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ivana34's review against another edition
dark
emotional
informative
reflective
relaxing
slow-paced
4.0
andrewjmajor's review against another edition
emotional
informative
inspiring
reflective
relaxing
3.75
chloraphyll's review against another edition
reflective
slow-paced
2.75
of the topic essays in the seasons quartet, I actually enjoyed the ones in “summer” the most, but all of the journal entry style documenting of his days was just tedious to get through and not something I enjoyed reading at all, so that significantly brought down my interest in the book as a whole. it honestly just became something to get through to finish the quartet rather than something I was actually wanting to read (which was kind of a theme of all the books in the quartet unfortunately). incredibly interesting premise for these books, they just fell so far flat from what I’d hoped they’d be.
midnightcitizen's review against another edition
4.0
[b: U leto|58468967|U leto|Karl Ove Knausgård|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1625172502l/58468967._SX50_.jpg|52074030] je poslednji deo [a: Karl Ove Knausgård|3020048|Karl Ove Knausgård|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1450722222p2/3020048.jpg] tetralogije o godišnjim dobima koji uspešno kombinuje pristupe iz prethodna tri dela za veliku završnicu. “Radnja” se dešava dve godine nakon rođenja ćerke (četvrtog deteta), tako da smo ~osam doba nakon [b: U proleće|20412983|Poslednje proleće u Parizu|Jelena Bačić Alimpić|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1396514173l/20412983._SY75_.jpg|29345893]. Knjiga je skoro dupla duža od prethodnih, emotivna najsličnija proleću, u slabijim delovima jeseni, a najdeskriptivnija kada se ugleda na zimu.
awilderm23's review against another edition
4.0
Time tears into the flesh, that is what the avalanche of days changes, while the soul is only a witness to it, like something seen from a window a swelling river that slowly overflows its banks and, when it recedes, leaves behind a very different landscape.
Sunlight shine against her cheek. If I had known how, I would have painted it.
Salt has nothing to do with either culture or identity and almost no bearing upon human life, except for the the tiny amount we need in order not to die. Salt is no agent, it is neither sophisticated nor unsophisticated. Salt is salt. And yet there are few things in the world that can measure up to diving into the ocean from a smooth rock and feeling the taste of salt on your lips as your body bores through the water, which is full of eddies and swirls and pickets seething with bubbles, and afterwards lying on the rock in the sun next to the one you love, whose suntanned skin shimmers in places under a thin layer or sale, and whose lips taste of the ocean.
Just as the darkness behinds to thicken at night, towards the end of July and the beginning of august, as if it is becoming a touch moister and no longer dissolves as easily in the air, the plums begin to ripen. The sweet juicy taste therefore always has a hint of melancholy about it; summer is over for now.
If one brings plums along into autumn and winter, as we did when I was growing up and my mother made preserves of them and they stood in glass jars in the basement storeroom, then every trace of summer is gone, they lie there darkening inside jars filled with transparent sugar syrup, like little shrunken heads preserved in formalin. The skins are leathery and the taste bittersweet, and I dont think there is anything in the material world which B more closely resembles memories.
One day the world will perish, a day as beautiful and ordinary as this.
Sunlight shine against her cheek. If I had known how, I would have painted it.
Salt has nothing to do with either culture or identity and almost no bearing upon human life, except for the the tiny amount we need in order not to die. Salt is no agent, it is neither sophisticated nor unsophisticated. Salt is salt. And yet there are few things in the world that can measure up to diving into the ocean from a smooth rock and feeling the taste of salt on your lips as your body bores through the water, which is full of eddies and swirls and pickets seething with bubbles, and afterwards lying on the rock in the sun next to the one you love, whose suntanned skin shimmers in places under a thin layer or sale, and whose lips taste of the ocean.
Just as the darkness behinds to thicken at night, towards the end of July and the beginning of august, as if it is becoming a touch moister and no longer dissolves as easily in the air, the plums begin to ripen. The sweet juicy taste therefore always has a hint of melancholy about it; summer is over for now.
