My Struggle: Book 5 (My Struggle #5)

by Karl Ove Knausgård

I put it in a bag and went down the spiral staircase and into the toilet. A picture by Raphael stood out at once, two women in front of a well, one naked, the other dressed, the naked one was strikingly beautiful, she was looking enigmatically to the side, her small breasts were pert, a strip of cloth covered her nether region, but her thighs were visible and I got a hard-on, I flipped through, stared at a picture by Rubens, The Rape of the Daughters of Leucippus (1618), one of the two naked women was the red-haired, pale freckly type with a small chin and a full body, then there was Botticelli’s The Birth of Venus (1485), where one breast was bared, and Titian’s Venus of Urbino (1538), in which the woman in the foreground had one hand resting between her legs while she gazed straight at the observer with a provocative, self-assured expression on her face. I studied her naked breasts for a long time, her broad hips and small feet, but there was more to see of course, and I went on to Bartholomeus Spranger’s Vulcan and Maia (1585), in which the woman, with her hands on a strong bearded man, thrusts her hips forward with a lustful glint in her eye. Her breasts were supple, her skin was all white, her face almost childish. She was good. The next was Delacroix’s The Death of Sardanapalus (1827), the woman in the foreground had her back to us, one breast was revealed, thrust right forward, because she had a sword to her throat, and the whole of her bottom was visible, perfectly...