Karl Ove Knausgaard’s Summer
Summer Chronicles #6*
By Jim Miller
In the renowned Norwegian writer Karl Ove Knausgaard’s Summer, he riffs on everything from lawn sprinklers, chestnut trees, and campsites to bicycles, ground wasps, and crab fishing. What is remarkable about this work, like all his others, is how he moves from observations about the most commonplace of things to deeper philosophical explorations. In many ways, his writing mimics the way consciousness works, how we drift from the banal to the sublime, from light to dark, from the petty to the profound.
Thus, in the first essay in the volume, he reveals how a simple lawn sprinkler is somehow tied to his most important memories, and, in a rumination on summer afternoons, he drifts from pondering the beauty of the light glittering through the leaves of a tree to how one could engage in a mass shooting. In this manner, Knausgaard’s body of autobiographical work is relentless in its quest to expose a kind of naked truth not just about him but about the human condition.
At one point, in the middle of the book, he explores what it means to write about himself and how the process works:
When the person writing about him or herself has moved out of the self, thus incorporating an external gaze, a strange kind of objectivity arises, something which at one and the same time belongs to the inner and the outer, and this objectivity makes it possible to move around in oneself as if it belonged to another, and then we have come full circle for that movement requires empathy.
So, in one sense, what Knausgaard’s body of work does is to try to answer the question, “what are we talking about when we talk about ‘I.’” How do we know who we are even if we are merciless in our self-examination? This can make his writing stark and, at times, difficult to read as we make our way through excruciating episodes of personal pain and trial along with moments of profound meaning.
Then, at other times, Knausgaard takes us into the minute details of everyday life and shows us how they hold so much more than we think as when he writes about mowing his lawn, “This little world of grass is large enough that I can lose myself in it, and the satisfaction of knowing it so well I can only compare to that of knowing intimately the work of a painter or poet, when everything about it is familiar and yet nothing is ever exhausted.”
And it is this vein in Knausgaard that has led me to consume all the massive volumes of My Struggle along with the other books that trace the seasons that precede Summer—his pursuit of the inexhaustible. Toward the end of the book, he meditates on “fullness”:
[B]y fullness of meaning we mean that feeling of intensity which arises in us when we stand in front of a work of art or read a book, that very particular sense of “more” or of “much” which cannot be traced back to some single aspect of the work but rather radiates out from all of its parts, where it is precisely the number of parts and the parity that gives rise to the feeling.
For Knausgaard the richness of art “opens the world, even its smallest part toward the infinite.” And then we see the world itself with an artist’s eye as when we see the “blazing landscape” of summer and “the trees with their dense curtain of green leaves seem to stretch themselves towards the deep blue sky, until the wind rises and everything is set in motion and a wave seems to pass through the landscape, this is what I think about: if one could only write like that!”
Thus, to see summer like Knausgaard is to be fully alive while writing the story of your own life. For my part, it’s time to retire to the endless universe of my garden.
Summer Chronicles #6*
In the summer of 1967, the great Brazilian writer, Clarice Lispector, began a seven-year stint as a writer for Jornal de Brasil (The Brazilian News) not as a reporter but as a writer of "chronicles," a genre peculiar to Brazil. As Giovanni Pontiero puts it in the preface to Selected Chrônicas, a chronicle, "allows poets and writers to address a wider readership on a vast range of topics and themes. The general tone is one of greater freedom and intimacy than one finds in comparable articles or columns in the European or U.S. Press."
What Lispector left us with is an eccentric collection of "aphorisms, diary entries, reminiscences, travel notes, interviews, serialized stories, essays, loosely defined as chronicles." As a novelist, Pontiero tells us, Lispector was anxious about her relationship with the genre, apprehensive of writing too much and too often, of, as she put it, "contaminating the word." It was a genre alien to her introspective nature and one that challenged her to adapt.
More than forty years later, in Southern California—in San Diego no less—I look to Lispector with sufficient humility and irony from my place on the far margins of literary history with three novels and a few other books largely set in our minor league corner of the universe. Along with this weekly column, it's not much compared to the gravitas of someone like Lispector. So, as Allen Ginsberg once said of Whitman, "I touch your book and feel absurd."
Nonetheless the urge to narrate persists. Along with Lispector, I am cursed with it--for better or worse. So, for a few lazy weeks of summer I will, as I have for a few years now, try my hand at the form.