My Struggle: Book 4

by Karl Ove Knausgård

The silence was not oppressive, it was open.

Seems like the perfect Knausgaardian state of being: "open silence." Heh.

But one thing did emerge from these pages with greater force than anything else, and that was the description of a book, Ulysses, which in its singularity sounded absolutely fantastic. Before me I saw an enormous tower, glinting with moisture as it were, surrounded by mist and a pallid light from the overcast sun. It was regarded as the major work of modernism, by which I imagined low-slung racing cars, pilots with leather helmets and jackets, zeppelins floating above skyscrapers in glittering but dark metropolises, computers, electronic music. Names such as Hermann Broch, Robert Musil, Arnold Schönberg. Elements of earlier, long-gone cultures were assimilated into this world, in my mind’s eye, such as Broch’s Virgil and Joyce’s Ulysses.

Knausgaard on the big ones ...

She was wearing jeans, a blue denim jacket, and, beneath it, a white lace blouse. She was chubby, her breasts under the blouse were full and her hips broad. Her hair was blond, shoulder-length, her skin pale with some freckles around her nose. Eyes large, blue, and teasing. Standing next to her in the hall, smelling the fragrance of her perfume, which was also full, as she passed me her jacket – there were no hooks in the hall – with a slightly searching look, I got another boner.

Knausgaard's deacriptions are decidedly differentiated when writing about women -- not the case with men!

Then it was as though the pressure inside me was ratcheted up, although there was no particular place that hurt, everything was painful, and the pain grew and grew, it was unbearable, and then my stomach muscles went into a spasm. I swallowed, dragged myself to my feet, and tried to hold it back as I stumbled toward the bathroom, the pressure mounting and mounting, that was all that existed, and then I snatched at the toilet seat, flung it up, knelt down, wrapped my arms around the bowl, and spewed a cascade of yellow and green vomit into the water with such force that it splashed back into my face, but it didn’t matter, nothing mattered anymore, it was so wonderful to feel the relief, so fantastically wonderful.

Knausgaardian hang over vomit.

The following spring I went to the carnival with Jan Vidar, Mom had made me up as Bowie’s Aladdin Sane, the town was heaving with people wearing curly black wigs, hot pants, and sequins, everywhere there was the throb of samba drums, but the air was cold, people were stiff, there was a huge amount of embarrassment to be overcome all the time, and this was visible in the processions, people were squirming rather than dancing, they wanted to feel emancipated, that was what this was about, they were not, they wanted to be, this was the 1980s, this was the new liberated and forward-looking era in which everything Norwegian was pathetic and everything Mediterranean was alive and free, when the sole TV channel which had informed the Norwegian population for twenty years about what one small circle of educated people in Oslo considered important for them to know was suddenly joined by new, very different TV channels that took a lighter approach, they wanted to entertain, and they wanted to sell, and from then on these two entities fused: entertainment and sales became two sides of the same coin and subsumed everything else, which also became entertainment and sales, from music to politics, literature, news, health, in fact everything. The carnival marked this transition, a nation moving away from the seriousness of the ’70s to the levity of the ’90s, and this transition was visible in the awkward movements, in the nervous eyes and the wild triumphant looks of those who had overco...

Great passage on Scandinavian identity.

I would be as good to him as I could possibly be, I decided. Regardless of what he did, I would be a good son.

Oh, the muted lights in buses at night and the muted sounds. The few passengers, all in their own worlds. The countryside gliding past in the darkness. The drone of the engine. Sitting there and thinking about the best that you know, that which is dearest to your heart, wanting only to be there, out of this world, in transit from one place to another, isn’t it only then you are really present in this world? Isn’t it only then you really experience the world?

Everything hurts, but nothing is as good. Oh, this is the song about being sixteen years old and sitting on a bus and thinking about her, the one, not knowing that feelings will slowly, slowly, weaken and fade, that life, that which is now so vast and so all-embracing, will inexorably dwindle and shrink until it is a manageable entity that doesn’t hurt so much, but nor is it as good.

