A Death in the Family (My Struggle #1)

by Karl Ove Knausgård

When we were growing up, I chatted all the time with Yngve and we never had any secrets, but at some juncture, perhaps as early as when I was at gymnas, this changed: from then on I was immensely conscious of who he was and who I was when we were talking, all spontaneity vanished, every statement I made was either planned in advance or analysed retrospectively, mostly both,

I couldn’t sit and chat to people any more, my awareness of the situation was too acute, and that put me outside it.

Often it felt to me as if I were false, or deceitful, since I never played with an open deck, I was always calculating and evaluating. This didn’t bother me any more, it had become my life, but right now, at the outset of a long car journey, now that dad was dead and so on, I experienced a yearning to escape from myself or at least the part that guarded me so assiduously.

he never tried to get close to them, by which I mean he didn’t make them compensate for something in himself, or in his life.

on our side, right on the edge was a box of Kleenex. Practical no doubt, but how cynical it seemed! Seeing it, you visualised all the bereaved relatives who had come here and wept in the course of the day and you realised that your grief was not unique, not even exceptional, and hence not particularly precious. The box of Kleenex was a sign that here weeping and death had undergone inflation.

As a rule I was always aware of how I looked, of how others might think of what they saw, sometimes I was elated and proud, at others downcast and full of self-hatred, but never indifferent, it had never happened that the eyes that saw me meant nothing at all, or that the surroundings I was in were as if expunged. But such was my state now, I was numb, and the numbness prevailed over everything else. The world lay like a shadow around me.

He had imprinted his image of himself in me so firmly that I never saw anything else, even when the person he became diverged so widely from the person he had been, both in terms of physiognomy and character, that any similarities were barely visible any longer, it was always the person he had been with whom I engaged.

If I had been able to, I would have fallen to my knees, clasped my hands and cried to God, shouted, but I couldn’t, there was no mercy in this, the worst had already happened, it was over.

When I was twenty-four I had a flash of insight: that this was in fact my life, this is exactly what it looked like and presumably always would. That one’s studies, this fabled and much-talked-about period in a life, on which one always looked back with pleasure, were for me no more than a series of dismal, lonely and imperfect days.

I could endure any amount of loneliness and humiliation, I was a bottomless pit, just bring it on, there were days when I could think, I receive, I am a well, I am the well of the failed, the wretched, the pitiful, the pathetic, the embarrassing, the cheerless and the ignominious. Come on! Piss on me! Shit on me too if you wish! I receive! I endure! I am endurance itself!

he pulled me up into the world of advanced literature, where you wrote essays about a line of Dante, where nothing could be made complex enough, where art dealt with the supreme, not in a high-flown sense because it was the modernist canon with which we were engaged, but in the sense of the ungraspable, which was best illustrated by Blanchot’s description of Orpheus’ gaze, the night of the night, the negation of the negation, which of course was some way above the trivial, and in many ways wretched, lives we lived, but what I also learned was that our ludicrously inconsequential lives, in which we could not attain anything of what we wanted, nothing, in which everything was beyond our abilities and power, had a part in this world, and thus also in the supreme, for books existed, you only had to read them, no one but myself could exclude me from them. You just had to reach up.

Modernist literature with all its vast apparatus was an instrument, a form of perception, and once absorbed, the insights it brought could be rejected without its essence being lost, even the form endured, and it could then be applied to your own life, your own fascinations, which could then suddenly appear in a completely new and significant light.

while poems by Ekelöf, Björling, Pound, Mallarmé, Rilke, Trakl, Ashberry, Mandelstam, Lunden, Thomsen and Hauge floated around, on which I never spent more than a few minutes, I read them as prose, like a book by MacLean or Bagley, and learned nothing, understood nothing, but just having contact with them, having their books in the bookcase, led to a shifting of consciousness, just knowing they existed was an enrichment, and if they didn’t furnish me with insights I became all the richer for intuitions and feelings.

what enriched me while reading Adorno, for example, lay not in what I read but the perception of myself while I was reading. I was someone who read Adorno! And in this heavy, intricate, detailed, precise language whose aim was to elevate thought ever higher, and where every full stop was set like a mountaineer’s cleat, there was something else, this particular approach to the mood of reality, the shadow of these sentences, which could evoke in me a vague desire to use the language with this particular mood on something real, on something living.

for thoughts, whatever good one can say about them, have a great weakness, namely, that they are dependent on a certain distance for effect.

Compared to their heavy gloom I felt like a lightweight, a dilettante who had no understanding of anything, just drifted across the surface, watched football, knew the names of a few philosophers and liked pop music of the simplest variety.

If I suggested that we should hold the funeral here, which I was pretty certain he would say was impossible, the difference between us, which I did not want to be visible, would become obvious. He would be the realistic, practical person; I would be the idealistic, emotion-driven one.

Now I had burned all the diaries and notes I had written, there was barely a trace left of the person I was until I turned twenty-five, and rightly so; no good ever came of that phase.

The sole difference, which is the difference between a child’s reality and an adult’s, was that they were no longer laden with meaning. A pair of Le Coq football boots was just a pair of football boots. If I felt anything when I held a pair in my hands now it was only a hangover from my childhood, nothing else, nothing in itself. The same with the sea, the same with the rocks, the same with the taste of salt that could fill your summer days to saturation, now it was just salt, end of story. The world was the same, yet it wasn’t, for its meaning had been displaced, and was still being displaced, approaching closer and closer to meaninglessness.

