A winningly interior journey into the most interior of seasons.
The Norwegian author continues his series of seasonal meditations with some appropriately austere thoughts on nature and life in a cold climate.
This is the second book in a planned quartet that Knausgaard (My Struggle: Book Five, 2016, etc.) conceived as a kind of welcoming present for his newborn daughter, collecting brief musings on a variety of quotidian subjects, written as if one were seeing the world anew. Its predecessor, Autumn (2017), balanced riffs on philosophical themes (forgiveness, illness) with more overtly offbeat takes on everyday stuff (tin cans, vomit). Here, the author sticks to more elemental matters, drawing heavily on nature and Scandinavian folklore, while also writing more personally about friends and the messiness of family life. (One piece is literally titled “Mess.”) Pipes evoke “a vast physical network which lies coiled, serpent-like around the globe”; stuffed animals externalize what children’s “souls look like, small, soft, good, and faithful”; a train is “an embodiment of longing”; sugar is a “cheap and simple pleasure” undermined by good-health hard-liners. Where the prevailing mood in Knausgaard’s My Struggle novels is anxiety, these seasonal books are propelled by his sense of wonder. Whether he’s contemplating a deer struck by a car on the highway or a beloved pair of “old, tattered, almost Chaplin-esque boots,” the author casts the world in a holy glow of surprise and compassion, whether it involves science or myth. The fact that he follows a piece on atoms with one on the prankster god Loki seems no accident. Trying to see the world anew, though, also means seeing the world weirdly at times, and he delivers peculiar takes on Q-tips and half-seriously proposes “sex stations along major roads” to satisfy carnal cravings. Such moments, however, read more like fresh perspectives than hollow provocations.
A winningly interior journey into the most interior of seasons.Pub Date: Jan. 23, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-399-56333-1
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: Oct. 10, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2017
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
This autobiography might almost be said to supply the roots to Wright's famous novel, Native Son.
It is a grim record, disturbing, the story of how — in one boy's life — the seeds of hate and distrust and race riots were planted. Wright was born to poverty and hardship in the deep south; his father deserted his mother, and circumstances and illness drove the little family from place to place, from degradation to degradation. And always, there was the thread of fear and hate and suspicion and discrimination — of white set against black — of black set against Jew — of intolerance. Driven to deceit, to dishonesty, ambition thwarted, motives impugned, Wright struggled against the tide, put by a tiny sum to move on, finally got to Chicago, and there — still against odds — pulled himself up, acquired some education through reading, allied himself with the Communists — only to be thrust out for non-conformity — and wrote continually. The whole tragedy of a race seems dramatized in this record; it is virtually unrelieved by any vestige of human tenderness, or humor; there are no bright spots. And yet it rings true. It is an unfinished story of a problem that has still to be met.
Perhaps this will force home unpalatable facts of a submerged minority, a problem far from being faced.
Pub Date: Feb. 28, 1945
ISBN: 0061130249
Page Count: 450
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1945
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