If one brings plums along into autumn and winter, as we did when I was growing up and my mother made preserves of them and they stood in glass jars in the basement storeroom, then every trace of summer is gone, they lie there darkening inside jars filled with transparent sugar syrup, like little shrunken heads preserved in formalin. The skins are leathery and the taste bittersweet, and I dont think there is anything in the material world which B more closely resembles memories.
One day the world will perish, a day as beautiful and ordinary as this.
tom_f's review against another edition
4.0
This is my first experience of the 'seasons quartet', after having scarfed down parts 1-6 of My Struggle and all of A Time for Everything in between those volumes. Even in this, probably in sum my least favourite book of his, Knausgaard's work feels nonetheless urgent, for all its bizarre readability, because he still takes the notion of challenging himself seriously. Where My Struggle felt like a self-excoriation, an ironic insistence upon the expansive and exhaustive focus of A Time For Everything within the sensitive perimeter of his own experience, Summer – or at least the short essays that comprise the characteristic bulk of it – feels like a retreat from technical scope towards discipline and focus. Generally, I would say this passage from, in fact, one of the book's alternatively diaristic sections illustrates the philosophical backdrop of this short essay form:
Whether or not he's actually writing this stuff for his youngest daughter (whom he refers to in the third person occasionally, and to whom he offers up some pretty inappropriate subject matter at a few points), it's a pretext that would seem to justify each essay's controlled slide from unembellished, encyclopaedic observation ("Ice cubes are small, hard and shiny cubes of frozen water which are used mainly to cool drinks") to more or less inspired apprehensions of what he elsewhere calls "poetic truth" (here it's indicative but a bit fluffy):
While I think what I greatly value and perhaps also take for granted with Knausgaard is that the 'readability' of his work seems to derive as much if not more from his vulnerable patience and compelling honesty in describing experience as plainly as possible than from any of the more sensationalist content that really made his name, I empathise with the idea that the thought processes behind his writing run counter to the narrative direction of these essays: that these experiences begin with direct apprehension of some mysterious element in life (a symmetry or paradox or resonant microcosm, or just pain or beauty) and that they must be dissected into facts, known quantities and indivisible components. We see and we feel before we grow to understand the "bundles of wires" that support these experiences. He writes about his young daughter splitting the world between direct perception and description of it with nascent language; perhaps Summer is something of an attempt to return to the kind of innocence that he sees her trying semi-consciously to outgrow.
Though in sum they're satisfying to anyone still looking to find their own experience inside Knausgaard's physical and mental Norwegian landscapes, these essays aren't entirely successful as an experiment because, while their structural consistency dilutes their flavour across longer reading sessions, the insights in each individual piece are sometimes too constrained by their deliberate realisation to reward more meditative consideration. Elsewhere here there's an ongoing diary, which thankfully yields more glitteringly revelatory portraits of moments of human (often specifically masculine, obviously) frailty and humility – the account of the cycle to the castle is an obvious triumph that reverberates richly throughout the rest of the text – than it does clankingly awkward textual indulgences in the grossest aspects of those characteristics, where the text is again clearly constrained (as it is fictionally in Paul Schrader's film First Reformed) by the artificial compulsion to commit to whatever has already been written. There's also an extended indulgence in a kind of embryonic novelistic sequence, a projection into the shocking and ecstatic experiences of a figure from Knausgaard's family's past: it's knitted awkwardly into the diary with obscure relation to his own literary concerns, but once it picks up a rhythm it's as engrossing for its sensational detail as for its elegantly realised and empathetic generosity. While its geographical settings and interests in macroscopic family drama resonate with A Time For Everything, this narrative sketch makes a case for Knausgaard committing to a more straightforward fictional approach with future work.
I recommend My Struggle to anyone who I think might listen but having only just now finished Summer, undoubtedly a less compelling read on balance than most if not all of the former series, I've already recommended it to a friend as a decent place to start with Knausgaard. Though they're weighted less compellingly here, this is a less daunting and less metatextually encumbered but still refreshing arrangement of the familiar components of his characteristic literary approach: the psychological honesty, the hypnotic epistemic detail, the bravely and sometimes-wincingly sometimes-flinchingly awkward ethical experimentation. I'll be interested as ever to see if there's much variety of approach across the other instalments of this 'quartet'.
