My Struggle: Book 1

by Karl Ove Knausgård

I have always had a great need for solitude. I require huge swathes of loneliness and when I do not have it, which has been the case for the last five years, my frustration can sometimes become almost panicked, or aggressive.

I am probably as far from the person I aspire to be as possible.

but I needed something to occupy myself with, so I took one, opened it with my teeth and gulped it down. I lit a cigarette as well. They were my tools; with those in my hands I was equipped and ready to go. A cigarette in the left hand, a bottle of beer in the right. So I stood there lifting them to my mouth, first one, then the other. Cigarette, beer, cigarette, beer.

There was something I had always liked about gliding through the darkness with the dashboard illuminated beside a man who was confident and calm in his movements.

What does laconic mean? she asked, her green eyes looking at me. Every time she did that I almost fell apart. I could smash all the windows around us, knock all the pedestrians to the ground and jump up and down on them until all signs of life were extinguished, so much energy did her eyes fill me with.

Writing is more about destroying than creating.

For nostalgia is not only shameless, it is also treacherous. What does anyone in their twenties really get out of a longing for their childhood years? For their own youth? It’s like an illness.

For us everything has been turned on its head, for us the real is unreal, the unreal real.