My Struggle: Book 6

by Karl Ove Knausgård

An elderly man, full of years, potters about in his garden

Everyone’s life contained a horizon, the horizon of death, and it lay somewhere between the second and third generations before us, and the second and third generations after us. We, and those we lived with and loved, existed between those two lines. Outside were the others, the dead and the unborn. There, life was a chasm without us.

So a couple of weeks earlier I’d shaved it off. When I showed up at the nursery the next day, Ola, the only other person there of my age, father of Benjamin, Vanja’s current best friend, and a head of faculty at Malmö’s university, had stared at me and asked if there was something different. Hadn’t I had some facial hair or something? He was being funny, not referring to it as a beard,

I looked unusually good, I thought to myself, there was something about the beard and the sunglasses that made me seem … well, so masculine. And with John on my arm to complete the picture, I looked like … well, dammit, yes, like a dad.

I piled up a plate with macaroni and meatballs, Sweden’s national dish, cut a tomato into bite-sized wedges, squirted some ketchup over it all, and sat down.

It was one of the purest works of modernism I had read, certainly from that part of modernism that had been interested in the classical age, such as Ezra Pound’s The Cantos, Hermann Broch’s The Death of Virgil, and James Joyce’s Ulysses, or, for that matter, Paal Brekke’s Roerne fra Itaka – The Oarsmen of Ithaca. Like

But the woman interviewing me had noticed I had it with me and made a little aside of it. “Knausgaard reads Gombrowicz,” a caption said. It haunted me for years after. I was contacted several times by newspapers and journals wanting me to write something about the Polish author for their pages. I, who had read only the first ten pages of his diary, and none of his novels or plays, was now thought to be a Gombrowicz expert.

I had to keep pretending to him that I was a Gombrowicz aficionado.

Ketchup land was something they had heard about at the nursery, so I assumed, not really wanting to know since it filled me with such a sense of unpleasantness, ketchup being red, red being blood, blood being dead.

right away it would be a while before I could fall asleep. I was nervous about the next day, the round of interviews that lay ahead, but not for the old reason, the way it normally was, the horror of having to talk and take up space, and be quoted on everything I said, the horror of making a fool of myself; this time I was scared about what I had written.

The next morning his reply was in my in-box. Your fucking struggle, said the subject line. I stood up without reading it and went out onto the balcony, sat there smoking and looking out over the city, cold and despairing.

the way I can criticize things that I haven’t thought of myself; preferring the role of someone who reads Adorno rather than actually reading Adorno. Mediocrity combined with poor self-awareness and big ambitions doesn’t come out very well.

there, at some point between the madman’s own particular and therefore uncommunicated ramblings, meaningless to everyone but the madman himself, who found them fascinatingly relevant, and the genre novel’s fixed formulations and clichés, which had become clichés by being familiar to everyone, was the domain of literature. The highest ideal for any writer was to write a text that worked on all levels at the same time.

The old saxophone player whose spot was by a pillar only a few meters from the entrance to our building, where the flow of people crossing the square was greatest, began to play. He always played the same thing, a minute-long fragment of some tune, presumably on the assumption that his audience was always new. That a man seven floors up had to listen to every note, not just day after day, but month after month, was something that almost certainly didn’t occur to him.

The little card reader came abruptly to life and ejected a slow ribbon of paper from its innards.

And reading that e-mail made me realize where all this is coming from. You’re not the only lunatic in the family. You’re all like that. Your dad, your uncle, you.”

It was like somehow existing on different levels, all of which had suddenly become active at the same time. One that was absorbed in the letter from Gunnar and an almost savage feeling of despair. One that was thinking about what to have for dinner, and that steered the shopping cart around the store accordingly. One that regretted having treated Heidi the way I had before. One that was annoyed by Vanja’s behavior. One that was sad to see her obey, because maybe it meant I was strangling her spirit. One that was pleased she did as she was told.

I think Ernst Billgren got it right when he was asked to comment on having appeared in Den högsta kasten. He said he was aware there was a character in the book with the same name as him. In my case, I can’t see it that way, what you’ve written about is too close to home for that, but the point is that he indicates an escape route that’s open to any person in a novel. There’s a character in that book who’s got the same name as me.”

“In which case you’d be letting an accountant in Kristiansand decide the path of Norwegian literature. You can’t do that, can you?”

