My Struggle: Book 5 (My Struggle #5)

by Karl Ove Knausgård

Otherwise I sat in my seat smoking and drinking coffee, reading newspapers but no books, on the basis that it might affect my prose, that I might lose whatever it was that had got me into the Writing Academy.

It was beautiful, but it was of no use to me, and I walked up through

of low brick terraced houses waiting for the taxi. There was a kind of heaviness in the light summer night, impossible to localize yet unmistakable. An augury of something damp and dark and gloomy.

Usually I read quickly, raced through the pages without taking much notice of how it was written, what devices or style of language the writer used, all I was interested in was the plot, which sucked me in. This time I tried to read slowly, take it sentence by sentence, notice what went on in them, and if it seemed significant to me, to underline the passage with the pen I held at the ready.

Had to say something a writer-to-be might conceivably say that they hadn’t considered before. It didn’t work like that though. They

gloes and raies, evanbillits and conulames, for example, or ibitera, proluffs, and lopsits, whatever they might be, we would have sung their praises

Actually

chosen.

I read it as I had been taught, with a regular rhythm, not stressing individual

words, not stressing anything because it carried meaning, rhythm was paramount, rhythm was everything.

“A nice little story. Concise and pithily told. There’s not much more to say about

it, is there?”

For a few minutes at any rate I had filled his mind with what existed in mine!

It was the same novel that had got me into the course, and there was no development evident in it, I wrote in exactly the same style now as I had done then, the whole year had been wasted, the sole difference was that when they accepted me I thought I was a writer, while now, on the verge of finishing, I knew I wasn’t.

others walking with me, I thought they weren’t like that, only I was, I rose higher and higher, farther and farther, while they stayed where they were. Fucking Media students. Fucking Media brats. Fucking Media theorists. What did they know about life? What did they know about what was really important? Listen to my heart beating. Listen to my heart beating, you dozy fucking little imbeciles. Listen to it beating! Look at me. Look at the strength I’ve got! I could crush every last one of them. And it

their trouser pocket and opened a door to a detached house on the opposite

their used wityh singular

It was of course ironic that such violent types should be here of all places, in a camp where the peace and pacifist flag flew aloft, but it was also typical because in some way or other they were the “alternatives,” they lived half inside, half outside the bounds of society, and it was there the most important part of the seventies’ alternative movement could be found. If you took away their ideology, all that was left was an outsider status and drugs.

for unlocked bikes, sat down on a step and smoked, it would soon be morning, the sun was already shining at the edge of the sky. I went to the telephone booth behind the soccer field and called Ingvild’s

miusread end of the sky inbstead of edge lije ebd better

cat:

Bergen was a tract of land and it wasn’t just rain that fell into it, there was also everything that was thought and done throughout the world that found its way here, to the foundations of this town in whose streets we walked. 808 State released 808:90, the Pixies

“You don’t look soft,” Hans said. “But if you insist, okay. It’s good to have variations on this theme. Tiny unexpected details which make it that much more exciting.

little I said came from the bottom of a deep well, dark and somehow quaking.

We didn’t read any of these to be able to summarize the contents, as we did with the literature on the syllabus, but because they could give us something. What was this “something”? For my part, it was something being opened up. My whole world consisted of entities I took for granted and that were unshakable, like rocks and mountains of the mind. The Holocaust was one such entity, the Age of Enlightenment another. I could account for them, I had a clear image of them, as everyone did, but I had never thought about them, never asked myself what circumstances had made them possible, why they happened when they did, and definitely not whether there was any connection between them.

big concepts like evil, indifference, guilt, collective guilt, individual responsibility, mass man, mass production, mass extinction. In this way the world was relativized, but also more real: lies or misunderstandings or deceit were inherent in notions of reality, not in reality, which was inaccessible to language.

about myself, that I was a mere Zeitblom while he was a Leverkühn, that I was doomed to become a literary critic or a cultural correspondent, he to become what he was: a poet, a writer, an author.

Sometimes I saw what Espen and I did through Yngve’s eyes, then we were transformed into two nerds sitting alone and reading aloud and playing chess and listening to jazz, as far from the social, sociable world of bands and girls and nights out as it was possible to be. Yngve

felt like I was in a fin-de-siècle novel when I was there, the young couple living in a morality different from their own, surrounded by prohibition, denial, nonlife, while we were in the midst of pulsating life, full of repressed desires which occasionally forced their way to the surface. I liked that feeling, it was the most romantic feeling I could imagine.

struck me that you could find rest in the prose, the way you can rest under a tree or in a chair in the garden, and that had a value in itself. Why

The sheerness and verticality of spruces, the frugality and loftiness of pines, the paleness and greed of birches and the aspen, the trembling of aspens as the wind whistles up the mountainside!

No, the composure he possessed I didn’t have in me, and the self-assurance and serenity, which all great prose writers had, I couldn’t even achieve as a pastiche. Such was my experience of reading Naipaul, like reading almost all the other good writers, enjoyment and jealousy, happiness and despair, in equal portions. But it took my mind off the institution

it was as though they had reached their final age, I thought, as I caught the bus back up to Jan Vidar’s, and from now on they wouldn’t be a day older. I had no connection with Kristiansand,

have