My Struggle: Book 5 (My Struggle #5)

by Karl Ove Knausgård

But the world is constructed in such a way that it meets you halfway in moments precisely like these, your inner joy seeks an outer counterpart and finds it, it always does, even in the bleakest regions of the world, for nothing is as relative as beauty.

we extol the world and love it although it’s not necessary, the world is the world, it’s all we have.

I had no idea what else she did, apart from what Mom told me. There were only two generations between us, yet I knew nothing of how she had spent her life, not really, not essentially, I knew nothing of her relationship with objects and animals, life and death. When Grandma and I looked at each other it was from either side of a chasm.

I was scared of myself, not in some make-believe way, not to make myself interesting, but in reality, scared of what I might do. If I could try to destroy my brother anything was possible. If I’d had a knife would I have stabbed him? I also talked about my grandmother, the dignity she possessed in all the misery in which she was trapped.

When I was with her it was as though something was being drawn out of me. The darkness became lighter, the crippled straighter, and the strange thing was that it didn’t come from outside, it wasn’t that she lit the darkness, no, it was something that happened inside me because I saw myself with her eyes, and not just my own, and in her eyes there was nothing wrong with me, quite the contrary. In this way the balance shifted. When I was with Gunvor I no longer wished to do myself any harm.

What was consciousness other than the cone of light from a torch in the middle of a dark forest?

cried. Not because of death and its coldness but life and its warmth. I cried because of the goodness that existed. I cried because of the light in the mist, I cried because of the living people in the dead man’s house, and I thought, I can’t waste my life.

This was a man who had once had the strength and magnetism of a king. There was nothing left of him. And now, now that everything was over, he turned to me. Only now could he say I looked smart. But I was twenty-eight, not eight, I no longer needed this, and I no longer needed him.

I wanted Dad’s life to be seen in that perspective, not the close-up, not the man children feared and who later drank himself to death but the broad view, a human who was born on earth, pure and innocent, as all are at birth, and who lived a life as all humans do and died his death.