Summer

Description

The grand finale of Karl Ove Knausgaard’s masterful and intensely-personal series about the four seasons, illustrated with paintings by the great German artist Anselm Kiefer.2 June–It is completely dark out now. It is twenty-three minutes to midnight and you have already slept for four hours. What you will dream of tonight, no one will ever know. Even if you were to remember it when you wake up, you wouldn’t have a language in which to communicate it to us, nor do I think that you quite understand what dreams are, I think that is still undefined for you, that your thoughts haven’t grasped it yet, and that it therefore lies within that strange zone where it neither exists nor doesn’t exist.The conclusion to one of the most extraordinary and original literary projects in recent years, Summer once again intersperses short vividly descriptive essays with emotionally-raw diary entries addressed directly to Knausgaard’s newborn daughter. Writing more expansively and, if it is possible, even more intimately and unguardedly than in the previous three volumes, he mines with new depth his difficult memories of his childhood and fraught relationship with his own father. Documenting his family’s life in rural Sweden and reflecting on a characteristically eclectic array of subjects–mosquitoes, barbeques, cynicism, and skin, to name just a few–he braids the various threads of the previous volumes into a moving conclusion.
 
At his most voluminous since My Struggle, his epic sensational series, Knausgaard writes for his daughter, striving to make ready and give meaning to a world at once indifferent and achingly beautiful. In his hands, the overwhelming joys and insoluble pains of family and parenthood come alive with uncommon feeling. PRAISE FOR SUMMER AND THE SEASONS QUARTET:“Knausgaard’s clear and compelling style keeps the pages turning.” —The Washington Post“Engrossing. . . . Knausgaard’s prose evokes universal themes from intimate specifics.” —Publisher’s Weekly (starred review)  
“Knausgaard 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.” —Kirkus Reviews (starred review)“For fans of the Norwegian’s mammoth breakout work, there is much that is recognizable in Autumn. . . . Knausgaard’s sharp eye for detail, for one thing. His willingness to suddenly turn the narrative to pursue new and uncomfortable lines of thought, for another. But mostly, what feels most familiar is Knausgaard’s reliable internal muse. . . . An unusual mixture of digression, reflection, thought experiment, diary entry and writing prompt.” —The Globe and Mail“Karl Ove Knausgaard’s Seasons quartet is a raw journey through the writing process. . . . Karl Ove Knausgaard is one of the greats whose literary works will live. . . . The Seasons books—and the wonders within—show the process of a literary writer. . . . Knausgaard writes most compellingly in the Seasons books not of objects like toilets and toothbrushes but of his family’s life. . . . He lets us in on the joy of family and the deep fear—the deepest kind there is—that comes with deep love. And then he’ll rattle on about something like coins or kitchen utensils. 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.” —The Millions
“Often written in bite-size pieces, they’re easy to consume; they’re very much taken with questions of taste and they invite a glancing intimacy.” —Parul Seghal, The New York Times“Whenever [Knausgaard] opens wide in the dark, where things are seriously falling apart, he always returns, like a mindfulness teacher, to the idea that if he is still and notices what is around him . . . he can find infinite and inspiring awe. . . . He brings it all alive in his prose, makes it shimmer. . . .  [Knausgaard] may be done with this quartet, the My Struggle series, and auto-fiction altogether, but I still want more of it.” —Lisa Teasley, Los Angeles Review of Books“A series of mini-essays riffing on whatever comes to mind—from atoms to the 1970s and the joy of dressing up as Father Christmas—it sounds mad, and often is, but it’s also sweet, funny and brimful of wide-eyed seasonal wonder.” —Metro (UK)
“Karl Ove Knausgaard has taken this kind of unflinching observation, association, and insight to a level few of us can imagine. . . . [Winter is] one of the wisest, saddest, and most beautiful things I’ve ever had the pleasure of reading.” —Big Think KARL OVE KNAUSGAARD’s first novel, Out of the World, was the first ever debut novel to win the Norwegian Critics’ Prize and his second, A Time for Everything, was widely acclaimed. A Death in the Family, the first of the My Struggle cycle of novels, was awarded the prestigious Brage Award. The My Struggle cycle has been heralded as a masterpiece wherever it appears.
Anselm Kiefer is an internationally acclaimed German painter and sculptor known for work that explores his home country’s sensibilities and culture, including an unflinching gaze on the rise of Nazism. His art has been exhibited in museums around the world, including the Louvre and White Cube gallery, and he has directed the opera Am Anfang. Diary
 
Sunday 5 June 2016
* * *
 
‘Have you ever heard Heidegger reading Greek?’ Anselm Kiefer asked me for some reason or other when I visited him at his studio outside Paris about a month ago to select paint­ings for this book.
 
‘No,’ I replied. ‘How does it sound?’
 
‘It is very beautiful,’ he said. And then he produced some peculiar foreign sounds before laughing at himself.
 
Rarely have I wished so strongly as I did then that I could articulate some of my impressions, that I could say something about Heidegger and antiquity, something about Lucretius and nuclear physics, something about the materi­ality of things and luminous beauty, and about the infinite depths of time. But I couldn’t, not a word came from my lips, instead I looked down with a slight smile, a little embarrassed by the sounds he had imitated not entirely successfully.
 
