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“He brings it all alive in his prose, makes it shimmer. Whether intellectually parsing for meaning or playing this existential video game of political turmoil, horror, and heartache, his writing flows easily from quiet, thoughtful engagement to ecstatic communion with the world… 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?” — Los Angeles Review of Books “Knausgaard closes his quartet of autobiographical meditations on the seasons in an appropriately verdant and optimistic fashion. . . 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, starred review “Engrossing… Knausgaard’s prose evokes universal themes from intimate specifics.” — Publisher's Weekly, starred review Informationen zum Autor Karl Ove Knausgaard Klappentext 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 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.Lawn Sprinklers That I have my own lawn sprinkler has never quite dawned on me, it was just one of the many things I acquired when we bought this house, like the lawnmower, the garden shears, the rakes and all the other equipment that belongs in a garden. Though I have fastened the hose to the tap in the porch of the summer house countless times, have heard the water first hiss, then rush through the hose, and then seen the thin jets of water rise in the garden, maybe five metres into the air, often glittering in the sunlight, and, slowly wavering, fall to one side, before rising again and falling to the other side, in a movement that has always made me think of a waving hand, I have never connected it with myself or my life, as if what it represents doesn't represent me, or in other words that the life I lead here isn't really mine, but merely something I happen to be doing right now. To draw such a far-reaching conclusion from something as insignificant as a metal arm full of holes through which water flows may seem overblown, but of all the things I remember from the summers when I was growing up, the lawn sprinkler is the most emblematic, it is the single object around which the greatest number of moods and events cluster in my memory and which evokes the most associations. Every household in the development had a lawn sprinkler, and all of them were of the same type, so that these fine, glittering arcs of water could be seen everywhere on summer days when the sun was shining. Often the lawns they stood on were deserted, as if the sprinklers led their own in...