Schopenhauer

Among the items Dad left behind were three notebooks and one diary. For three years he wrote down the names of everyone he met during the day, everyone he phoned, all the times he slept with Unni, and how much he drank. Now and then there was a brief report, mostly there wasn’t.

Finally, some revelation on the dad.

I understand why he noted down the names of everyone he met and spoke to in the course of a day, why he registered all the quarrels and all the reconciliations, but I don’t understand why he documented how much he drank. It is as if he was logging his own demise.

We drove past Kokkeplassen, Mom’s old workplace, where I had been at a nursery for a year, and I craned my neck, there had been a cliff there, we had climbed up a tree over the cliff every day, I seemed to remember. But it wasn’t a cliff, it was just a little slope, I could see now. And the tree must have been chopped down.

Again, what is the status of memory, if all is memory in My Struggle?

I stamped my foot down hard at every step, the area was full of adders, at least it had been when I was growing up. Once Dad and I had encountered one only a few hundred meters from where I was walking now, it was spring, the snake had been stretched out on a stone slab in the sun. I must have been about ten. Dad went crazy, started throwing stones at it, I watched as they seemed to sink into the snake’s body as they struck, the adder tried to get away, it was hit again and again until it lay still beneath a pile of stones. But as we were about to walk on, out it wriggled again. Dad went closer, continuing to throw stones at it, he wanted me to do the same, I was on the point of throwing up, the snake was still now, Dad ventured closer and crushed its head with the big rock he was holding in his hand.

Dad kills the adder.

One problem was her devotion to me, it placed me in a superior position, which I didn’t want. Yet I was inferior to her, indeed as low as anyone can be, that was where I was for the weeks that became months because what I was slowly realizing, the terrible truth that my relationship with her had revealed, was that I couldn’t make love to anyone. I couldn’t do it. A naked breast or a hurried caress across the inside of a thigh was enough, I came long before anything had begun.

Machinations of Knausgaardian love.

Dad started undressing. I turned away. I had never seen him undress, I had never been in the same room as him before when he was doing something so intimate. Sitting on the bench, he folded his trousers, rolled his socks in a ball, and undid his shirt. I felt myself getting hot and flustered, didn’t know where to look or what to do with myself, because now he was taking off his underpants and for a few seconds he was completely naked. I had never seen him naked before, and a shudder went through me as I cast my eyes over him.

Naked before one's dad.

Of all the days Dad described in his notebooks this is the only one I have a clear memory of, presumably because I saw him naked for the first and only time in my life. In the notebook he wrote: Friday 6 March With K.O. and Fredrik in the swimming pool. Nice to swim again. Home for fondue and slides of China. Talk after. Too much to drink. Scenes. Unni fed up – broke clock. Shame.

Heartbreaking note from dad's journal.

And it was the real me when I was with her. It was also the real me when I was with Hilde. It was also the real me when I got drunk with Espen or any of the others at school. I was the real me, but the real mes were irreconcilable.

The Me's. They will be merged.

I loved being drunk. I came closer to the person I really was and dared to do what I really wanted to do. There were no limits.

The theme of book 4.

I wanted to steal, drink, smoke hash, and experiment with other drugs – cocaine, amphetamines, mescaline – to get high and live the great rock-and-roll lifestyle, to feel to the last drop of my blood that I couldn’t give a flying fuck about anything. Oh, what appeal there was in that! But then there was all the rest of me inside that wanted to be a serious student, a decent son, a good person. If only I could blow that to smithereens!

The theme of book 4, elaborated.

For what happened was that the person I usually was began to draw in the person I became when I was drinking, the two halves slowly but surely became sewn together, and the thread that joined them was shame.

Me's are merging.

The singular feeling that arose when you looked at your own eyes, which so purely and unambiguously expressed your inner state, of being both inside and outside, filled me to the hilt for a few intense seconds, but was forgotten the moment I left the room, in the same way that a towel on a hook or a bar of soap in the small hollow in the sink also were, all these trivialities that have no existence beyond the moment, but hang or lie undisturbed in dark, empty rooms until the door is opened the next time and another person grasps the soap, dries his hands on the towel, and examines his soul in the mirror.

the little intensities.