My Struggle: Book 4

by Karl Ove Knausgård

We finished our wine and went for a look round. I lost sight of Bjørn fairly soon and cruised around on my own. By the door to the big hall, on a sudden impulse, I looked in. What’s going on in here? I asked a small bald man with glasses. It’s a conference, he answered. Who for? I said. Biologists, he said. Okay, I said. Interesting! He withdrew, I went in, people were gathered around the small tables, but far fewer than earlier in the week. On one of them lay a little green and white card. I went over and inspected it. It was a name tag. I pinned it to my lapel and walked toward the big door. It opened onto a conference hall, rows of seats in a wide, gradually ascending semicircle around a speaker’s podium. A man was talking below. Stills were being shown on a screen behind him. The room was slightly more than half full. I walked down past a few rows, entered one, people stood up just as in the cinema, and I sat down, crossed my legs, and concentrated on the speaker. Now, I said to myself in a low voice. Imagine that. Fascinating! After twenty minutes, during which I spent as much time looking at the other people in the audience as the speaker, whose grating microphone voice filled the whole auditorium and hung like a constant annoying thought in the background, I got up and went back to the disco.