WINTER

A stand alone but actually a second volume in his autobiographical quartet based on the seasons, Winter is an achingly beautiful collection of daily meditations and love letters addressed directly to Knausgaard's unborn daughter. He takes stock of the world seeing it as if for the first time in his inimitably sensitive style as shown in his masterpiece My Struggle. He writes about the moon, water, messiness, owls, birthdays, puddles and waterfalls, the nose ('all the other body orifices can be closed, either by sphincter muscles as in the rectum or the mouth, or with folds of skin, like the labia and the foreskin, or by a permanent inner wall, as in the ears. Only the nostrils always remain open.) These oh so familiar objects and ideas are filled with new meaning and with a new life of his daughter on the horizon and the earth in hibernation in winter, there is a contradictory melancholy inflecting his gaze. Exquisitely beautiful writing translated from the Norwegian, startling, compassionate and sublime. Tiny remainder mark, beautifully decorated endpapers, 256pp.