A Death in the Family (My Struggle #1)

by Karl Ove Knausgård

They had been together a long time. But the way she had looked at me, the closeness that had sprung up out of the blue, that could not be insignificant, could it? It had to mean something. There was an interest there, a desire in her for me. There had to be. On Monday, on Monday, then I would see her again. But what the hell was I to do until then? That was almost ONE WHOLE day!

To be honest, I was not sure that she was actually attracted to me, it might simply have been that she was flattered by all the attention she was receiving and found it entertaining.

When I got home to my flat I interpreted everything she said and did in the course of a school day, and that either sent me into the deepest vale of misery or up onto the highest peak of elation – there was nothing in between.

It was a fantastic feeling, but it left me restless because the most important thing in it was the longing for what was going to be, and not what I did or had done. How to burn up all that was inside me now?

Could I do this to her? Could I have this effect on her? Could I have this effect on anyone? No. For Hanne, I was a nobody and would remain so. For me, she was everything.

I thought of Hanne. It was as if she had a place inside me. As if she existed as a real location where I would always be.

You know too little and it doesn’t exist. You know too much and it doesn’t exist. Writing is drawing the essence of what we know out of the shadows. That is what writing is about. Not what happens there, not what actions are played out there, but the there itself. There, that is writing’s location and aim. But how to get there?

Chaos is a kind of gravity, and the rhythm you can sense in history, of the rise and fall of civilisations, is perhaps caused by this. It is remarkable that the extremes resemble each other, in one sense at any rate, for in both immense chaos and in a strictly regulated, demarcated world the individual is nothing, life is everything. In the same way that the heart does not care which life it beats for, the city does not care who fulfils its various functions.

For several years I had tried to write about my father, but had got nowhere, probably because the subject was too close to my life, and thus not so easy to force into another form, which of course is a prerequisite for literature. That is its sole law: everything has to submit to form. If any of literature’s other elements are stronger than form, such as style, plot, theme, if any of these take control over form, the result is poor. That is why writers with a strong style often write poor books. That is also why writers with strong themes so often write poor books. Strong themes and styles have to be broken down before literature can come into being. It is this breaking down that is called ‘writing’. Writing is more about destroying than creating.

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,

‘I love you,’ she said. ‘I love you too,’ I said. As always when I said this, I wondered if it was actually true. Then the feeling passed. Of course I did, of course I loved her.