B+
To me, the truly fascinating thing is not the world of spirits and angels that Swedenborg gained access to in London, the parallel reality which opened before him and into which he gazed from his everyday existence, but rather what he was working on before that, the materiality of the soul, the physical origin of dreams, their foothold in the flesh. [...] That arms can be lopped off like branches and continue to feel. That everything we see and feel passes through bundles of wires, that blood flows through tubes, that images flicker through us as we sleep.
Whether or not he's actually writing this stuff for his youngest daughter (whom he refers to in the third person occasionally, and to whom he offers up some pretty inappropriate subject matter at a few points), it's a pretext that would seem to justify each essay's controlled slide from unembellished, encyclopaedic observation ("Ice cubes are small, hard and shiny cubes of frozen water which are used mainly to cool drinks") to more or less inspired apprehensions of what he elsewhere calls "poetic truth" (here it's indicative but a bit fluffy):
Motion and heat cannot be preserved, only reborn, only projected even further, which gives life its hysterical and manic aspect, which the ice cubes are also given their share of when they are introduced into summer, for in them too speed increases, they are transformed, they turn into water, which trickling or sloshing, splashing or streaming, lapping or purling, burbling or billowing is caught up by the great wheel of nature that turns slowly between earth and sky and keeps everything going.
While I think what I greatly value and perhaps also take for granted with Knausgaard is that the 'readability' of his work seems to derive as much if not more from his vulnerable patience and compelling honesty in describing experience as plainly as possible than from any of the more sensationalist content that really made his name, I empathise with the idea that the thought processes behind his writing run counter to the narrative direction of these essays: that these experiences begin with direct apprehension of some mysterious element in life (a symmetry or paradox or resonant microcosm, or just pain or beauty) and that they must be dissected into facts, known quantities and indivisible components. We see and we feel before we grow to understand the "bundles of wires" that support these experiences. He writes about his young daughter splitting the world between direct perception and description of it with nascent language; perhaps Summer is something of an attempt to return to the kind of innocence that he sees her trying semi-consciously to outgrow.
Though in sum they're satisfying to anyone still looking to find their own experience inside Knausgaard's physical and mental Norwegian landscapes, these essays aren't entirely successful as an experiment because, while their structural consistency dilutes their flavour across longer reading sessions, the insights in each individual piece are sometimes too constrained by their deliberate realisation to reward more meditative consideration. Elsewhere here there's an ongoing diary, which thankfully yields more glitteringly revelatory portraits of moments of human (often specifically masculine, obviously) frailty and humility – the account of the cycle to the castle is an obvious triumph that reverberates richly throughout the rest of the text – than it does clankingly awkward textual indulgences in the grossest aspects of those characteristics, where the text is again clearly constrained (as it is fictionally in Paul Schrader's film First Reformed) by the artificial compulsion to commit to whatever has already been written. There's also an extended indulgence in a kind of embryonic novelistic sequence, a projection into the shocking and ecstatic experiences of a figure from Knausgaard's family's past: it's knitted awkwardly into the diary with obscure relation to his own literary concerns, but once it picks up a rhythm it's as engrossing for its sensational detail as for its elegantly realised and empathetic generosity. While its geographical settings and interests in macroscopic family drama resonate with A Time For Everything, this narrative sketch makes a case for Knausgaard committing to a more straightforward fictional approach with future work.
I recommend My Struggle to anyone who I think might listen but having only just now finished Summer, undoubtedly a less compelling read on balance than most if not all of the former series, I've already recommended it to a friend as a decent place to start with Knausgaard. Though they're weighted less compellingly here, this is a less daunting and less metatextually encumbered but still refreshing arrangement of the familiar components of his characteristic literary approach: the psychological honesty, the hypnotic epistemic detail, the bravely and sometimes-wincingly sometimes-flinchingly awkward ethical experimentation. I'll be interested as ever to see if there's much variety of approach across the other instalments of this 'quartet'.
B+
ellahaugdahl's review against another edition
informative
slow-paced
2.0
Denne var så kjedelig. Han sporet helt av fra essayene og det ble for mye dagbok. Er glad for å endelig ha blitt ferdig.
profpeaton's review against another edition
challenging
dark
emotional
informative
reflective
slow-paced
4.0