I haven't read the previous books in this series - but I will. Knausgaard writes with intelligence and sensitivity about topics ranging from everyday thoughts to serious ones. The style of writing makes the reader feel a connection to the author. It's a unique kind of book that brings up memories for the readers to contemplate from their own past as the author describes memories from his.

I liked the thoughtfulness of this book and enjoyed reading it.

I’ve now read three volumes from the Seasons Quartet – all but Spring. The series started with Knausgaard addressing his fourth child in utero. By now she’s two years old but still the recipient of his nostalgic, slightly didactic essays on seasonal topics, as well as the “you” some of his journal entries are written to. I wasn’t so keen on Autumn, but Winter and Summer are both brilliant for how they move from tangibles – ice cream cones, camping, fruit flies, seagulls, butterflies and the circus – into abstract notions of thought, memory, identity and meaning. That fluidity is especially notable here when Knausgaard drifts in and out of the imagined experience of an elderly woman of his grandfather’s acquaintance who fell in love with an Austrian soldier and abandoned her children during World War II.

I especially enjoyed two stories: traveling with his son to Brazil for a literary festival where he ran into English surgeon Henry Marsh, and fainting at an overcrowded publisher party in London. He’s always highly aware of himself (he never gives open-mouthed smiles because of his awful teeth) and of others (this woman at the party is desperate to appear young). But more so than these stand-out events and his memories of childhood, he gives pride of place to everyday life, things like chauffeuring his three older children to their various activities and shopping at the supermarket for barbecue food. “By writing it I reveal that not only do I think about it, I attach importance to it. … I love repetition. Repetitions turn time into a place, turn the days into a house.” I highlighted dozens of passages in the Kindle book. I’ll need to catch up on Spring, and then perhaps return to the My Struggle books; I only ever read the first.

Absolutely brilliant last installment to the series of seasons. I was a bit surprised as Summer didn't follow Spring but it was beautifully written, moving and deep.

I’m a great fan of Knausgaard’s My Struggle series. I enjoy his obsession with detail, the recounting of every action, every mood, every event. The slightest of trivia. But I found Summer, one of his quartet of seasons books, too episodic. It’s the sustained narrative I enjoy in My Struggle but here I couldn’t relate to his random approach. The book is a mix of diary entries, mini-essays, reflections and meditations, some quite interesting after a fashion, but tedious in the aggregate. Not for me, this one.

"...even an egalitarian society needs people who distinguish themselves through their superior intelligence, and the function of school is not primarily to convey knowledge but to differentiate, so that the intelligent students end up on the right shelf, while all the others are taught that there is no difference between people, so that later they will accept being governed by the intelligent."

A third of the book was vintage Knausgård. The rest of it was typical of the first two installments of the series, Autumn and Winter. Not a big lover of that style of personal reflection. The problem being that little of Knausgård’s personality comes through.

"...placed side by side fullness of life can never compete with intensity…"

Karl Ove Knausgård has a brilliant mind and is extremely interesting when in his confessor mode and in the midst of questioning himself and his motives. Sad to say this last installment fell far short of the brilliance and intensity found in his third in the series titled Spring. Nonetheless, it is always a pleasure to read Knausgård. An example of why I read him follows:

"...That too is something I realise when I look out of this window, and there is something strangely comforting about it, that we notice the world while we are passing through it, but it takes no notice of us. That is one of the tasks of literature, to remind us of our insignificance and make us understand that our own way of producing meaning is merely one of many possible in the world, along with the forest, the plains, the mountains, the sea and sky. The world is untranslatable but it is not incomprehensible, as long as you know the simple rule that nothing of what it expresses through its myriad lives and creatures is followed by a question mark, only by exclamation marks."

Now we come to Summer, the finale of the quartet Knausgård began with Autumn. But this summer doesn't follow the Spring that precedes it -- two years have seemingly passed. In the first two books Knausgård is addressing his as yet unborn daughter, his fourth child, who is born in the final pages of Winter. Consisting of essays on many diverse topics, they were a form of journal to introduce this daughter to the world. Spring was a departure. Taking place over the period of one day, he tended to his family, their mother mysteriously absent despite the presence of a newborn. Her struggles finally are brought to light, and I was curious what Summer would bring. It is a culmination of promises made during the course of the earlier books. Again, he is addressing his youngest daughter, again he only refers to the older children as they relate to her (your eldest sister, your brother), and this, rightfully called his magnum opus, diverts into new territory with elements found in the earlier books -- there are essays on numerous topics from salt to ladybugs, and there are autobiographical pieces that run on at length in which he addresses this toddler, forging memories she will have no recollection of that she can learn in later life. There are also longish memories of an old woman from World War II era, also told in first person, some transitions taking place within the same paragraphs. As with all of Knausgård's work, this is immersive, educational, heartfelt, challenging.