My Struggle: Book 5 (My Struggle #5)

by Karl Ove Knausgård

When Grandma and I looked at each other it was from either side of a chasm. For her, family was the central point in her life, in other words, her family, the one that came from the farm where she grew up, and then her children. I had the impression that Grandpa’s family, which had moved inland from the islands a generation earlier, was not important. Her family was the center of her existence, and the soil. Kjartan would sometimes say that the soil was her religion, that they were soil 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.