Autumn

I want to show you our world as it is now: the door, the floor, the water tap and the sink, the garden chair close to the wall beneath the kitchen window, the sun, the water, the trees. You will come to see it in your own way, you will experience things for yourself and live a life of your own, so of course it is primarily for my own sake that I am doing this: showing you the world, little one, makes my life worth living.

Autumn is the first volume in Karl Ove Knausgård's Årstidsencyklopedien series; begun as a letter to his fourth child while still in utero (as she is just four months away from being born at the beginning of this volume, which covers three months, I'll assume she bursts upon the scene in the second one; presumably changing the tone of the series going forward). Although these four volumes are to follow the seasons, “autumn” isn't particularly significant here; only serving as a backdrop as Knausgård looks out the window of his writing studio while recording his impressions of the world. The book itself contains three letters to the unborn daughter, each followed by twenty short (2-3 page) essays on whatever comes to Knausgård's mind. Honestly, I found the whole a little underwhelming, but as I was also underwhelmed by A Death in the Family (and, yes, I have read that if I stuck with the whole 3600 page Min Kamp series I would eventually understand the brilliance of the first volume's purposeful patience straining), I may need to just give up on Knausgård as so much wankery. 

In Autumn Knausgård dares to explore the unmentionable – the “slippery” anus, the colourful beauty of vomit, the consistency and smell of piss – and also writes of the painfully mundane, like tin cans (shaped like a cylinder, a form not found in nature), buttons (we use both to conceal the body beneath clothing and to train ourselves in self-restraint), and toilets (this swan of the bath chamber). He gives personal opinions, such as Madame Bovary being the best book ever written, the paintings of Edvard Munch creating “a presence, in the vortex of which everything became meaningful”, whereas Van Gogh couldn't paint at all. He makes banal statements about nature and startlingly painful references to his dead father. Much is made about the solidity and knowability of the human body, the conundrums of the unknowable outside of ourselves, and the liminal interstices between the two. He writes about things that don't need exploring, and then turns them into profundities – which felt annoying and relentless over sixty short essays. One recurring theme is as follows:

Red and green.

They mean nothing to you, but to me those two colours contain so much, something within them exerts a powerful pull, and I think this is one of the reasons why I have become a writer, for I feel that pull so strongly, and I know that it's important, but I lack the words to express it, and therefore I don't know what it is. I have tried, and I have capitulated. My capitulation is the books I've published. You can read them someday, and maybe you will understand what I mean.

The blood flowing through the veins, the grass growing in the soil, the trees, oh the tress swaying in the wind.

So, for some reason, understanding the pull of “red and green” is the reason why Knausgård writes, and it keeps popping up:

Few things are more beautiful than the sight of blood suffusing a young person's face and colouring his or her cheeks red as they meet the gaze of another young person. Unless it is the green grass as it turns red beneath a blue sky, stained by the blood of a dying hero, once long ago, amid the turmoil of battle, the sounds of which grow fainter and fainter in his ears, as the colours of the world grow ever paler, while the body that only minutes ago was trembling now comes to rest, white as snow.

The green hills of a military training base has hoisted a red flag to warn of active shelling exercises; the arresting sight of a book left outside, its red spine laying in the green grass; the red wooden wall against the green grass of his garden. It's there throughout, and I don't know what it signifies any more than Knausgård claims to.

Even the experts aren't agreed on this one, with this article in The Guardian concluding that Autumn “quietly illuminates Knausgaard’s profound gift for making the reader see the world in fresh and unpredictable ways”. While this other article in The Guardian calls it “the most colossal load of old cobblers”, thereafter using descriptors such as “twee” and “fey”. They can't both be right, and if there's no obvious consensus, I won't feel badly for not being impressed. Load of old cobblers it is. Just not for me.