9780399563362: Spring
Hardcover
ISBN 10: 0399563369 ISBN 13: 9780399563362
Verlag: Penguin Press, 2018

Inhaltsangabe

“Spring features Knausgaard unbound, writing for the first time without a gimmick or the crutch of extravagant experimentation…Fall in love with the world, he enjoins, stay sensitive to it, stay in it.”
-The New York Times

"Poignant and beautiful…Even if you think you won’t like Knausgaard, try this one and you’ll get him and get why some of us have gone crazy for him."
—Los Angeles Review of Books

You don’t know what air is, and yet you breathe. You don’t know what sleep is, yet you sleep. You don’t know what night is, yet you lie in it. You don’t know what a heart is, yet your own heart beats steadily in your chest, day and night, day and night, day and night.
 
So begins Spring, the recommencement of Knausgaard’s fantastic and spellbinding literary project of assembling a personal encyclopedia of the world addressed directly to his newly born daughter. But here Knausgaard must also tell his daughter the story of what happened during the time when her mother was pregnant, and explain why he now has to attend appointments with child services. In order to keep his daughter safe, he must tell a terrible story, one which unfolds with acute psychological suspense over the course of a single day.
 
Utterly gripping and brilliantly rendered in Knausgaard’s famously sensitive, pensive, and honest style, Spring is the account of a shocking and heartbreaking familial trauma and the emotional epicenter of this singular literary series.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Karl Ove Knausgaard’s first novel, Out of the World, was the first ever debut novel to win the Norwegian Critics’ Prize and his second, A Time for Everything, was widely acclaimed. The My Struggle cycle of novels has been heralded as a masterpiece wherever it has appeared, and the first volume was awarded the prestigious Brage Prize.

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

One

You don't know what air is, yet you breathe. You don't know what sleep is, yet you sleep. You don't know what night is, yet you lie in it. You don't know what a heart is, yet your own heart beats steadily in your chest, day and night, day and night, day and night.

You are three months old and as if swaddled in routines you lie on a bed of sameness through the days, for you don't have a cocoon like larvae do, you don't have a pouch like the kangaroos, you don't have a den like the badgers or the bears. You have your bottle of milk, you have the changing table with nappies and wet wipes, you have the pram with the pillow and the duvet, you have your parents' large warm bodies. Surrounded by all this you grow so slowly that no one notices, least of all yourself, for first you grow outwards, by gripping and holding on to the things around you with your hands, your mouth, your eyes, your thoughts, thereby bringing them into being, and only when you have done this for a few years and the world has been constituted do you begin to discover all that grips you, and you grow inwardly too, towards yourself.

What is the world like to a newborn baby?

Light, dark. Cold, warm. Soft, hard.

The whole array of objects in a house, all meaning deriving from the relations within a family, the significance that every person dwells within, all this is invisible, hidden not by the darkness but by the light of the undifferentiated.

Someone once told me that heroin is so fantastic because the feelings it awakens are akin to those we have as children, when everything is taken care of, the feeling of total security we bask in then, which is so fundamentally good. Anyone who has experienced that high wants to experience it again, since they know it exists as a possibility.

The life I live is separated from yours by an abyss. It is full of problems, of conflicts, of duties, of things that have to be taken care of, handled, fixed, of wills that must be satisfied, wills that must be resisted and perhaps wounded, all in a continual stream where almost nothing stands still but everything is in motion and everything has to be parried.

I am forty-six years old and that is my insight, that life is made up of events that have to be parried. And that the moments of happiness in life all have to do with the opposite.

What is the opposite of parrying something?

It isn't to regress, it isn't to withdraw into your world of light and dark, warm and cold, soft and hard. Nor is it the light of the undifferentiated, it is neither sleep nor rest. The opposite of parrying is creating, making, adding something that wasn't there before.

You were not there before.

Love is not a word I often use, it seems too big in relation to the life I live, the world I know. But then I grew up in a culture that was careful with words. My mother has never told me she loves me, and I have never told her I love her. The same goes for my brother. If I were to say to my mother or my brother that I love them, they would be horrified. I would have laid a burden on them, violently upsetting the balance between us, almost as if I had staggered around in a drunken fit during a childÕs christening.

