We’ve all seen this, I know, on TV and in the movies, the constant cajoling and haggling parent and the variously resistant kids, or we’ve done it ourselves, where it’s not cute and is almost always exasperating. But to read it as Knausgaard presents it is nothing but thrilling: it matters for us, we are aware of a tension; it feels routine but it also feels as if the unimaginably bad could happen at any moment ... There are two conspicuous mysteries and a few quiet ones that keep us anxiously focused as Knausgaard describes the routines and variations of everyday family life. He wants to show us that our thoughts, impressions, and memories are actions too ... As the house-making dad, the anxious husband and father, Knausgaard the writer continues to seem to me at his greatest, as he is in Spring, situating himself in the present day while he unpeels the past that is in its midst ... It’s poignant and beautiful, with his usual constant striving toward the most exposed vulnerability.
Knausgaard reveals his life and tries to impart some wisdom to his dozing infant passenger ... He weighs the promise of life against the meanness, cruelty and tragedy that await us all. Existence is full of spontaneous threatening swerves. Knausgaard’s assets are on full display, including his precise writing style and his unerring sense of detail. He is constantly attuned to his surroundings, noting the changing weather and the colors of flowers, which may account for why he is so successful at what he does: transforming quotidian life into drama. Perhaps it is the Proustian in him, this desire to impart the full benefit of experience, no matter how small or seemingly insignificant. Domestic life is his territory, and he enlarges it.
The book begins in a home where everything is leaking and creaking and on the verge of collapse. Every zipper is stuck, every button loose. The drains are clogged. The light bulbs have burned out long ago. So has the marriage ... Spring features Knausgaard unbound, writing for the first time without a gimmick or the crutch of extravagant experimentation, the endurance test of My Struggle or the staccato essays of his previous books on the seasons. Spring refuses contrivance; it refuses to parry ... the book’s blunt, unforced telling brings the larger project’s meaning into sudden, brilliant focus ... Knausgaard has assembled this living encyclopedia for his daughter with a wild and desperate sort of love, as a way to forge her attachment to the world, to fasten her to it — to fight the family legacy of becoming unmoored and alienated.
Knausgaard circles around a mind and a life that, while intelligent, impassioned and perceptive, are ordinary. That ordinariness continues in Spring ... The book oscillates between a suspenseful, hour-by-hour account of the day of this event and a lighter, almost parodic, account of the father’s car journey — with his infant daughter ... But at the core of the book is a quandary about the ways we can best care for an ill person ... Spring, written after its author attained vast international celebrity, feels like a new expression of the power of detail to order a story.
By Spring, the project has broken with its original form and is now framed as a straightforward autobiographical novel ... The shift in form prompts the reader to wonder what kind of work she has been reading. To some extent it is a diary project, but when read as a diary most of its strengths are obscured. It even lacks the thrill of disclosure. A sense of melancholy and privacy—understandable after the revelations of My Struggle—form a dense steam around the author and his thoughts ... On one level, Spring investigates the mystery of the unhappiness of a family living an ordinary, blessed life, with four healthy children and more than enough money. What could there be to be sad about? Knausgaard inspects his own household’s gloom—and his own serial exits from the household—more carefully than in his other works ... The most interesting moments in Spring, however, are the ones that feel off-track ... Although there are many interesting moments in Spring, the reader basically wants out, as the characters do.
This third installment in Knausgaard’s seasonal cycle departs from the encyclopedic style of its predecessors, Autumn (2017) and Winter (2018). Instead, Knausgaard opts for more straightforward narrative ... At times, Knausgaard slips into philosophizing on free will, the self, and the nature of personality, musings that acquire urgency when Knausgaard reveals why he’s written all this, telling his newborn daughter: 'I guess it was mostly for my sake that I did it, as a way of preparing myself.'
As we read, we realize the purpose behind Autumn, Winter, Spring, and, this summer, Summer. Knausgaard writes in a desperate bid to throw his daughter a lifeline, well before she even needs one. You go back, reread those tender, intense books, return to Spring, and see: This man is writing to save his daughter's life.
This volume is a novella that more directly recalls his epic My Struggle series, driven by the same intensely analytical impulses but applying a narrative scrim upon them ... Knausgaard approaches the story with a mix of quotidian depiction...and a Proustian attention to the ineffable ... A somber, philosophical addendum to My Struggle and a fine stand-alone meditation on mortality and fatherhood as well.
Knausgaard’s latest is a radical, thrilling departure from the first two volumes of his Seasons Quartet ... This is a remarkably honest take on the strange linkages between love, loss, laughter, and self-destruction, a perfect distillation of Knausgaard’s unique gifts.
