My Struggle: Book 5 (My Struggle #5)

by Karl Ove Knausgård

The grass was yellow, the sky gray, and if anything at all glowed it was the brickwork of the buildings, but of rust, the color of perishability and decay. Oh, that filled my soul, this was England; the buildings we saw probably originated from the first period of industrialization, I loved the Empire that had declined but was still proud, and those who grew up in this dismal grayness captivated us all, first the sixties generation, pop, the Beatles and the Kinks, then the seventies heavy rock, all the evil bands from the metalworking towns in the Midlands, filthy rich in their twenties, then punk, in the mountains of uncollected garbage in 1976, then post-punk and goth rock, the enormous seriousness they brought to their music, and then, now, Madchester, raves, colors, and beat. England, I loved England, everything about England. The soccer, what more could you want than a tired old stadium from the beginning of the twentieth century, filled with ten to twelve thousand grim-faced, fiery working-class men, the mist over the heavy muddy field, and tackles so hard they echoed between the advertising billboards? The dark houses with wall-to-wall carpets everywhere, even on the stairs and in pubs.