My Struggle: Book 5 (My Struggle #5)

by Karl Ove Knausgård

She didn’t object when I said I was going to be away for two months, she said nothing when I went out at night and came home plastered at five in the morning, and she never threatened to leave me, even though I had been depressed for two years and obviously hated myself. How could that be? It wasn’t the whole picture. I was good for her, too, she needed me, and we had a good life together in Bergen, both when we were alone and when we were together with others, the circle of family and friends around us, so if I was filled with inner despair, it had nothing to do with life as it unfolded around me, with 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...