Karl Ove Knausgaard

Well, it looks like I'll be following the seasons with Karl Ove Knausgaard. This time, it's Winter -- and as with Autumn, I'm a willing participant.  

Part of what I've enjoyed about these short essays is their mixture of levity and profundity: right on point, each and every time, Knausgaard delivers an observation, an aphorism, a detail -- all of which transform the commonplace into something more, something endowed with a flicker of meaning. 

In my reading, Autumn was more successful, perhaps, than Winter, but I attribute that as much to the season as to any deficiency in Knausgaard's prose. Winter marks the end: of life, of movement, of warmth. The topics that accompany this have the potential to be less engaging -- certainly less hopeful. 

And there were indeed sections of Winter which trace a hopelessness: a preoccupation with death, even with the underworld. But there were equally, I felt, chapters which moved in the opposite direction, which asked the reader to see beyond the snow and ice, to identify a beauty in the brown earth just below the frozen surface. 

At this point, I guess, I'm in for the rest of the year: Spring and Summer will be on my list. But it's not out of obligation that I'll read them as much as curiosity: as the year progresses and as the earth renews, I'm eager to see how Knausgaard's writing mirrors that change, how it assumes a faint and then sudden sense of life. "Nothing," writes Knausgaard, "ends with what the eyes can see."