My Struggle: Book 5 (My Struggle #5)

by Karl Ove Knausgård

worshippers in Jølster, where she came from, a kind of ancient heathendom they had clad in the language and rites of Christianity. Look at Astrup’s pictures, he would say, all the fires they lit on Midsummer Eve, that’s Jølster folk for you, they dance around the flames as though they were their gods. Kjartan would laugh when he said such things, and it was not without disdain, yet there was always some ambivalence because Kjartan had a lot of her in him: the serious attitude to life and the deep sense of duty were in Kjartan, too, and if she worshipped and cultivated the soil, Kjartan worshipped and cultivated nature, the presence of the universe in the form of birds and animals, mountains and skies. He would deny that any such connection existed between him and his mother, after all he was a communist, an atheist, a ship’s pipefitter. However, all you had to do was look them in the eye to banish any lingering doubts. They had the same brown eyes, the same wary gaze. Now there was nothing left of her life, disease had consumed her, eaten up her body, leaving only shaking and fits. It was hard to believe when I saw her sitting there asleep with her mouth agape that her strong will, which couldn’t even rule her body now, and her strict morality, which she was no longer able to express, could have left such a deep mark on her children. But it had.