For that was what I experienced in Kiefer’s paintings, the different velocities of time in the material and in the human world, and a continual search for depth in surfaces, which is the curse of every painter but with Kiefer seems to be an obsession. The only abyss we know is that of time, but not from personal experience, for we are contemporaneous with everything that surrounds us. Time is like death, we are shut out of it, and we can only be allowed in by becoming it. So when the gate opens, we are already a part of it and there­fore cannot experience it. Perhaps that is why Kiefer was so interested in the artistic expressions of the very oldest cul­tures, both their texts and their buildings, for that is the only thing in the depths of time that we are able to identify with, the only thing issuing from it about which we can say with any justification ‘we’ or ‘us’. In Kiefer’s art I also perceived an interest in things, in objects, in matter as such, and in the principle of transformation, that something is what it is as the result of a determination and that with a flick of the wrist it can become something else.
 
But there I was, sitting on a sofa next to Kiefer, in a studio at the innermost end of an enormous several- hundred- metre- long hangar- like building, full of works of art in all sizes and shapes, with nothing to say. The studio was like a building within the building, it was located on the first floor, and the walls in the three large high- ceilinged rooms were covered with paintings he was working on or had just been working on. There was a strong smell of paint. The paint­ings were lighter and more colourful than anything I had seen by him previously, they represented rivers and trees, tangled vegetation and open stretches of water, some with light trickling through them.
 
 
He had come cycling through the hall dressed in a blue boiler suit as I was being shown around, and when he saw me he said, ‘Ah, we have a visit from a Viking!’ We exchanged a few words, and then he cycled away while I continued look­ing around. One painting hung in another building next to this one, it was at least twenty metres tall, with two full- sized fighter planes on the floor beside it, full of dried flowers. That one man could have produced all these thousands of works was difficult to understand, the incredible thing being not their number but rather everything they represented, the universe they made up in their totality. I would have felt exhausted just to wake up in the morning to the certainty that I would be working on one of the new, light paintings, which were maybe six metres wide and four metres tall. The kind of force required to do something like that every day throughout one’s life, just climb up and get down to it, as it were, had to be a very special one, obstinate and blind to everything else, for there couldn’t be room for much else in his life.
 
[Edvard] Munch had something of the same, he did nothing except paint every day from the age of sixteen until he died. And though he worked in monumental formats only exception­ally, in a similar way he created a whole universe, distinctive and peculiar and powerful. And Anna Bjerger [the acclaimed Swedish artist who worked with me to provide the paintings for my book Spring], the same thing, every day at the studio, every day new pictures, which had to be created out of nothing.
 
Kiefer is probably the wealthiest artist in the world, or at least the one who is best paid for his works. It seemed as if all the money went into creating a sheltered world around his work. He slept in the studio, had cooks hired to make his meals, a dozen assistants helping him in his work, and a sec­retary and an adviser who made almost all decisions for him, as far as I understood.
 
‘Do you fly helicopters?’ he asked while we were eating.
 
I shook my head.
 
‘You have to try it, you know. It’s fantastic! You have to come for a ride some time!’
 
That’s what he did when he was travelling somewhere, to London or Provence or Portugal, he flew there in his own helicopter. He loved flowers, grew them in all the places he owned, and threw none away, dried each one. He had a large library and had bought horses for his children so they would have something to do when they came to visit him. But all this magnificence, these grand gestures, which might lead one to think of him as a sort of prince among artists, were not the main thing about him, they weren’t even important, at least that is the impression I got in the few hours I was there. Everything was about his work, his paintings, his artworks. And where did they come from, what had given rise to this possession, this obstinate blindness to every­thing else? It couldn’t be anything other than a way of coping, he must at some point have discovered a way to open himself up to his inner greed, that which could never be filled or satisfied, only temporarily stilled. He told me that he hadn’t known any other children when he was growing up, only his grandmother, they lived in Schwarzwald in the years after the war, and when I cast a final glance at the in­sane number of artworks before leaving, I suddenly saw trees and forest in everything he had made. Trees and forest, time and death, and his own biography running through it all like a thin, almost invisible thread.
 
When I parked in front of the house where your elder sister’s friend lives, after crossing the sunlit plain and reaching the low hills that rise just before the sea, I looked straight at two large roosters with magnificent feathers and erect necks, staring at me. Some brown and considerably smaller hens were walking around them. I opened the gate, and in the same instant the door to the house opened and an enormous dog with a square head and muscular torso came rushing out, followed by a small, shaggy, furiously barking dog. I knew they weren’t dangerous, but my heart still began to beat faster when I saw the teeth in the giant dog’s wet jaws. I dutifully stroked its head, though I dislike dogs intensely, just as your sister came out, neck bent as if she was trying to make herself a little smaller at the moment of parting, to make it pass more quickly or to make it as small as possible was my guess; at least that’s how I always felt.
 
We drove home the same way I had come, through the silent evening agrarian landscape that was now our home and which to her was also the place she was from. Sunlight shone against her cheek. If I had known how, I would have painted it. US