A somber, philosophical addendum to My Struggle and a fine stand-alone meditation on mortality and fatherhood as well.
The third book in Knausgaard’s quartet of seasonal observations takes a more novelistic (and funereal) turn.
In the prior installments in this series, Autumn (2017) and Winter (2018), Knausgaard welcomed his infant daughter to the world through a series of short observational essays about everyday life; becoming a new father was a kind of writing prompt, inspiring him to re-experience life as if through a child’s eyes. This volume is a novella that more directly recalls his epic My Struggle series, driven by the same intensely analytical impulses but applying a narrative scrim upon them. As the book opens, Karl Ove is preparing his children for the day and planning to drive the infant girl to visit her mother. Knausgaard delays explaining why mom isn’t at home, nor does he immediately explain why he had to pay a visit to Sweden’s Child Protection Service the previous summer. There are hints, though, in the themes that Knausgaard keeps returning to as he ferries his child: parental anger, connection, depression, and suicide. As in the My Struggle series, Knausgaard approaches the story with a mix of quotidian depiction (at this point we know more about his bowel movements than those of any writer of consequence since antiquity) and a Proustian attention to the ineffable. The perils a child puts herself through prompts him to contemplate our fragility, how “to be alive is to be always in proximity of death.” Because mortality is so much on his mind, the minor domestic calamity in the closing pages (he’s low on gas, out of money, and left the baby’s bottle behind) takes on a life-or-death tension. If we neglect simple things, how else are we neglectful? And how much harm are we unwittingly bringing upon others, especially those we love most?
A somber, philosophical addendum to My Struggle and a fine stand-alone meditation on mortality and fatherhood as well.Pub Date: May 8, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-399-56336-2
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 22, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2018
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
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