Karl Ove Knausgaard Shows You What Makes Life Worth Living

“I have tried and I have capitulated. My capitulation is the books I have published,” writes Karl Ove Knausgaard, who has 3,600 pages of capitulation behind him in the My Struggle series alone. That capitulation, he writes in his new work, Autumn, was to his inability to describe in satisfying terms the “pull” that the colors red and green exert upon him. We move past this odd admission.

Red and green reappear throughout , as does the season itself, but the point of this spare collection of essays addressed to his unborn daughter is not to finally be able to talk about color, exactly. What is most interesting to this reader about , and possibly most interesting to Knausgaard himself, is how the acts of seeing and distilling might work together. Here, the writer is considering the sights and objects that staff his current life, not his past. Here, no 40-page reminiscences of the time young Karl—the first of a “seasonal” series—by corralling those things that he wants to precisely regard, and that he wants his daughter to one day regard for herself. Three letters directly addressed to his child tether the true substance of the work—60 meditations on topics such as beekeeping, petrol, war, vomit, , chewing gum, and, of course, eyes, an ongoing topic of interest for this author since the first book of feels like a gift in the hand.