“The question is by what right. The right of literature? That means I’m saying literature is more important than the life of the individual. And not only that, I’m saying my literature is more important than his life.”

The unattainable for me was closely bound up with the person who had written it. Thomas Bernhard, for instance, what he wrote and achieved was completely out of my reach. Jon Fosse the same. But not a writer like Jonathan Franzen. Him I could match, and probably even surpass. The same was true of Coetzee, he also was a writer who lacked the distinctive aspect of personality that could take his writing that final stretch of the way;

For me the fairy tale was a kind of literary archetype, or rather a primordial force of literature itself, since on the surface everything was about transformation, including the world’s own transformation into fairy tale, and at the same time this transformation involved a kind of simplification, reality contracting into a small number of figures that were so precise and so perfectly honed after having been through so many differently shaped experiences that their truth surpassed any individual experience of the circumstances, this was the same for everyone, and when these different figures were set into motion, the depths in each and every listener opened, and those depths were bottomless.

“The end,” I said when we finished the last page. “Sleep time now.”

But then that was me through and through, so I understood, because in the next sentence he was warning the publisher against me and my deceitful nature, manifested in the way I sat, hunched forward, and the way I held my head, always with my face turned away from whomever I was talking to, with a cheerless, scowling expression, eyes full of guilt and brooding speculation. They should not allow themselves to be fooled. What I stood for was not goodness and truth, despite the impression I tried to give, what I stood for was in fact the opposite. I was a notorious liar, I was a quisling, I

thats interesting because he doesnt in fact present himself as the hero throughout the story, he’s very insecure and worried about his appearance instead. so what did gunnar miss?

If the publisher did not halt this project he would take legal action. In order to avoid such a step, he wished to put forward a proposal. I had written so lavishly about angels in my previous novel, as my uncle Kjartan had about crows. The publisher ought therefore to suggest to me that I write a book about devils. They were on a level with which I was familiar. And in that I could make use of the literary talent I had inherited from my father.

But what about the staircase leading up to the living room? I had no recollection at all. I must have exaggerated. Unreliable, again.

autobiographical. In contrast to my own prose, which constantly leaned toward the emotional and evocative, Handke’s prose was dry and unsentimental. When I started writing I’d been trying to achieve a similar style, if not dry, then raw, in the sense of unrefined, direct, without metaphors or other linguistic decoration. The latter would give beauty to the language, and in a description of reality, especially the reality I was trying to describe, that would be deceitful. Beauty is a problem in that it imparts a kind of hope. As a stylistic device in literature, a particular filter through which the world is viewed, beauty lends hope to the hopeless, worth to the worthless, meaning to the meaningless. This is inevitably so. Loneliness beautifully described raises the soul to great heights. But then the writing is no longer true because there is no beauty in loneliness, not even in yearning is there beauty. But while it may not be true, it is good. It is a comfort, a solace, and perhaps that is where some of literature’s justification lies? But if that’s the case, then we are talking about literature as something else, something unto itself and autonomous, valuable in its own right rather than as a depiction of reality.

mercy. From a literary perspective, mercy lay in beauty, which is to say in the beautiful sentence, and in the creative manifestation, the fictionalization, the secret alliance of events that crisscrossed any novel, because this crisscrossing in itself was an affirmation of meaning and cohesion.

But I saw life too, in its pure, blind form, something that simply existed and was growing. The energy and the beauty of that. Death was indeed nothing, a mere absence. But just as blind life on the one hand could be viewed as a force, something sacred and – well, why not – divine, and on the other hand as something meaningless and empty, death too could be seen in that same way, its song too could be sung, it too could be infused with meaning and beauty. This was what made German National Socialism so infinitely significant to us, a mere two generations having passed since the Nazis were in power, and under their reign of terror, modern in every respect, all three of these perspectives prevailed at once:

He was an influence, my thoughts were increasingly similar to his,

“Isn’t that what they call plagiarism?” I said, feeling a warmth rise to my cheeks. He looked at me for a second. “No, it’s what’s called freedom. It’s because you’re made in such a way that you’re writing a novel, whereas I’m writing nonfiction. I’ve been destroyed by academia. It makes me check and double-check everything I do. I can’t write a sentence without adding a footnote with a reference. I’m tied down. You’re without bonds entirely.” “You’re reliable, I’m not.” “All right, no need to be harsh on yourself. What you’re doing works!” “I suppose you’re going to tell me it was you who came up with the My Struggle title as well?” “Well, now that you mention it.” “Seriously?” “It was in a sentence you said, my struggle, and I said there you go, there’s your title. That’s how it was.” “Shit.” “It’s how you work. Your head’s this simmering pot, everything goes into the soup.”

