Your four-book series of vignettes are named after the four seasons. Why ?
I wrote them down as a journal during the fourth pregnancy of the mother of my children. When I was in my twenties, I read a book by a French writer whose name I now forget, who wrote texts about objects. I underlined almost every sentence in the book. I remembered this when I decided to make this journal for my daughter. I would get up at 4 a.m. before my three other children got up, I would write a text, over the four seasons of a year, and I would send it to my editor.
Isn’t that unfair to your other children?
I have five children now. Yes maybe. But I only wanted to capture a moment in my life.
In In autumn, you write that your childhood no longer interests you. It is striking after all the confidences that you have made in My battle. And yet, throughout this new book, you still evoke memories of childhood.
The memories are always very real to me. I am no longer so interested in my childhood, I wrote and reflected on my father and my mother in My battle, but the memories still stay there. Especially since having children brings back a lot of childhood memories to the fore.
You still write about your parents anyway, especially when you are moved to see how one of your daughters looks like your mother and how you look like your father.
At a certain point, we understand that in the life of our parents, there are circumstances that explain their actions. It allows us to forgive. My father had a very strong presence in my life, from which I had to move away. When i wrote My battle, I wanted to understand it and understand myself. Then I had kids, and I had a hard time envisioning how my presence was going to affect them.
We have known your children and the mother of your children a lot through My battle and in English in the four books written for your fourth child, but now you are divorced and live in London rather than in Sweden, your adopted homeland. Do you see your children often?
Yes, I have a very good relationship with their mother who stayed in Sweden. We have shared custody.
You write that adolescence is a time when you wonder who you are. In My battle, you have often spoken of the androgyny of singers of the 1970s, Davie Bowie for example. What do you think of the current vogue that encourages teens to display their sexual identity and orientation?
For me, it was great to have Bowie as a role model. But I suffered as a teenager for not conforming to the model of manly masculinity that was then prevalent in Norway. When I was little, I loved flowers and I cried easily. My classmates laughed at me because of it, because I was feminine. I spent my youth trying to conform to this masculinity. Then I became a father and had to deal with the impact that a baby had on this masculinity. It is only now that I am comfortable with the fluidity of my masculinity and femininity. So I think it’s great if a teenager can state that they prefer this or that pronoun.
You finish In autumn on a spiritual note: we see the soul of the loved one through his eyes. Earlier you write that forgiveness demeans the person who is forgiven. All this recalls the time of your childhood when you were very Christian, quick to turn the other cheek …
As for forgiveness, honestly I can’t remember what went through my mind, it’s been seven years. But in general, I think that we cannot do without the question of spirituality, of the feeling that there is something that is beyond us in our life, that we cannot apprehend. That’s why my novels, the first I wrote in 20 years, take place in a magical universe. Spirituality is an echo of intimacy. It’s a mystery. I remember an essay on Rembrandt that I read where the author digressed about the passengers in his train compartment. One of the passengers was particularly disgusting. And yet, according to Christianity, he was worth as much as anyone. I think this is a very difficult truth to grasp. It makes me dizzy.
In autumn
Karl Ove Knausgaard
Of Christmas
269 pages