My Struggle: Book 4

by Karl Ove Knausgård

But none of the records was an island, there were connections between them that spread outward: Brian Eno, for example, started in Roxy Music, released solo records, produced U2, and worked with Jon Hassell, David Byrne, David Bowie, and Robert Fripp; Robert Fripp played on Bowie’s Scary Monsters; Bowie produced Lou Reed, who came from Velvet Underground, and Iggy Pop, who came from the Stooges, while David Byrne was in Talking Heads, who on their best record, Remain in Light, used the guitarist Adrian Belew, who in turn played on several of Bowie’s records and was his favorite live guitarist for years. But the ramifications and connections didn’t only exist between the records, they extended right into my own life. The music was linked with almost everything I had done, none of the records came without a memory. Everything that had happened in the past five years rose like steam from a cup when I played a record, not in the form of thoughts or reasoning, but as moods, openings, space. Some general, others specific. If my memories were stacked in a heap on the back of my life’s trailer, music was the rope that held them together and kept it, my life, in position. But this wasn’t its most important aspect, which was the music itself.

Half an hour later we were walking up the hill from the flat. I was drunk in that pure joyful way you can be from white wine, when your thoughts collide with one another like bubbles and what emerges when they burst is pleasure. We had been at my place, I thought, and this filled me with pleasure. We were colleagues and on our way to becoming friends, I reflected. And I had written a damn good short story. Pleasure, pleasure, pleasure. And then there was this light, dim down among humans and things human, attended by a kind of finely honed darkness which became diffused in the light though did not possess or control it, only muted or softened it, high up in the sky it was gleamingly clean and clear. Pleasure. And there was this silence. The murmur of the sea, our footsteps on the gravel, the occasional noise coming from somewhere, a door being opened or a shout, all embraced by silence, which seemed to rise from the ground, rise from objects and surround us in a way which I didn’t formulate as primordial, though I sensed it was, for I thought of the silence in Sørbøvåg on summer mornings when I was a child there, the silence above the fjord beneath the immense Lihesten Mountain, half hidden by mist. The silence of the world. It was here, too, as I walked uphill, drunk, with my new friends, and although neither it nor the light we walked in was the main event of the evening it played its part. Pleasure. Eighteen years old and on my way to a party.

We don’t live our lives alone, but that doesn’t mean we see those alongside whom we live our lives. When Dad moved to northern Norway and was no longer physically in front of me with his body and his voice, his temper and his eyes, in a way he disappeared from my life, in the sense that he was reduced to a kind of discomfort I occasionally felt when he called or when something reminded me of him, then a kind of zone within me was activated, and in that zone lay all my feelings for him, but he was not there. Later, in his notebooks, I read about the Christmas when he called from the Canary Islands and the weeks that followed. Here he stands before me as he was, in midlife, and perhaps that is why reading them is so painful for me, he wasn’t only much more than my feelings for him but infinitely more, a complete and living person in the midst of his life.

Then we had to get up and go skiing in the Alps, there was something dreamlike about that, too, for the sky was completely blue, the sun was shining, everywhere we looked white mountains towered in the air, and after a few minutes on the lift, with our skis dangling beneath us, everything was perfectly still. As though we had passed into another state. All that could be heard was the low hum of the lift close to us, otherwise it was completely and utterly still. A sense of jubilation filled me, for the silence was as vast as an ocean, while there was also something painful about it, as there is in all joy. The silence high up in the mountains, surrounded on all sides by beauty, allowed me to see myself or become aware of myself, not in relation to my psyche or my morality, this had nothing to do with my personal qualities, this was all about being here, this body which was ascending, I was here now, I was experiencing this, and then I would die.

The next morning I was stopped by a group of boys standing outside the shop, they asked how I was getting on, fine, I said, did I want to go to a party later that day, they asked, where, I said, it’s no big deal, they said, we’ll just be sitting around drinking up at Edvald’s, come up if you feel like it, no need to bring any booze, we’ve got enough. Leaving them and walking up to my flat, I thought about how open people were here, inviting me to all sorts of events although I was not one of them, and I pondered why. What did they want from a Kristiansander with a black coat, a beret, and progressive musical tastes, why take him in tow in the evening? At home going out demanded planning, lots of obstacles had to be overcome, you didn’t just turn up at someone’s house or sit down at a table in a bar with someone you vaguely knew. Everyone had their own circle, and if you didn’t, you were on the margins. Here there may have been similar circles, but if so they were open. In the few weeks I had lived here the most striking discovery was that everyone was accepted. Not necessarily liked, but always accepted. They didn’t have to wave to me and invite me out, but they did, and not just a few people but everyone. Perhaps the answer was they had to, it was as simple as that. There were so few of them that they couldn’t afford to leave anyone out. Or else it was their attitude to life that was different, rawer, more casual. If you lived your life on a boat deck, if you did hard phy...

Various community centers on the island took turns organizing parties, and at the beginning of March it was Håfjord’s turn. We had pre-drinks in our house, almost all the temporary teachers were there, and after only a few drinks I was floating on air, they made me so happy, these people, and I told them so, too, on the way up to the community center, swinging the bag with the bottle of vodka and the extra pouch of tobacco. What was special about these parties was that they weren’t restricted to or arranged for particular age groups – desperate twenty-year-olds here, resigned forty-year-olds there – no, everyone came to these community center parties. Seventy-year-olds sat at the same table as teenagers, fish-processing workers at the same table as school inspectors, and the fact that they had known one another all their lives did not prevent them from letting their hair down, normal social relationships were set aside, you could see a thirteen-year-old necking with a twenty-year-old, a juiced-up old lady dancing and shaking her dress cancan style while grinning a toothless grin. I loved it, couldn’t help myself, there was a freedom in this I had never encountered anywhere else. Yet you could only love it if you were there, part of the untrammeled euphoria, for with even the tiniest hint of criticism or good taste everything would collapse and become a wild parody or perhaps even a travesty of the human condition. The young men who lit their coffee so it burned with a low ...