My Struggle: Book 5 (My Struggle #5)

by Karl Ove Knausgård

I took the lid off the saucepan. Circles of grease had floated to the top, a couple of sausages had already split. I pulled it off the heat and took a pair of wooden tongs from the drawer. The clock on the wall above the window showed it was nearly twelve. Even if the land was leased out and everything that could be called farmwork had ceased many years ago, they still maintained the old mealtimes: breakfast at six, lunch at twelve, tea at five, and supper at nine. Habits that were tied to farmwork. This was how it had been around here for many centuries. And it had been like this for a reason. The fury I occasionally felt as they sat down to eat lunch at twelve sharp was completely unjustified, it was unreasonable to get worked up about this. Yet, somehow, yes, it was reasonable: what sort of life was it getting up at the crack of dawn to sit around all morning, as she did, in a chair, or as in his case, to lie on the sofa, with the radio on so loud that the voices were distorted, what sort of a life was it, living day after day, as though they were waiting for something and while they waited went into the kitchen to eat, then returned to wait and so on and so on? It was deeply entrenched inside them, almost an instinct, any tiny deviation could cause tremors that spread and became, or so it seemed, unbearable, perhaps even life-threatening.