My Struggle: Book 5 (My Struggle #5)

by Karl Ove Knausgård

She was different, something else, and the odd thing was that I also became different and something else when thinking about her. I liked myself better when I thought about her. It was as though thinking about her erased something in me, and that gave me a fresh start or moved me on.

The farmhouse looked the way it must have when Grandma worked here, in the 1920s and ’30s. Yes, everything looked more or less the same as it did then. Yet everything was different. It was August 1988, I was an ’80s person, contemporaneous with Duran Duran and the Cure, not that fiddle and accordion music Grandpa listened to in the days when he trudged up the hill in the dusk with a friend to court Grandma and her sisters. I didn’t belong here, with all of my heart I felt that. It didn’t help that I knew the forest was actually an ’80s forest and the mountains actually ’80s mountains.

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.

Our spirits rose after a few beers, all that lay between us during the day, the silences that could develop from nowhere, the irritation that could set in, the sudden inability to find areas of common interest, even though there were so many, all of that vanished as our spirits soared and we felt the concomitant warmth: we looked at each other and knew who we were.

I sat down on the sofa, strangely restless, it was as though the tempo inside me was greater than that outside. I

She was a living person who existed in the world with her own way of perceiving it, her own memories and experiences, she had her mother and father, her sister and her friends, the countryside she had grown up and walked in, all this resided within her, this immense complexity that is another person and of which we see so little when we are with them, yet it is enough to like them, to love them, for it takes nothing for this to happen, two serious eyes that suddenly beam with happiness, two playful teasing eyes that suddenly become unsure or introspective, that falter, a person faltering, is there anything more beautiful than that? With all their inner richness, yet faltering all the same? You see it, you fall in love with it, and it is not much, perhaps you will say it is not much, but the heart is always right.

When, shortly afterward, I stopped at the top of the hill and saw the town beneath me, my feeling of happiness was so ecstatic that I didn’t know how I would be able to make it home, sit there and write, eat, or sleep. 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. Had the world been different, in my opinion, without mountains and oceans, plains and seas, deserts and forests, and consisted of something else, inconceivable to us, as we don’t know anything other than this, we would also have found it beautiful. A world with gloes and raies, evanbillits and conulames, for example, or ibitera, proluffs, and lopsits, whatever they might be, we would have sung their praises because that is the way we are, we extol the world and love it although it’s not necessary, the world is the world, it’s all we have. So as I walked down the steps toward the town center on this Wednesday at the end of August I had a place in my heart for everything I beheld. A slab of stone worn smooth in a flight of steps: fantastic. A swaybacked roof side by side with an austere perpendicular brick building: so beautiful. A limp hot-dog wrapper on a drain grille, which the wind lifts a couple of meters and then drops again, this time on the pavement flecked with white stepped-on chewing gum: incredible...

In the autumn and winter Bergen was like a bowl, it lay still and took whatever came its way; in the spring and summer it was as though the mountains folded back, like the petals of a flower, and the town burst forth in its own right, humming and quivering.

That I might control my future and try to make it turn out the way I wanted was completely beyond my horizon. Everything was of the moment, I took everything as it came and acted on the basis of premises I didn’t even know myself, and without realizing this is what I did.

My whole world consisted of entities I took for granted and which 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. As soon as I started to read Horkheimer and Adorno’s book Dialectic of Enlightenment, of which I understood very little, something opened, in that things which could be viewed in one way could also be viewed in another, words lost their force, there was no such thing as the Holocaust, for what the term indicated was so incredibly complicated, right down to the comb in the pocket of the jacket in the pile of jackets in the warehouse, it had belonged to a little girl, the whole of her life exists in the term “the Holocaust,” and up again to the 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.

what were thoughts worth? What was consciousness other than the surface of the soul’s ocean? Other than small, brightly colored boats, floating plastic bottles, and driftwood, waves and currents,

I had never imagined that happiness could hurt so much.

All that usually drew my eyes in his direction, for our entire life together, everything he had done, been, and said, that which made up “Dad” and was immanent in him, or in my view of him, whatever his appearance, all that was suddenly gone. He looked like a drunk who had put on a suit. He looked like an alcoholic his family had picked up, cleaned up, and taken along.

I had dreaded this, the worst moment was when I closed my eyes and lay there without being able to see anything in the house, it was as if all my terrible thoughts, finally liberated, launched themselves at me, tonight as well, as I sank slowly, sort of dangled into sleep, not unlike a hook on the end of a line, I caught myself thinking, which the weight drags down, then darkness fell and I disappeared from the world.

I was the son of the man who had ruined everything.

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.

this was not the end of the world, actually it was the world.

“Who’s that?” Yngve said, nodding discreetly in the direction of a woman. She wore a hat with a veil that concealed her face. “No idea,” I said. “But all self-respecting funerals have a woman no one recognizes.” We laughed. “Well, the danger’s over now,” Yngve said, and we both laughed again.

the trivial incidents that make up all lives and can suddenly shine bright in the dusk of meaninglessness: the door goes, she comes home, bends over and takes off her shoes, looks at me and smiles, her face is magical and childlike. She pours paint from a five-liter can into a small receptacle, climbs up on a chair and starts painting the molding over the window, wearing a workman’s overalls stained with paint. She snuggles up to me on the sofa, we watch a film, tears run down her cheeks, I laugh at her and she laughs through her tears. There are thousands of such moments, lost the second they occur, yet still present because they are what form a relationship, the particular way we stayed together, which was the same as everyone’s, though different, it was her and me, no one else, it was us, we dealt with everything that came at us as well as we could, but the darkness in me thickened, the joy in me evaporated, I no longer knew what I wanted or what to do, only that I was standing still, I was stuck, this was how it felt, as though I wasn’t formed on the inside, it was only a mold shaped by everything on the outside.

I was the kind to endure. No one had said you couldn’t become a better person through endurance.