Summer is the fourth volume of the Seasons quartet, a collection of short prose and diaries written by a father for his youngest daughter, with stunning artwork by Anselm Kiefer.
Your voice woke me up around eight this morning, it sounded unusually close, since, as I discovered upon opening my eyes, you were lying in our bed. You smiled at me and began talking. I made coffee and had a smoke in the office before I ate breakfast with you, and when your mother got up, I came in here to write a new piece.
In Summer, Karl Ove Knausgaard writes about long days full of sunlight, eating ice cream with his children, lawn sprinklers and ladybirds. He experiments with the beginnings of a novel and keeps a diary in which the small events of his family's life are recorded. Against a canvas of memories, longings, and experiences of art and literature, he searches for the meaning of moments as they pass us by.
The fourth and final volume of the "Seasons" quartet continues its encyclopaedic slant on the material world, and its focus on the wonder and mystery of the everyday and family life, as the author considers the struggle of doing justice to memory while also attending to the intricacies of the present moment.