“Pappa, inte,” said Vanja. Don’t, Daddy! “Are you ashamed of me?” “No, you’re just stupid.”

to call a novel unoriginal is one of the worst things a reviewer can say about it.

Only in fiction is there any expectation of a unique “I,” whose greatest and most important constraint is not to imitate, not to copy anyone else or say what they’ve said, at least not in the same way. The more distinctive a writer is, the greater he or she is perceived to be. Many

Why write?

First of all it is to lose oneself, or one’s self. In

All the journalists I meet, even those twenty years younger than me, are my betters, and I always do what I can not to bore them, I often say things I don’t even mean simply in order to present them with something.

You’ve got absolutely no insight into yourself. Hasn’t it ever occurred to you that it’s the others who are boring? That it’s the others who are unoriginal and haven’t a thought, that they’re the ones who are imitative and full of platitudes? No,

While meeting Geir gave me a viewpoint on myself and a space in which it could be articulated, in other words remoteness, which was invaluable, meeting Linda gave me the opposite, in that encounter all remoteness was dissolved, I became closer to her than I had ever been to any other person in my life, and in that closeness there was no use for words, no use for analysis, no use for thoughts, because when all is said and done, which is another way of saying in life, when it presents itself in all its intensity, when you’re there, at the center of it all, with your entire being, the only thing that matters is feeling. Geir gave me the chance to look at life and understand it, Linda gave me the chance to live

It was this same ideology, hostile to all difference, that could not accept categories of male and female, he and she. Since han and hun are denotative of gender, it was suggested a new pronoun, hen, be used to cover both. The ideal human being was a gender-neutral hen whose foremost task in life was to avoid oppressing any religion or culture by preferring their own.

The ability to talk about matters great and small in a personal way without ever getting personal, which Swedes master to perfection, is something at which I am utterly inept; either I blurt out something so private that people look down or become ill at ease, or else I go on about something so remote from myself that everyone else quite naturally is bored to death.

I put it down on the table, lit another cigarette with the stub of the first, leaned back in the chair, and let out a sigh. “Another one of your east-European sighs,” said Geir.

How small they are, I thought to myself, staring at them for a moment before closing my eyes and drifting into sleep, the night inside us that seems so vast and boundless when we are within it yet can never be greater than ourselves.

Happily, the children didn’t seem to be bothered. Conceptions of inner and outer chaos were not yet relevant to them, they approached the world as an unproblematic place most of the time, which was probably right, I thought to myself now. The material world was neutral, we wove our inner psychological landscapes into it, coloring it with our conceptions until it couldn’t help but be messy.

I took another slurp of coffee, wiped my mouth with the back of my hand, stood up, pressed an index finger against one nostril, and with a swift, forceful exhalation expelled a glob of mucus from the other out over the balcony. “You do your morning ablutions al fresco, I see,” said Geir.

“Engineer all of a sudden, are we?” he said, leaning back and putting the cup to his lips. “I’m an engineer of the soul,” I said.

“That’s the smuggest thing I’ve heard anyone say in ages,” he said, and closed his eyes completely after taking a slurp. He opened them again and looked at me as he put his cup down on the table. “I’d say garbageman of the soul would be more accurate.” “Refuse disposal officer, if you don’t mind,” I said. “You know they call the garbage room in the basement here the Milieu Room, don’t you? That makes ‘milieu manager of the soul’ the most correct title.” “Milieu consultant of the soul.”

Socks were always at the bottom, they percolated down through the layers, as if consciously seeking the ground,

It was a Red Delicious, most likely genetically modified, for the white flesh never went brown in the air the way the apples of my childhood always did, and they never seemed to rot, either. It was scary and went radically against all my conceptions of right and wrong.

In the afternoons the place came alive with customers dragging the new wheelie baskets along behind them. It was one of the saddest sights I knew, all semblance of human dignity evaporated the moment a person went with that of all options. The feeble, characterless action of trundling instead of carrying. The fussy little wheels, the long black handle, the basket that followed on behind like a small dog. The clatter of the wheels was earsplitting from the moment one became aware of it. The very thought deflated me.