Karl Ove Knausgaard’s observations a balm during troubled times

After the bloody wound of Charlottesville, Va. and President Donald Trump slowly shaking salt into it, the world of objects suddenly seems more attractive than that of humans. Objects — so pleasant, so passive — don’t let you down.

They don’t hate, kill, dissemble, maim, bully or wear white golf shirts and carry the barbecue torches their moms lent them. They are silent. They offer pleasure.

For those seeking this and a moment of contemplative peace, the Norwegian writer Karl Ove Knausgaard’s new book will help. Autumn, written while his wife, the writer Linda Bostrom, was pregnant with their fourth and last child, will be published in English on Tuesday. It will be the first of a quartet — each season gets its own volume — written for his then-unborn daughter.

World, meet Anne. Anne, meet World. Autumn is a kind of travel guide containing short descriptive, analytical pieces on daily life in and around the family’s rural Swedish home.

In the September section, Knausgaard writes about, among other things, apples, teeth, urine, twilight, beekeeping, blood, adders and daguerreotypes. In October, it’s rubber boots, jellyfish, labia, beds, autumn leaves, Van Gogh, lice and oil tankers. In November, he chooses tin cans, birds of prey, Flaubert, buttons, forgiveness, willows, chimneys, pain and the documentary photographer August Sander.

His intent, he told the Paris Review, was to describe a year that Anne would experience without remembering. His tinge of optimism, he said, was hard to avoid. “That doesn’t mean I’m all positive and life-affirming,” he explained, quite unnecessarily in his case.

Children accept the world as it is. They love their families as they are presented to them; the shocked recognition comes later. As Knausgaard writes, children “are so deeply immersed in the world that they don’t distinguish between it and their own selves. Not until that happens does the question arise: what makes life worth living?”

Knausgaard studies beds. The bed is a kind of hiding place, he writes, “not one associated with secrecy but rather with a sort of discretion.”

If every building had glass walls, we’d have an alarming primordial vision of all city-dwellers “lying motionless in their cocoons, in room after room for miles on end ... immobile people who have withdrawn from others in order to lie in a coma throughout the night.”

We never mention the strangeness of it, this extraordinary motion like a stadium wave (audience) around the earth every 24 hours, with billions suddenly horizontal as if there had been a serial global drugging. Putin sleeps, Kim Jong Un sleeps, Trump sleeps.

Then follows the eerie opposite, with billions rising from their beds.

Knausgaard has the Scandinavian talent for celebrating the plainness of things, the importance of the minor objects with which one shares solitary confinement. Adults tend to allow things like this to slide past.

Take plastic bags, for instance. Buried, they absorb neither dirt nor water, which is why we find them alien and ultimately repellent.

Take blood. We aren’t red inside. Our organs are generally pale. It’s only a massive network of fine blood filaments that make us automatically think of our interiors as scarlet.

Take repetition. It calms the infant but annoys the adult. But in times of strife, adults revert to familiarity and repetition.

There are no frames in nature, Knausgaard writes. “To be human is to categorize, subdivide, identify and define, to limit and to frame.” In twilight, he looks through a window frame from the outside of the house. Inside, he sees the children play.

Anne will love the immediacy of games. The slow fading of light will not interest her, but time and darkness will obsess the adults around her.

Knausgaard admires Madame Bovary above all other novels, saying Flaubert’s sentences “are like a rag rubbed across a windowpane encrusted with smoke and dirt which you have long since grown accustomed to seeing the world through.” Autumn performs the same task.

Tiny Anne, this is the world you will come to know, her father writes. It is a gentle place. “For one knows how much pain the world will inflict ... and how the child will develop a whole series of defence mechanisms, avoidance strategies and methods of self-preservation in that intricate interaction with one’s social environment that a full life entails, for better or worse.

“None of this is present in the infant, the joy that shines in its eyes is entirely pure, and the adult body it leans its head against is still the safest place it has.”