Autumn

May 1, 2017
Novelist Knausgaard (My Struggle) eloquently expresses the delights, rewards, and insights of looking closely in this, the first of a projected quartet of autobiographical volumes based on the four seasons. Writing to his unborn daughter—the author and his wife, Linda, already have three other children—Knausgaard revels in everyday items such as tin cans and rubber boots; his perfect deconstruction of an old-fashioned landline telephone is a joy. His thoughts take to the heavens as well, whether contemplating the sun overhead, the arrival of twilight, or the migration of birds each year. He is not shy about exposing the scatological or the cruel in life; there is both softness and hardness in his musings, reverence and irreverence. Most of all, his writing encourages the reader to see the connections between quotidian things and the bigger picture and to appreciate both continuity and change. Autumn hums in the background as apple trees flourish and days get darker, and one looks forward to what associations he will uncover in the remaining seasons of the year. Agent: Andrew Wylie, the Wylie Agency.

Starred review from May 15, 2017
The acclaimed author delivers a host of brief but insightful observations about the small matters of everyday life.In the My Struggle series, Knausgaard mined his life but called it fiction, crafting an epic story with a novelistic shape. This book, the first in a quartet with seasonal themes, is explicitly autobiographical but less personally revealing, looking outward instead of inward. Contemplating the upcoming birth of his daughter, the author asks, "what makes life worth living?" The answer: details. The book is built on an assortment of short essays on a wide range of topics, including frogs, photographs, beds, and tin cans. "Autumn" is a framing device, but not every essay engages with the season. What truly unites these pieces is Knausgaard's sensibility, which is one part Montaigne (an urge to address big issues), one part Nicholson Baker (an eye for picayune detail), and one part Annie Dillard (an admiration for nature and an elegant prose style). Watching beekeepers, he finds an intersection of man and nature that "shows human beings at their most subservient and perhaps also at their most beautiful." "Fever" triggers memories of his parents doting on his childhood illnesses. ("With fever came privileges. Meals in bed. Grapes. New comic books.") "Forgiveness" is a sketch about his wonderment at how humans could culturally arrive at a capacity for mercy. Considering bird migrations, he finds not a cliched sense of freedom but evidence of nature's boundaries. Because each chapter is brief, usually about three pages, Knausgaard can't deliver more than glancing consideration of any one subject, and three pages each on female genitalia and vomit is more than plenty. But in the aggregate, the pieces feel remarkably substantive, a call to pay closer attention to the routine stuff in our lives and to allow ourselves to be thunderstruck by their beauty. An engagingly wide-ranging set of meditations.

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July 1, 2017

This book by Knausgaard (My Struggle), the first in a four-part series, has the author shifting his focus from the mundane events of his life that made up his earlier work to the objects in the world around him. Written in the form of a letter to his unborn daughter, this book hopes to show her the world she will soon inhabit. The objects described vary from material items (apples, beds, vomit, gum) to the abstract (loneliness, forgiveness, experience). Throughout, the author highlights how certain articles blur the line between the internal and external. For example, he discusses certain fruits, such as oranges, as having a thick skin separating the inside from the outside and how when eating an orange we must first work to remove the skin. Apples, however, have thin, edible skin. Thus, the boundary between the internal and external is diminished in an apple. The focus on internal and external worlds is primarily what connects the items throughout the book. While the subject matter is banal, the attention given to each item, and the insights gleaned from such attention are fascinating. VERDICT Fans of Knausgaard's earlier books as well as anyone with an interest in creative nonfiction should be satisfied. [See Prepub Alert, 2/13/17.]--Timothy Berge, SUNY Oswego Lib.

Copyright 2017 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

June 1, 2017
The phenomenally prolific author of the best-selling autobiographical sextet My Struggle, as well as Home and Away (2017), Knausgaard returns with the first in a four-part series centered around the seasons. Working with dozens of brief vignettes, he dispenses with the veneer of narrative, adopting a more reflective, essayistic style. The result is a collection of freely associative, often profound installments, unchained by storytelling conventions. Divided into three parts, one for each month of autumn, beginning in late August and spanning through November, each section opens with a Letter to an Unborn Daughter, addressed ostensibly to Knausgaard's soon-to-be-delivered child. Topics under consideration include objects as innocuous as apples, infants, and chewing gum, but also blood, piss, and vomit. On full display is Knausgaard's gift for extracting high drama from even the most mundane daily events: The little tooth, sharply white, dark red with blood at the root, is thrown in to almost obscenely sharp relief against my pinkish palm. This fresh, welcome performance will tide readers over until publication of the much-anticipated finale of My Struggle in 2018.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2017, American Library Association.)