My Struggle: Book 5 (My Struggle #5)

by Karl Ove Knausgård

The house was on a hill, from his backyard there was a view of the fjord, the sky was blue and the wind whispered through the trees on the slope beneath us, as always in the afternoon. They had a cat and he told me about the time she had given birth to kittens. She had been much too small, or there was something else wrong, because one afternoon Ellen had come home and the young mother had killed all her young. There had been nothing short of a bloodbath in the house. Jan Vidar laughed as he told me, I was shaken, I imagined how it must have been, all the squeaking and snarling and crawling on the carpet. The next day I woke to an empty house and caught the bus down to Kristiansand, filled with the old feeling of panic, it was such a fantastic day, not a cloud to be seen anywhere, and I didn’t leave town, I stayed in the hot, narrow streets sweating while everyone else was sailing their boats around the islands, swimming and drinking beer and having a good time. I had never managed that, I had never been invited, and you don’t do that kind of thing on your own. What was a record shop on a baking hot day in Kristiansand? What was the library, who was that sitting there gawping?