My Struggle: Book 6

by Karl Ove Knausgård

“It always looks a lot worse than it is,” I said to Geir. He was standing in the doorway now, looking like he was about to ask for another job. “I find the impression of mess and the mess itself to be quite congruent,”

were. “You’ve got no chaos inside you at all, so you need some outside instead. I’m the opposite, chaos on the inside and a need for tidiness on the outside. Only I fall short on the last part.” “You recreate your chaos, I recreate order. We’re as much geometry as we are psychology.”

The TV was from the eighties, only a very nostalgic thief would want to run off with it.

“Are you going to start whistling now?” I asked. “What do you mean?” he said. “Your body language is so cheerful.” “It’s a nice day. The sun’s out and I’m on my holidays. Of course I’m cheerful! Not even a misery guts like you can alter that.” He started whistling.

The house was silent when he got there, he went in, his uncle’s wife lay dead on the floor of the kitchen, her face twisted almost beyond recognition, her eyes bulging, the blood had run from her ears and nose.

Where were the children? Had I forgotten them? Were they at home in the apartment? No. I’d dropped them off at the nursery. Or was that yesterday?

this is the wecond time he’s done this. i hope it’s not freddy foreshadowing

“Leave your bike here, we’re going inside the church now,” said Geir. “I want to take it with me,” said Njaal. “It’s not allowed, you little terror. No bikes in God’s house.” “No balance bikes, anyway. Pedals would have been different.” “What?” Njaal looked up at me. “Karl Ove’s only joking,” said Geir. “Leave your bike and come here!”

“No, the minuteness of it. It’s so incredibly small. A tiny little ejaculation in a huge mass of snow. Sex is completely out of proportion, we give it so much space and attach so much meaning to it, but in actual fact it’s nothing. Totally verging on zero.”

the best parts are karl and geir just bullshitting arund

“I may be a fool, but I’m not an idiot!” he said in English. “We’re talking about the way it is. Not the way we want it to be. You want life to be big and meaningful. Noble, even. Sorry. It is small and lonely. It’s never going to be better than that orgasm in the snow. Sex and death, that’s all there is.” “Then why do you even bother talking to me, if that’s the case? Shouldn’t you be at home jerking off? Or sticking your head in a bucket and putting a gun in your mouth?”

“What do you know? I often jerk off when I’m talking to you.”

excellent

A writer such as Marcel Proust would be unthinkable without Impressionism, since his entire work is built around the relationship between recollection and oblivion, light and shade, visible and invisible, and the compelling feeling the world, especially the sunken world, yet also the prevailing world of the present, awakens in him, is shaped, if not brought into being, by the eye of the Impressionist.

Regrettably, their radicalism has completely disappeared from our cultural consciousness, now all that remains are the fine colors and the flowers, a fate Proust avoided, his own fine colors and flowers existing in words, and he could certainly never be suspected of appropriating beauty by copying an appealing motif, which incidentally would be one possible definition of kitsch.

I picked up my coffee cup and handed it to him. It had stains all over it, mostly spots but streaks too, the way my coffee cups always did for some reason, I had no idea why. Other people’s coffee cups tended to be shiny and untarnished on the outside. I supposed it was because I held my lips in a certain way that allowed coffee to dribble between them and the cup, but while I didn’t understand how this could be the case, I was unable to do anything about it; no matter how hard I pressed the cup to my lower lip, there were stains all over it by the time I was finished.

that. I agree with Karen Blixen when she says you can’t go chasing the Holy Grail with a baby carriage. You can’t have both. There’s only one kind of masculinity. You’re either more of a man or less. That’s fucking it. There’s no such thing as masculinities in the plural. Oh, how I despise that word. It makes me want to throw up.

It was what sort of signals a novel by Anne Karin Elstad sent out compared to a novel by Kerstin Ekman, and how both of these related to a collection of poetry by Lars Mikael Raattamaa, for instance. The reason why reading Peter Englund was a bit more exclusive than reading Bill Bryson, albeit not by much. The reasons why one could no longer express fascination and enthusiasm about Salman Rushdie without seeming culturally adrift, left behind in the late eighties, while V. S. Naipaul was still accepted.

One of the three parking spaces at the top end of Brogatan, by the back entrance to our building, happened to be free as we drew up, this was hardly ever the case and I said to Geir we were in luck.

expressions of frequency lend credibility to someone’s long term residency?

munching what was left of my apple. Usually I ate them whole, core, stalk, the lot, and had done so ever since I was a boy, and there was something about that, to do with the slightly bitter taste of the stalk and the seeds, and the stringy consistency of the core, that for some reason always reminded me of childhood, as if the deviance of that action, for that was how I perceived it, as a rather deviant thing to do, opened up new spaces of experience compared to the norm, which was the taste of the white, succulent flesh of the fruit. These spaces were not large expanses, more like tiny stabs of the past prickling the consciousness, the feeling of fingers passing over the surface of a dark blue down jacket on the road outside the house in the dim light of morning, or the rain as it began to fall on a Sunday morning, patches of snow still left here and there at the roadside,

see, people who eat apple cores are freaks

And Christina was in many ways like me, someone who endured and stuck things out, a person who pleased others, at the same time, like me, being essentially solipsistic or solitary, she could have been the last person on earth and been quite happy with that.

