Knausgård may not be a great thinker, but it does not prevent him to be a great writer.
At the very beginning, I am not sure how to react to his writinKnausgård may not be a great thinker, but it does not prevent him to be a great writer.
At the very beginning, I am not sure how to react to his writing style. To be more precise: I did not find any intellectual or aesthetic value in it. Then I just trusted the fact that it was real. Customarily, you can say: this writer pens brilliant sentences full of wonderful images or this other writer pens revealing reflections on unexpected topics. When reading Knausgaard, you can say: this writer is capable of building up a kind of "architecture of a lifetime" that readers can transit at ease. This feat is closer to an artistic exploit than a purely literary one, so I think readers have to change their minds a little bit to fully enjoy it. That is to say that the enjoyment that you get from it highly differs from that you would get, for instance, reading the perfect chapters of Tolstoy or the demanding pages of Proust.
What happens in Seasons Quartet is pretty straightforward. It tells a letter to an unborn child and continues to a letter to a newborn child. But, as is often the case with the great book, this is not great because of the plot. Seasons Quartet is an all-timer because Knausgård grabs hold of the reader's emotions and trusts us to internalize what is happening, even for the bits we don’t fully understand. A simple but effective overall structure. The whole project comprises four novels occasionally divided into large sections, each of whom are directly linked with a stage of life from months to months.
The way it's written in so many chapters and the incredibly slow pacing that I was worried would bore me all added up to something that was surprisingly and incredibly absorbing. The plot is completely blurred, or at least non-defined. Notwithstanding that, you can follow a clear story made up of essayistic reflections intermingled with the drift of the main character.
He writes lean, everyday prose, relates mundane experiences that pay no attention to lit devices of plot or build and yet somehow manages to be riveting. The style is maximum clear and understandable as any other basic elements of a conventional novel such as structure, characters, scenes and so on. This clearness, when combined with a madding peace and a cascade of narrative facts, results in the readablest book ever.
He is vulnerable (and so am I) and I especially like his honest accounts of his insecurities. He is a fantastic observer. Furthermore, he is so descriptive in his retelling of his life, it is stunning. As the series ended, I was quiet. For the next few hours, I barely spoke. Partially because there were some bits I didn’t understand, so I was thinking through their meaning within the overall context, but also because I knew I had just read a masterpiece. I look forward to reading more books from Knausgård soon.
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