All the windows and the doors in the house were open, and that, the movement of air inside plus the sunlight falling over the floors and the overpowering smell of detergent on at least the first floor, allowed the house to open up, as it were, and become a place the world flooded through, which, deep in my emotional gloom, I noticed and liked.

And to me, what had dad been to me? Someone I wished dead. So why all these tears?

Lutefisk lunches with friends, well, that wasn’t a world I inhabited. Not because I couldn’t force down lutefisk but because I wasn’t invited to that kind of gathering. Why not, I had no idea. I didn’t care any more, anyway. But there had been days when I had cared, days when I had been on the outside and had suffered. Now I was only on the outside.

One of the things Tonje liked best about me, I suspected, was that I was so fascinated by precisely that, by all the contexts and potential of various relationships, she wasn’t used to that, she never speculated along those lines, so when I opened her eyes to what I saw she was always interested. I had this from my mother, right from the time I went to school I used to carry on long conversations with her about people we had met or known, what they had said, why they might have said it, where they came from, who their parents were, what kind of house they lived in, all woven into questions to do with politics, ethics, morality, psychology and philosophy, and this conversation, which continued to this day, had given my gaze a direction, I always saw what happened between people and tried to explain it, and for a long time I also believed I was good at reading others, but I was not, wherever I turned I only saw myself,

for sights like this were not exceptional; on the contrary, hardly a day passed without the sky being filled with fantastic cloud formations, each and every one illuminated in unique never-to-be-repeated ways, and since what you see every day is what you never see, we lived our lives under the constantly changing sky without sparing it a glance or a thought. And why indeed should we? If the various formations had had some meaning, if, for example, there had been concealed signs and messages for us which it was important we decode correctly, unceasing attention to what was happening would have been inescapable and understandable. But this was not the case of course, the various cloud shapes and hues meant nothing, what they looked like at any given juncture was based on chance, so if there was anything the clouds betokened it was meaninglessness in its purest and most perfect form.

all the images, voices and actions that drinking alcohol conjured up at the drop of a hat gave me the illusion that I was somewhere surrounded by a lot of people and merriment. I knew it wasn’t true, but that was how it felt,

I loved it, I loved the feeling, it was my favourite feeling, but it never led to anything good, and the day after, or the days after, it was as closely associated with boundless excess as with stupidity, which I hated with a passion. But when I was in that state, the future did not exist, nor the past, only the moment, and that was why I wanted to be in it so much, for my world, in all its unbearable banality, was radiant.

This was how Giotto painted people. They never seemed to be aware that they were being watched. Giotto was the only painter to depict the aura of vulnerability this gave them.

Actually the thought of smoking was repugnant, as it always was the day after drinking because the smoke, not so much the taste or smell as what it stood for, created a connection between the present day and the previous one, a kind of sensory bridge across which all kinds of things streamed so that everything around me, the greyish-black tarmac, the light grey kerbstones, the grey sky, the birds flying beneath it, the black windows in the rows of houses, the red car we were standing beside, Yngve’s distracted figure, were permeated by terrifying internal images; at the same time there was something in the sense of destruction and desolation that the smoke in my lungs gave me that I needed, or wanted.

as tears flowed down my cheeks without cease, for dad, who had grown up here, he was dead. Or perhaps that was not why I was crying, perhaps it was for quite different reasons, perhaps it was all the grief and misery I had accumulated over the last fifteen years which had now been released. It didn’t matter, nothing mattered, I just walked around the garden cutting the grass that had grown too tall.

the sight of familiar places evoked nothing in me, and perhaps I was seeing them for the first time as they actually were, meaningless, devoid of atmosphere.

I had been away for a number of years now, and ever since I arrived I had noticed how the stream of impressions the place left me with was partly tied to the first world of memories, partly to the second, and thus existed in three separate time zones at once.

The first time I realised what I was writing really was something, not just me wanting to be someone, or pretending to be, was when I wrote a passage about dad and started crying while I was writing.

My father was an idiot, I wanted nothing to do with him, and it cost me nothing to keep well away from him. It wasn’t a question of keeping away from something, it was a question of the something not existing; nothing about him touched me. That was how it had been, but then I had sat down to write, and the tears poured forth.

But there was more. I had also wanted to show him that I was better than he was. That I was bigger than he was.

The day always came with more than mere light. However frayed your emotions, it was impossible to be wholly unaffected by the day’s new beginnings.

my dreams he was sometimes dead, sometimes alive, sometimes in the present, sometimes in the past. It was as if he had completely taken me over, as if he controlled everything inside me, and when at last I awoke, at around eight o’clock, my first thought was it had been a nocturnal visitation, the second that I had to see him again.

For humans are merely one form among many, which the world produces over and over again, not only in everything that lives but also in everything that does not live, drawn in sand, stone and water. And death, which I have always regarded as the greatest dimension of life, dark, compelling, was no more than a pipe that springs a leak, a branch that cracks in the wind, a jacket that slips off a clothes hanger and falls to the floor.