus something new: a point-of-view shift in the next sentence, always announced in advance like that, from KOK’s typical first-person (consistent and reliable narrator/author overlap) to a first person in which the narrator is nothing like the author at all (a mother of three children in an unhappy relationship who nurses an Austrian soldier to health during WWII, falls in love, and leaves with him, choosing freedom over everything else — which may abstractly/obliquely relate to the news that Karl Ove and Linda have recently split).
This fictional first-person POV seemed really forced at times and was difficult to read without fighting the impulse to skim until the nearly story-length passage that started to take off after ten pages but nevertheless felt underwritten and a little rushed, even for Knausgaard.
Many dog-eared pages throughout I’ll most likely not return to and type up to post here for posterity even though I’d like to do just that. But generally the same sort of thing, thematically — permeability between this and that, internal and external worlds, although in this installment there’s often a recurrent gesture in the direction of freedom, of busting out of duality, balance, the expected.
Spoiler alert! Ends in a swarm of ladybugs after a swarm of wasps after a BBQ grill sets the overhanging trees on fire.
An ecstatic collection overall, built on moments when the mundane seems extraordinary, observations with a spiritual side that always say something about the nature of art and what it means to make meaning from the meaningless raw material of life.
Felt at times like a different translator or at least I noticed so many parts that opened with good old-fashioned Euro-style comma splices, something I rarely noticed in the other volumes or My Struggle.
Generally, I’m pretty sure I’d prefer to read Knausgaard than any other living author at this point, so while this may seem looser than his others, it’s still a worthwhile way to spend some late-summer days, even if you get to it in the late-summer days of other seasons.
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To support the kind publishers who have taken a chance on my writing, please acquire a copy of Neutral Evil ))) and/or JRZDVLZ. Or my translation of Horacio Castellanos Moya’s Revulsion: Thomas Bernhard in San Salvador. Or Thanks + Sorry + Good Luck: Rejection Letters From the Eyeshot Outbox directly from the publisher. Or even a copy of The Shimmering Go-Between directly from me (the publisher is kaput).