Ratings2
Average rating4
15
Ratings2
Average rating4
The second volume in his autobiographical quartet based on the seasons, Winter is an achingly beautiful collection of daily meditations and letters addressed directly to Knaugsaard's unborn daughter 2 December - It is strange that you exist, but that you don't know anything about what the world looks like. It's strange that there is a first time to see the sky, a first time to see the sun, a first time to feel the air against one's skin. It's strange that there is a first time to see a face, a tree, a lamp, pajamas, a shoe. In my life it almost never happens anymore. But soon it will. In just a few months, I will see you for the first time. In Winter, we rejoin the great Karl Ove Knausgaard as he waits for the birth of his daughter. In preparation for her arrival, he takes stock of the world, seeing it as if for the first time. In his inimitably sensitive style, he writes about the moon, water, messiness, owls, birthdays--to name just a handful of his subjects. These oh-so-familiar objects and ideas he fills with new meaning, taking nothing for granted or as given. New life is on the horizon, but the earth is also in hibernation, waiting for the warmer weather to return, and so a contradictory melancholy inflects his gaze. Startling, compassionate, and exquisitely beautiful, Knausgaard's writing is like nothing else. Somehow, he shows the world as it really is, at once mundane and sublime.
Featured Series
4 primary booksÅrstidsencyklopedien is a 4-book series with 4 primary works first released in 2015 with contributions by Karl Ove Knausgård and Ingvild Burkey.
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Knausgaard is a master essayist. He is, for one thing, a regular person. He is a smart person, yes, but not an academic, and he leads a regular life of having to fix things around the house and to take your kids to soccer practice. He is, however, able to look carefully at things and ideas and beliefs, very carefully, almost like taking a zoom lens to them, and flipping them, and looking at them upside down and backwards, and wildly speculating about things, until the reader marvels at the brilliant thoughts that Knausgaard has about perfectly ordinary things.
People keep telling me, in admiring tones, “Oh, you read a Knausgaard book,” as if it were some dense tome of physics or calculus. I urge you to banish that thought. Knausgaard is completely novel, and completely fascinating, but he is also completely readable and applicable.
I can't think of anyone who couldn't read this book and take pleasure in reading it and feel satisfaction in the ideas taken away from the essays.
