In essays like these, subjects glow in the light of fierce attention ... His view is existentialist and tragic; many essays end with a reminder of death ... Yet he can become transfixed with the glory of the everyday, the wordless eloquence of landscape, sky colors at sunset, the hills of Norway. Such near-ecstatic homage pulls against his insistent darkness ... Also pervading Summer is art, what it is, why it is crucial. The diary entry for June 7, 2016, meditates on literary art, why art must be ruthless, tell the truth no matter how we feel about it (as Knausgaard tries to do here). Utterly remarkable, this passage could be a mini-primer for a course on literature ... Although there will be much that saddens and disturbs, Little Anne may well grow up grateful for this record of a father's world and soul.

Summer begins with Knausgaard continuing his encyclopaedic summaries of things and concepts ... electric hand mixers, which, he notes, unlike almost everything else human-made, resemble nothing else in nature ... It’s a charming but head-scratching piece poised elusively between the absurd and the profound—a description that applies to most, if not all, the entries. They can be enjoyed for the ideas and images Knausgaard conjures seemingly out of nowhere, or at least out of such everyday material to which most of us give so little thought that nowhere might as well be their provenance ... He is...endlessly curious about the world. It’s just that his perceptions of it are so particular, and so much the product of his internalized debate, that the world ends up being one vast, if often fascinating, projection of Knausgaard’s restless mind.

The fourth volume in his Seasons Quartet, Summer, is less propelling [than Spring]—a combination of musing on his quintessential subjects and diary entries ... Summer, in particular, is uneven and uncategorizable ... Surprisingly, in these diaries the first-person narrative is taken over by the voice of a 73-year-old Norwegian woman remembering her affair with an Austrian soldier during World War II ... her narrative is underwhelming, and not nearly as interesting or courageous in its revelations as Knausgaard himself. Taking on a female perspective is refreshing, but he fails to give this character equal gravitas. He also rather disappointingly leaves out an ending diary for August ... He may be done with this quartet, the My Struggle series, and autofiction altogether, but I still want more of it. That kind of passionate literary intimacy is rare. And wanting more and even more—isn’t that just like being in love?

Summer falls more or less back in step with essays followed by diary entries, per month ... Summer I put down and picked up at leisure. This is the way to do it. A forced march through the essays is not recommended. Even avoiding surfeit by taking them three or four texts at a time, I pondered if these books [Summer and the others in the Seasons Quartet] would have been better, more honest, with the dreck trimmed out, published as a single, longish book ... In Summer, Knausgaard’s diary segues in and out of a fiction whose narrator is an old woman looking back on a disastrous love affair ... The old woman’s story never goes far; it’s like an abandoned novel whose ending I didn’t particularly regret missing, though I enjoyed reading what there was of it. The problem was, after the first entry, the transition began to seem gimmicky, a clever device—should the old woman story have been deleted? ... No. Leave them in, just as they are. The story and the way it’s told share the writer’s process ... The spirit of Knausgaard’s seasons quartet lies in its process and its flaws, its moments of physical loveliness, the hapless insights, emotions joyful and big-hearted, petty and bitter.

Once again, he blends short meditations on everyday objects with extended diary entries ... Perhaps more so than in previous volumes, Knausgaard circles back to interrogate notions of consciousness and authenticity, continually debating the line between fiction and memoir, familiar terrain for anyone who’s been able to keep up with this prolific author’s impressive output. If not, readers should feel comfortable jumping into this cycle with any of the four books.

How come Knausgaard can concentrate his attention on seemingly anything in the world and deftly uncover the dances and dodges of mind and feeling? ... I’ve read all four books of the 'Seasons' series twice ... So homey, those darting explicatory personal essays! ... Summer is a collection of Knausgaard’s essays and diary entries and is the least orderly, least focused or purposeful of the bunch. It’s possible that even if you love Knausgaard you won’t ravenously devour Summer ... I enjoy the spontaneity of Knausgaard playing whatever cards he’s been dealt, because the rigor of the writing he does now depends on his exposure of the immediate moment.

With Summer, a feeling of recovery arrives ... It’s a relief for the reader to find herself in one of the long, meandering scenes for which Knausgaard has such a talent. Comedy, which has been largely absent in the quartet, returns ... It feels flattening and wrong to describe this book as a record of his movement towards divorce, yet it also feels absurd not to mention it ... Reading these books [in the Seasons Quartet] I felt at times like I was near a caged animal I desperately wanted to set free. I felt this much more in the quartet than in My Struggle, even though this project is far less straightforwardly autobiographical. In its best pieces, Knausgaard does seem to escape his extreme self-consciousness, if briefly; but then like a kid who manages to tag but immediately gets tagged back, he’s still stuck being It ... About halfway through Summer, Knausgaard’s ‘I’ becomes that of a 73-year-old woman ... A good old-fashioned yarn has sneaked into the project at nearly the last moment. Thank God for the escape, the reader may feel like saying.

The sights, sounds, and family activities of a Norwegian summer spark Knausgaard’s imagination in this expansive, engrossing meditation on everything ... Knausgaard’s writing is rambling, pensive, and neurotic—he’s ashamed of his narcissism, and of being ashamed of his narcissism—but also ruthlessly frank about himself and endlessly curious about the world. Always intriguing despite its seemingly banal subject, Knausgaard’s prose evokes universal themes from intimate specifics.

Knausgaard closes his quartet of autobiographical meditations on the seasons in an appropriately verdant and optimistic fashion ... The riffs are typically light, at times willfully frivolous ('has a single good author ever owned a dog?'), at others more thought-provoking and counterintuitive ... 'I am bad at writing imaginatively,' Knausgaard insists, but this is a bluff: He knows that while interrogating the nature of storytelling, he’s priming readers for a powerful, straightforward yarn. Breezy reading that’s also a commentary on breezy reading. Some trick.