An intriguing trip to moon and back with Knausgaard
Winter has set in for Karl Ove Knausgaard. The world is mostly still. His mind is not. It never is. This is the Knausgaard of the lauded six-volume, 3,600-page autobiographical novel, “My Struggle.” The Knausgaard who is now deep into an “autobiographical quartet” — four books, each named for a season, containing short, perambulating observations on the stuff of life itself.
In “Winter,” his mind turns to owls, coins, chairs, mess, toothbrushes, hollow spaces, bonfires, manholes, even Q-tips, even ears. The nouns are triggers. They are pursued. They set Knausgaard off into his signature swerves — long sentences, full-page paragraphs, free associations, basic facts, leisurely hypotheticals.
Take, for example, the moon. Knausgaard begins with a simple fact: “The moon, this enormous rock which from far out there accompanies the earth on its voyage around the sun, is the only celestial body in our immediate vicinity.”
True enough. A science lesson.
Thereby launched, the essay gains momentum. First, more facts: “That its surface is uneven can be seen with the naked eye; some areas are light, others dark.” Then, slowly, a hint of myth and otherworldly knowledge, supernal provocations: “the moon is ruled by silence, by immobility, like an eternal image of a world before life, or of a world after life. Is that what dying is like? Is this what awaits us?”
The paragraph doesn’t break, the words stream forward until Knausgaard is imagining the common horsetail drifting “slowly through space, landing gently in the dust of the moon.” His final touch? He sets aloft moon birds, “almost weightless, independent of oxygen … gliding with their enormous paper-thin wings.”
In 21⁄2 pages, we have traveled to the moon and back. We have floated on the rise of Knausgaard’s extraordinary imagination.
There are some fivedozen pieces of similar shape and heft within “Winter.” Many begin with a simple declarative. “Every day there is water on the table in a big glass jug,” reads the first sentence in a piece titled “Water.” “If there are children in the house, the first snowfall is eagerly anticipated,” begins “The First Snow.” Soon, however, Knausgaard is pursuing an arabesque, layering images upon assertions, the morning’s news against childhood memories, fantasy upon history. We’re never quite sure where he’s headed, and neither, it seems, is he, and that’s what makes this tumble of language so consistently entrancing: Together, reader and writer embark on the unknown.
There is a density to Knausgaard’s work, a potential tedium that the author avoids by regulating the rhythms within and across the pieces.
Consider “Safety Reflector.” The piece begins: “For animals a key survival skill has always been to merge as much as possible with the darkness at night.” Then Knausgaard writes of morning drives in Malmo, of a time before he got his driving license, of ad campaigns “promoting the use of reflectors.” We turn the page, and it is yesterday, and he was driving fast, and “a roe deer came running into the beam of the headlights.” Knausgaard avoids that deer. He does not avoid the next. Out in the dark, the deer lies trembling, still alive. Knausgaard has stopped his car, phoned the police, taken another look at the dying deer, then looked upon the sky “full of sparkling stars.”
Within the space of a single paragraph we have borne witness to death in the dark on a highway inadequately lit by stars.
Like “Autumn,” “Winter” contains three letters written to Knausgaard’s fourth child. She is unborn in the early letters. She is newly born in the last. Knausgaard imagines her “surrounded by water and darkness.” He imagines all she does not know, considers how “strange” it is “that there is a first time to see a face, a tree, a lamp, pyjamas, a shoe.” Knausgaard has, it seems, given himself the task of making the once-strange strange once more — not just for his daughter, but for us. He buckles his language. He pivots his thoughts. We follow where he leads.
Beth Kephart is the author of 22 books, most recently “Tell the Truth. Make It Matter.”