Winter

Last run on the series.
I regard Winter as a bit different from the others. It is still politically centred on about protests that happened in the past and now, referring to other current topics like pollution, littering, etc. What is shared in common between the four parts is that I can always find characters who dedicate themselves to work and act to change the shady bits of the world.
Yet, Winter, happens to be not so cold from what I perceive in the novel. The frozen bonds unraveled and manage to melt, being another festive season of the catch up of family members, being one of the centripetal forces that unite people, being one of the warm bonfire to light up the darkness and defense against the cold. From Art, his mother, his aunt and Lux's way of getting along, which I do have to give a round of applause to Lux, who, being a total stranger, is so willing to help build what was lost of the family and being the sheer force in solidarity when she literally could have refused from such an awkward and annoying case.
Speaking of art, Art and art, art in nature, considered by me as a nice shuffle of words. While Art himself might be in some sort of an existential crisis, or an identity crisis, in the sense which the blogs he had written, might not be real but would be the content reader wish to see and are able to relate. In the light of this, there is also shoutouts to Shakespeare, Charles Dickens, Charles Chaplin, etc. Again, it makes winter less unapproachable and rather, with a pair of welcoming arms in the air silently shouting a “you're always welcome here” with warmth while the outside is suffused in dormancy.
I do like the blithe atmosphere during the conversations in the Cornwall cottage. Yes, it might be annoying to have your seniors debating against each other just for the sake of being antagonistic while you are trying to think some things through, or finding the household with immense dread in itself simply because you find that irreparable generational gap slowly becoming an abyss that you cannot find any way to get across, ending up with a rendition of the circumstance that it is simply the lack of common interests which induce that abyss.
Winter, cold, fearful, dark, prolonged night, lessened day, petrified by winter tales, terrified by horror and the never ending darkness, depression, melancholy, isolation, loneliness... As with every review I have done about the quartet, ending it with the final season of the year is considering a bliss to myself. Again, a few more words, a few more sentences, a few more questions.
Take yourself out for a walk in winter and despite that clarity of bleakness, of everything covered in white, too sharpening to have your eyes on them for long, try to infiltrate yourself with some warmth-not from the nature perhaps, but with our species who do share the same amount of heat as we all do.
Winter, the end, the symbolic farewell to a year. “That's what winter is: an exercise remembering how to still yourself then how to come pliantly back to life again. An exercise in adapting yourself to whatever frozen or molten state it brings you.” To die, so we can be more alive, so we do know what means life.