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And the book’s blunt, unforced telling brings the larger project’s meaning into sudden, brilliant focus. He sneaks off for a cigarette and writing time. He changes diapers, makes meatballs, desultorily enforces some discipline and does a harrowing amount of laundry. Instead, over the course of one day, we watch Knausgaard care for the children and home, his wife mysteriously absent. “Spring” refuses contrivance it refuses to parry.

“Spring” features Knausgaard unbound, writing for the first time without a gimmick or the crutch of extravagant experimentation, the endurance test of “My Struggle” or the staccato essays of his previous books on the seasons. “The opposite of parrying is creating, making, adding something that wasn’t there before. And that the moments of happiness in life all have to do with the opposite,” he writes to her. “I am 46 years old and that is my insight, that life is made up of events that have to be parried. The new series is addressed to Knausgaard’s youngest child. The books are all sunlight and unfettered sentimentality. Gone is the claustrophobia, the scouring self-scrutiny, the glacial creep of “My Struggle.” “Autumn” and “Winter” were full of quick sketches of the material world, prose poems on buttons and badgers, apples and faces. On the face of it, Knausgaard’s new project - a series of books inspired by the seasons (the final one, “Summer,” will be published later this year) - has been a departure. “I married the world’s most indiscreet man,” Bostrom Knausgaard said in an interview in 2015. The books are so lavish with family secrets, they seem not shameless so much as an attempt to annihilate the very concept of shame itself.

Their fights could have been scripted by Bergman. In his six-volume autobiographical novel, “My Struggle,” Knausgaard documents their stormy marriage in pitiless detail: her rages, his resentments, their ecstasies of mutual recrimination. Those would prove to be the good old days. The first time they kissed, he fainted dead away. The first time she turned him down, he sliced his face to ribbons with a piece of broken glass. The first time Karl Ove Knausgaard saw Linda Bostrom, the Swedish writer he would later marry, he dropped everything he was holding.