My Struggle: Book 4

by Karl Ove Knausgård

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 ...