Knausgaard’s Quartet Ends With Disappointing ‘Summer’

Ever have one of those summers where you spend your entire vacation just roaming around looking for a place to stay? That's what the concluding volume of Karl Ove Knausgaard's seasonal quartet feels like. The Norwegian author takes the scenic route though midlife alienation and fatherhood, stopping off at a few interesting vistas before moving on, with no fixed destination in mind.

A year ago when this series began appearing in the U.S., Knausgaard seemed to have an interesting premise: a four-volume, year-long combination of “Baby's First Book,” “Fear and Trembling” and “Speak, Memory,” wherein he would introduce his infant daughter to life and document his own role within it. The books are generally divided between short adroit essays that define things and places — “Cats,” “Bats” and “Playground,” for example — and lengthy diary entries that balance his daughter's growing perception of the world against her father's acute and occasionally withering assessments. His continual aim has been to see the world afresh. “We say that something gives meaning, as if meaning is something we receive as a gift,” he writes, “but actually I think it is the other way round, it is we who give meaning to what we see.”

While Knausgaard is not stingy about meaning, he is cagey about intent. The previous volumes, whatever their individual merits, all had a sense of focus. With “Summer,” he seems unsure of his purpose.

He begins by considering several aspects of summer — sprinklers, camping, the weather, the beach — as well as the developing language skills of his daughter, now a toddler. He seems to be

‘Summer’

gradually approaching some idea about the consciousness of all living things. Soon, he is discussing Emanuel Swedenborg, but the great Swedish theologian and mystic puts him in a funk. What if he did, as he claimed, see God in a London restaurant?

Knausgaard ponders his own mortality as well; he was troubled by a health scare in the last book, “Spring,” and describes here a doctor's visit where it turns out he was worried for nothing. A visit with Anselm Kiefer, the rich and productive painter whose watercolors illustrate this book, leaves him feeling diminished. He thinks of his late, abusive father, worries about how his own children see him and wonders if all his self-absorption is healthy.

All of this is not without interest, and Knausgaard's clear and compelling style keeps the pages turning. But there is a growing sense of apprehension that all these many parts are not ever going to cohere — and that is even before Knausgaard decides to switch identities.

Suddenly preoccupied with the idea of guilt, he recalls a story of a married woman in the Swedish city of Malmo during World War II who had an affair with a German prisoner of war. Knausgaard adopts her personality as she writes out a long letter to her former lover. This becomes an intriguing and even exciting first-person story, as the Malmo woman recalls escaping her abusive husband and running off with her Nazi swain, but it also proves anti-climactic. Knausgaard loses interest.

Is there some subtle structure buried within this final volume of seasonal reflection? Is it about how essentially insular the writer's life has become?

Are all these thoughts supposed to hang together? Earlier in the book, Knausgaard recalls reading an old journal of Swedenborg's where pages have been ripped out, disrupting a linear narrative: “The shift from the outer to the inner world is so abrupt, and the inner world so chaotic and heavy with meaning that at first it is nearly impossible to orient oneself in.”

Knausgaard frequently points out this book was edited as it was being written. He seems to have no greater final design other than to close out this enterprise. “Summer” reaches no resolution. That does not make it a disaster, but it is a disappointment, deflating rather than expanding, more chaotic than meaningful — an author in a rut, spinning his wheels.