Winter, Karl Ove Knausgaard, 2015
This is the second volume in the four season series of letters/essays that Knausgaard has written to his daughter, first in utero and then after being born. They demonstrate a keen sense of observation and investigation, of mundane quotidian objects (manholes, body parts including noses, ears, and eyes, Qtips, toothbrushes, windowns, etc), of people who are a part of his life, and of emotions and feelings (sex, conversation, mess, ‘feeling of life’). In every case he articulates a unique viewpoint and vantage point on the topic, sometimes funny, occasionally deeply serious, but always new and fresh. In his essay on Birthday, he observes “I have experience the sixth of December forty-five times. Unless I die in an accident or get seriously ill, I will experience it roughly thirty times more. And it strikes me for the first time that maybe one’s lifespan is adapted to one’s days, that we die roughly when all the possibilities of variation contained within a given day have been exhausted. When this room consists solely of memories and nothing new can conceivably enter it. That this is what lies in the expression sated of days.” I take from this the need to keep discovering, moving, changing, enjoying, and maybe I can keep going!