Spring: A Review of a Book That Trusts Its Reader
This is a spoiler-free review.
Before anything else: I am choosing to separate the author from the book in this review. Knausgaard is a controversial figure (I’ll touch on that briefly later), but my rating reflects the work itself.
Spring is the third installment in Karl Ove Knausgaard’s Seasons Quartet–a four-part memoir series comprising Autumn, Winter, Spring, and Summer. Yes, that Karl Ove Knausgaard. The one who wrote a six-volume autobiographical series called My Struggle, which became one of the most talked-about and argued-over literary projects of the last two decades. Infamous, really. I came to him through none of that. A teacher recommended Spring specifically because I’m working on a memoir of my own, and I’d never heard of him before. I’m glad I listened.
A note on the missing middle section:
Similarly to how I reviewed Crying in H-mart, I won’t be dedicating a section to characters since this is a memoir and these are real people. What I will say is that the way Knausgaard writes about the people in his life (with that particular quality of distance he uses) is something I’ll be thinking about for a long time.
My Honest Review
I want to address the controversy briefly and then move on: Knausgaard has faced significant criticism for the way he writes about real people in his life, particularly family members who did not consent to being portrayed. It’s a legitimate conversation, and I don’t want to dismiss it.
This is also a man who titled his six-volume autobiographical series My Struggle. In Norwegian, Min Kamp. The same two words, in the same language, as a certain someone else’s memoir.
But, again, it is separate from what I’m doing here, which is reviewing Spring as a piece of writing. My four stars have nothing to do with anything outside these pages.
Now–Spring.
Knausgaard wrote this book for his newborn daughter, which is the kind of premise that could easily tip into sentimentality. It doesn’t. What he does instead is something much more interesting: he writes about mental illness (specifically a suicide attempt and its aftermath) without romanticizing it and without recoiling from it.
The writing itself is extraordinary. Knausgaard has this quality (hard to name exactly) where you feel a distance between yourself and the events on the page, and yet that distance doesn’t feel cold. Instead, it feels like looking at something very clearly through glass. You feel it, but there is always this sense that you are being shown rather than told, observed rather than lectured. For someone working on their own memoir, that was genuinely illuminating to read.
The honest caveat, and the reason this is four stars rather than five, is that I finished Spring unsure of what I was supposed to take from it. Not in a bad way, necessarily. As a reader, I could appreciate it completely. As a writer trying to learn from it, I kept asking: what is the point of entry here? What is Knausgaard giving me permission to do? I don’t have an answer, and I suspect that’s part of the point. But it left me with questions I’m still working through.
Four stars, and a plan to read the rest of the quartet.
Happy reading—and find yourself a teacher who recommends the right books.