Knausgaard once claimed he needed at least 300 pages to state even the simplest truth, but this book is told in a series of short bursts — 60 essays, each no more than three pages long, each considering a single object or phenomenon.

Image Credit... Sonny Figueroa/The New York Times

This is the opposite of escapist reading. Knausgaard plunges you into the material world, not just with his choice of subjects — apples, adders, tin cans, faces — but in the telling. He narrates and philosophizes as he empties the dishwasher, boils macaroni, combs lice from a child’s hair. A whole entry is sparked when a daughter loses a tooth and gives it to him — it’s not her first, and thus has no drama for her anymore. Knausgaard is left holding it and wondering why we stop marveling at loose teeth, why we stop marveling at the world. This becomes the central preoccupation of the book: to restore our sense of awe, to render the world again strange and full of magic, from loose teeth to rubber boots to hardened pieces of chewing gum (“which with their grey color, hemispherical shape and many little indentations resemble shrunken brains”).

There are misfires (the toilet bowl, he rhapsodizes, is the “swan of the bath chamber”) but fewer than you’d expect. Simone Weil wrote that “attention, taken to its highest degree, is the same thing as prayer” — and so it is here. Loose teeth, chewing gum, it all becomes noble, almost holy, under Knausgaard’s patient, admiring gaze. The world feels repainted.

The subjects seem, at first, like a motley mix of the pedestrian, the sacred and profane. But a pattern emerges. Most of the entries deal with the threshold of where the body ends and the world begins. Knausgaard considers buttons, and what it means that every day we use them to ritually lock ourselves off from the world. Flies excite his imagination because they’re covered in taste buds: “When everything they brush against is also tasted, it must seem still less clear to them what is them and what is the world.” In a way so it is with infants, he writes earlier in the book, who “don’t observe the world, don’t contemplate the world, but are so deeply immersed in the world that they don’t distinguish between it and their own selves.”