The Bookery: Karl Ove Knausgaard's "Spring"

Art by Anna Bjerger

“…to be alive is also to be always in the proximity of death.”

In his books Autumn and Winter, Karl Ove Knausgaard writes to his in-utero daughter by focusing on the minute universes (buttons, rubber boots, chewing gum) of everyday life. Things that hands and eyes and the senses explore once exposed to the tangible world. In Spring, the baby is born, stoic and observing the clouds and faces that eclipse her heavenward view. She is a quiet baby joining her father as they spend the spring day--the entire book--traveling for hours to visit her mother who is hospitalized with bipolar depression.

The mother--a mostly voiceless character--is a vague figure in a hot, dark room. In his flashbacks, she sleeps in the dark, stifling heat of their bedroom as he tends to their children, their garden, and all the household responsibilities. When she asks for help, he tells her that she must help herself, so he continues on with maintaining the house as she suffocates in the heat of her depression. What resonates most is the hot, dark room where she stagnates and drifts to the point where hospitalization is inevitable.

“…even in the dark night of the soul there comes a dawn. In some way or another we all know this, all except the suicide, for whom the darkness and the pain are so great that not even the certainty that it will get better can make it bearable. For whom the darkness and pain are so great that not even the sight of one’s own children is enough to overcome the longing for the final darkness, the death of the self. Suicide can also be a way to create meaning. It is an act, and acts always mean something, not only through their consequences, but also in their intentions.”

Depression makes impossible the extraction of magic from the everyday. Depression makes impossible the privilege of life’s materials to outweigh the hopelessness of the spirit. Depression makes impossible the facts to overcome the emotional bias. To love a person with depression is to stand at a threshold that leads to doors that won’t open. This one locked. That one jammed with barred windows. This one too small to fit through. That one’s doorknob is too high. To love a person while depressed is to have all the doors opened, but instead of a threshold, there is a chasm. From the other side of the chasm, one hears the sound of their children playing in the pool. The sound of their newborn crying and then quieted by a rubber nipple full of milk that is not their own. The sound of their husband washing dishes and cooing at the baby. And sometimes those sounds fade as the hot blanket is pulled up the bed, creating more muffled darkness.

“…and one day the body will enter the world of things completely, become an object among other objects, like a leaf, a log, a hillock, and go on existing as elements of a mute reality.”

A baby in his arms and a wife in her ill-bed, Knausgaard reports from that liminal place where the world and its materials are both novel and devastating. In the end, it is springtime in Sweden and he joins his community for Walpurgis Night, a greeting-time for spring, kicked off with music, food, and bonfires. His children whirl in the dark background of things as he carries a torch that he continues to carry despite the burning.