When you were born I knew nothing about you, yet I was filled with feelings for you, overwhelming at first, for a birth is overwhelming, even to someone who is merely looking on - it is as if everything in the room grows denser, as if a kind of gravity develops that draws all meaning towards it, so that for a few hours it can only be found there, later becoming more evenly spread out, subjected to the everyday, diluted with the eventlessness of all the hours of the day and yet always there.

I am your father, and you know my face, my voice and my ways of holding you, but beyond that I could be anyone to you, filled with anything. My own father, your grandfather, who is dead, spent his last years with his mother, and their existence was pitiless. He was an alcoholic and had regressed, he no longer had the strength to parry anything, he had let everything slide, just sat there drinking. That he did so in his mother's home is significant. She had given birth to him, she had cared for him and carried him here and there, made sure he was warm, dry, fed. The bond this created between them was never broken. He tried, I know that, but he couldn't do it. That's why he stayed there. There he could let himself go to ruin. No matter how crippled, no matter how hideous, it was also love. Somewhere deep within there was love, unconditional love.

Back then I didn't have children, so I didn't understand it. I saw only the hideousness, the unfreedom, the regression. Now I know. Love is many things, most of its forms are fleeting, linked to everything that happens, everything that comes and goes, everything that fills us at first, then empties us out, but unconditional love is constant, it glows faintly throughout one's whole life, and I want you to know this - that you too were born into that love, and that it will envelop you, no matter what happens, as long as your mother and I are alive.

It may happen that you don't want anything to do with it. It may happen that you turn away from it. And one day you will understand that it doesn't matter, that it doesn't change anything, that unconditional love is the only love that doesn't bind you but sets you free.

The love that binds one is something else, it is another form of love, less pure, more mixed up with the person who loves, and it has greater force, it can overshadow everything else, even destroy. Then it must be parried.

I donÕt know what your life will be like, I donÕt know what will happen to us, but I know what your life is like now, and how we are doing now, and since you wonÕt remember any of it, not the least little thing, I will tell you about one day in our life, the first spring you were with us. You had thin hair, it looked reddish in the light, and it grew unevenly; there was a circle on the back of your head with no hair at all, probably because it was nearly always pressing against something, pillows and rugs, sofas and chairs, but I still found it strange, for surely your hair wasnÕt like grass, which grows only where the sun shines and air is flowing?

Your face was round, your mouth was small, but your lips were relatively wide, and your eyes were round and rather large. You slept in a cot at one end of the house, with a mobile of African animals dangling above you, while I slept in a bed next to yours, for it was my job to look after you at night, since your mother was sensitive when it came to sleep, whereas I slept heavily, like a child, no matter what happened around me. Sometimes you would wake at night and scream because you were hungry, but since I didn't wake up or only heard it as a sound coming from far, far away, you learned the hard way not to expect anything while it was dark, so that after only a few weeks you slept through the night, from when you were put to bed at six in the evening until you woke up at six in the morning.

This morning began like all the others. You woke up in the darkness and started to scream.

What time was it?

I fumbled around for my phone, which should be on the windowsill just above my head.

There it was.

The light from the screen, no larger than my hand, filled nearly the entire dark room with a vague glow.

Twenty to six.

'Oh, it's still early, little girl,' I said and sat up. The movement set off a rustling, wheezing sound in my chest, and I coughed for a while.

You had gone quiet.

I walked the two steps over to the cot and bent over you, placed a hand on either side of your little ribcage and lifted you up, holding you close to my chest and supporting the back of your head and neck with one hand, even...

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Verlag
Penguin Press
Erscheinungsdatum
2018
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
0399563369
ISBN 13 
9780399563362
Einband
Gebundene Ausgabe
Anzahl der Seiten
192
Kontakt zum Hersteller
Nicht verfügbar
Verantwortliche Person
Nicht verfügbar

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