You don’t know what air is, yet you breathe,” so starts Spring , the new book by Norwegian author Karl Ove Knausgård, and with these first lines he sets the tone for the rest of the book. This third addition to Knausgård’s seasonal quartet is a dismantling of mundane events to find momentous meanings. Knausgård is famous for capturing the ordinariness of daily routines in infinitesimal detail and layering it with Proustian deliberations. Spring is no different.
Spring is addressed to his newly born daughter, his fourth child with Swedish author Linda Boström (the couple is divorced now). This slim volume knits the story of a day in Knausgård’s life and meanders several times to events that unfolded a few years ago.
Being dad
There is emphasis on an incident, the leftovers of which we find Knausgård contending with till this day. The incident remains unspoken till the last quarter of the book, giving a mysterious undertone to the story. He recently had to visit Child Protection Services, where, in front of two young women — themselves without any children yet — he attempts to come
across as a responsible father. “So they don’t know anything, I thought, and felt annoyed that two people so young should question me about my family.”
Early on though, we know that the incident has to do with his wife’s mood swings. She is absent from the first scenes, convalescing in hospital. Throughout the book, we encounter Knausgård as a dad, fixing broken things around the house, preparing breakfast, doing laundry and dishes, dropping his three older kids to school, while taking care of his newborn, all by himself. His life has clearly become messy, so much so that he doesn’t nearly get time to worry about a bout of internal bleeding.
We find Knausgård preparing for a day trip to meet his wife. On the backseat of his car, he has his infant daughter, with whom he cheerfully holds a one-sided conversation. In between, he reminiscences about the time when she was conceived — during the family’s road trip to the Farö Islands, where Knausgård was called for a lecture on Ingmar Bergman. They stayed in Bergman’s summer house for five days and everything seemed good but for the first signs of depression in his wife. Knausgård had let her be.
Parry, create
Later, when the depression intensifies, and his wife remains holed up in the bedroom, Knausgård appears almost inhumane. “The illness has to do with you not taking responsibility for yourself,” he tells her. He finds triumph in carrying out daily chores all by himself.
Later, we find him sobbing uncontrollably. Knausgård paints these alternating portraits of himself — caring father to self-centred celebrity author to distraught husband — in the space of a few pages, making Spring a tight echo of his six-volume My Struggles series.
Knausgård’s philosophical contemplation ranges from deflection to addition, from suicide to birth. ‘Parry’ is a word he uses a lot in the first half of Spring . “Life is made up of events that have to be parried. And that the moments of happiness in life, all have to do with the opposite,” he writes to his newborn, “the opposite of parrying is creating, making, adding something that wasn’t there before. You were not there before.”
Lost connections
On suicide, a theme that’s the tacit undercurrent in Spring , he writes about his own experience of climbing a mountain to jump to death when he was a teenager. He theorises that the world means nothing to someone who has lost connections, one who stands alone. And yet, he deliberately cuts off the connection his wife seeks from him.
In the last few years, Karl Ove Knausgård has gained a global standing. That he lives in Skåne region in Sweden, where I too live, impels me to search my surroundings in his words. But I fail, for how Knausgård microscopically synthesises the context and the events around him is beyond my grasp. Yet I enjoy his work as it allows me a peek into my own world with details that I tend to otherwise skip.
Spring, translated from Norwegian by Ingvild Burkey, is a short read, the shortest yet by Knausgård. It can be read in a few hours and for those yet uninitiated on Knausgård and daunted by the 3,500-page My Struggles series, it makes a good starting point.
The writer, who lives in Malmö, Sweden, is an avid admirer of Nordic literature.
Spring; Karl Ove Knausgård, trs Ingvild Burkey, Harvill Secker, ₹799
