Spring - Hardcover

Knausgaard, Karl Ove

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0345811097 ISBN 13: 9780345811097

Publisher: Knopf Canada, 2018

Synopsis

Spring is a deeply moving, lyrical, and inspiring memoir about family, our everyday lives, our joys and struggles, set over the course of a single day.

Today is Wednesday the thirteenth of April 2016, it is twelve minutes to eleven, and I have just finished writing this book for you. What happened that summer nearly three years ago, and its repercussions, are long since over.

Sometimes it hurts to live, but there is always something to live for.

In Spring, third volume of the Seasons quartet, we follow Karl Ove and his three-month-old daughter, Anna, over the course of one day in April, from sunrise to sunset: a day filled with routine, the beginnings of life and its light, but also its deep struggles and its darkness.
     In Spring, one of the world's most beguiling literary artists celebrates the greatness of the everyday--the beautiful and the painful--and the big things that hide behind the smallest events in all our lives.
    Whereas the first two books in Knausgaard's sublime Seasons series are comprised of short texts--sightings of things and places, associations and reflections related to nature and the material world--Spring is a narrative memoir that reads like a short novel. Emotionally captivating, it is the most accessible of all his books for new Karl Ove readers keen to enter into his writing, while also deeply moving for his devoted readers.
     This beautiful edition is illustrated by the acclaimed Swedish artist Anna Bjerger.

About this title

About the Author

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.

ANNA BJERGER was born in 1973 in Skallsjo, SE, lives and works in Almhult, SE.

Review

“This is a remarkably honest take on the strange linkages between love, loss, laughter, and self-destruction, a perfect distillation of Knausgaard’s unique gifts.” —Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
PRAISE FOR THE SEASONS SERIES AND KARL OVE KNAUSGAARD:

“Winter offers some of [Knausgaard’s] best writing. . . . His essays are often wild rides that end breathless and alive.” —The Philadelphia Inquirer

“Knausgaard made his name with My Struggle, a multi-part memoir-novel cut so close to the bone that his family shunned him. More gentle, Winter is the second in a seasonal quartet explaining the world to his fourth child while she’s still in the womb. 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. . . . The newest book, Winter, has short meditations on everything . . . and it’s one of the wisest, saddest, and most beautiful things I’ve ever had the pleasure of reading.” —Big Think

“Winter is an intriguing read, and since his hometown critics have acclaimed the other volumes, we clearly have much to look forward to when Spring and Summer arrive here. . . . Lars Lerin’s illustrations for the book give us the great darkness of a Nordic winter while Knausgaard attends to indoor matters, such as humans’ love for the hollow spaces in houses, wardrobes, and skulls. . . . The essays in Winter display an admirable refinement of the earnestness that drew so many readers to the earlier work. . . . In writing for his daughter, Knausgaard is renewing the great possibility of a civilized life spent exploring the world with curiosity and wonder.” —Los Angeles Review of Books

Edition details

• Publisher: Knopf Canada
• Publication date: 2018
• ISBN 10: 0345811097
• ISBN 13: 9780345811097
• Binding: Hardcover
• Language: English
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 192
• Illustrator: Bjerger Anna