My Struggle: Book 4

by Karl Ove Knausgård

All the books I liked were basically about the same topic. White Niggers by Ingvar Ambjørnsen, Beatles and Lead by Lars Saabye Christensen, Jack by Alf Lundell, On the Road by Jack Kerouac, Last Exit to Brooklyn by Hubert Selby, Jr., Novel with Cocaine by M. Ageyev, Colossus by Finn Alnæs, Lasso Round the Moon by Agnar Mykle, The History of Bestiality trilogy by Jens Bjørneboe, Gentlemen by Klas Östergren, Icarus by Axel Jensen, The Catcher in the Rye by J. D. Salinger, Humlehjertene by Ola Bauer, and Post Office by Charles Bukowski. Books about young men who struggled to fit in to society, who wanted more from life than routines, more from life than a family, basically, young men who hated middle-class values and sought freedom. They traveled, they got drunk, they read, and they dreamed about their life’s great passion or writing the great novel. Everything they wanted I wanted, too.

I hated all authority, was an opponent of the whole limited society I had grown up in, with its bourgeois values and materialistic view of humanity. I despised what I had learned at gymnas, even about literature; all I needed to know, all true knowledge, the only really essential knowledge, was to be found in the books I read and the music I listened to. I wasn’t interested in money or status symbols; I knew that the essential value in life lay elsewhere. I didn’t want to study, had no wish to receive an education at a conventional institution like a university, I wanted to travel down through Europe, sleep on beaches, in cheap hotels, or with friends I made on the way. Take odd jobs to survive, wash dishes at hotels, load or unload boats, pick oranges …

And, as for me, I was on my way to a first flat of my own. There I would have my own job and earn my own money. For the very first time I had control of all the elements in my life. Oh, how incredibly good it felt!

Not a person, not a house, was to be seen. But I hadn’t come here to meet new people; I had come to find the peace I needed to write. The thought sent a flash of pleasure through me. I was on my way, I was on my way.

It was a good feeling going back into my flat. It was the first place I’d ever been able to call mine, and I enjoyed even the most trivial activities, like hanging up my jacket or putting the milk in the fridge.

How could I explain that to Hilde? And although I, like her, always tried to see beneath the surface, on the basis of a fundamental yet unstated tenet that what lay beneath was the truth or the reality, and, like her, always sought meaning, even if it were only to be found in an acknowledgment of meaninglessness, it was actually on the glittering and alluring surface that I wanted to live, and the chalice of meaninglessness I wanted to drain – in short I was attracted by all the town’s discos and nightspots, where I wanted nothing more than to drink myself senseless and stagger around chasing girls I could fuck, or at least make out with. How could I explain that to Hilde?

I couldn’t, and I didn’t. Instead I opened a new subdivision in my life. “Booze and hopes of fornication” it was called, and it was right next to “insight and sincerity,” separated only by a minor garden-fence-like change of personality.

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.

I never worked out what it was that possessed me when music possessed me, other than that I always wanted it. Furthermore, it made me someone, of course. Thanks to music I became someone who was at the forefront, someone you had to admire, not as much as you had to admire those who made the music, admittedly, but as a listener I was in the vanguard. Up here in the north probably no one would see that, as hardly anyone in Kristiansand had been aware of it, but there were circles where it was seen and appreciated. And that was where I was heading.

The pre-party, as they called it here, excluded discussion. Issues regarding politics, women, music, or football were not on the agenda. What they did was tell stories. One story gave way to the next, laughter billowed across the table, and the tales they came up with, they being the trolls they were, all had their origins in the village and the people who lived there, which despite its modest proportions appeared to be an inexhaustible treasure trove of stories.

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,

There were trees everywhere, these beautiful green creations that you never really paid much attention to, just walked past; you registered them but they made no great impression on you in the way that dogs or cats did, but they were actually, if you lent the matter some thought, present in a far more breathtaking and sweeping way.

Outside it was dark, autumn was wrapping its hand around the world, and I loved it. The darkness, the rain, the sudden cracks in the past that opened when the smell of damp grass and soil rose up at me from a ditch somewhere or when car headlights illuminated a house, all somehow caught and enhanced by the music in the Walkman I always carried with me. I listened to This Mortal Coil and thought about when we used to play in the dark in Tybakken, a feeling of happiness grew in me, but not a happiness of the bright, weightless, carefree kind, this happiness was rooted in something else, and when it met the melancholic beauty of the music and the world that was dying around me, it was like sorrow, beautiful sorrow, romantic sorrow, beauty and pain in one impossible mix, and from there sprang a wild longing to live more. To leave this, to find life where it was really lived, in the streets of cities, beneath skyscrapers, at glittering parties with beautiful people in unfamiliar apartments. To find the one great love and all the restlessness that involved, and then the acceptance, the relief, the ecstasy.

I lowered my gaze and continued reading. Not many seconds passed before all words other than the ones Bjørneboe had written were gone from my mind. Thank goodness.

I had decided ages ago that I would not continue my education after school, what we learned was just nonsense, basically what life was about was living, and living in the way you want, in other words, enjoying your life. Some enjoyed their lives best by working, others by not working. Okay, I was aware that I would need money, which meant that I would also have to work, but not all the time and not on something that would deplete all my energy and eat into my soul, leaving me like one of the middle-aged half-wits who guarded their hedges and peered across at their neighbors to see if their status

While I washed my hands I stared at my reflection in the mirror. 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.