Another thing I sensed she was reacting to was that I allowed Geir to influence me to such an extent that his opinions became my opinions, that to a degree he was brainwashing me, and that the distance that had opened up between Linda and me, which was due to my frustration, was a part of that. Geir was whispering in my ear about my life and her role in it, and before long it would make me leave her. I didn’t know if this really was what she was thinking, or whether it was my own paranoia that had led me to such ideas, but there was no way to find out because there was no way we could talk about it other than when our arguments were coming to a head, at such a point she once yelled at me that she couldn’t understand why I didn’t just move in with Geir seeing as how I spent the whole time on the phone with him,

bromance

I felt I should get up and put my hand on her shoulder, but I knew she would react as if it were something alien and just leave it there to show me how removed she was from me, and not, as she normally would have done, since such signs of affection had become so infrequent and would always come as a surprise to her, return the gesture.

patted my back pocket to make sure I had my wallet with my cards in it, then my front pocket, feeling its lumpy nest of keys,

She was hardly ever like that in social situations and had been confident right from the start, but often in what was almost the opposite situation, the more intimate context, when the attention of a single person was directed toward her. With Vanja the opposite was true, she liked attention from one person and would even go looking for it, whereas in new social situations she would be shy and withdraw.

Shyness is a protective mechanism, and the interesting thing was that they were protecting different aspects of themselves. Did those aspects need protecting because they were particularly fragile or because they were particularly precious?

I entered my PIN, which was no longer 0000, but nearly as easy to remember, since it consisted of the four figures in the top right corner of the key pad, 2536,

The light changed to green and we ambled over the road in a little throng of pedestrians.

might have said so, though.” “We’re here to spend time with you. We could have boiled onion and it wouldn’t make any difference. For goodness’ sake, man.”

Two people in the other lane looked across at us. I didn’t care for this, and turned away so all they could see was my back. We were speaking Norwegian, that must have been it. Unless they happened to think we were a pair of gay men out with our surrogate child. Or our niece. Weren’t gay men often close to their nieces? “Thank you,” said the assistant. Why on earth would they think that? It was enough me looking like an idiot, with the beard and the long hair. I looked like a has-been heavy-metal musician rapidly heading for his fiftieth birthday. Oh, the fleshy face, the chubby cheeks, the deep furrows, and that wispy beard.

I picked up the basket and kept hold of it in my hand as step-by-step we progressed slowly toward the till; there was no way in the world I was going to end up the sort of person who shoved their basket over the floor with their foot while they flicked through a newspaper they had no intention of buying, putting it back

“Can I have a bag as well, please?” I said. Would he say it was OK and dismiss the extra cost with a wave of his hand, or would he enter the amount and make me get my card out again? “That’ll be two kronor,” he said. You little shit. Fuck you. I did my shopping there every single day.

With Linda it was different, if I heard her coming I would grip the door handle and press it upward in case she tried to press it down and come in.

I took the pizza box out and put it on the counter, switched the oven on, found the scissors in the drawer, tore off the long strip along the side of the box, tipped it so the pizza itself, round and surprisingly heavy, slid out into my hand, snipped open the see-through plastic it was wrapped in, which was stiff and had a kind of crinkly crispness about it, nothing like the see-through plastic of the bags we bought our fruit in, which were looser in some way, or the thin cling film for wrapping food up before putting it in the fridge.

after three years their habits were nearly as familiar to me as my own. I assumed they looked at me in the same way; at any rate, our eyes occasionally met and we always looked away. Such visual encounters were strange, our entering fleetingly into each other’s minds in that way, they into mine, certainly, they meant we somehow knew each other, balancing continually between seeing and knowing on the one hand, and looking away and not wanting to know on the other.

“I remember crying when I read about Julius Caesar. His death. I always did whenever I read biographies. Because of course they all die.

“A glass of wine while we’re waiting?”

oh my god this dinner is like 80 pages

Whenever I saw a real work of art or read real literature, all this was brutally shoved aside, for there was another dimension to being human, something quite different, of a different quality, dignity, and significance, it was what had inspired medieval man to build such enormous cathedrals against whose magnificence they became what they actually were: lowly, insignificant, and inconsiderable beings. Tiny little farts of life, one could say. Yet they had built them! They were creators of astonishing, otherworldly beauty, but they were farts too.

return. It is because the heart is a bird that flutters in the chest, it is because the lungs are two seals through which our air smoothly passes, it is because the hand is a crab and the hair a haystack, the arteries rivers, the nerves lightning. It is because the teeth are a stone wall and the eyes apples, the ears mussels, and the ribs a gate. It is because it is always dark inside the brain, and still. It is because we are earth. It is because we are blood. It is because we must die.

Death is what the human sphere borders, the absence of language is what our human world borders, and it is against its darkness that we and the world shine.

Laughter is counterrevolutionary and anti-utopian: he who laughs at everything laughs also at the dictatorship of the proletariat, and if everyone laughs at the revolutionary there will be no revolution.

The Idiot is the opposite of Don Quixote and Madame Bovary. The Idiot is an anti-comedy.

Dostoevsky cherishes simplicity. His novels are hugely complex and chaotic, a tumult of characters and voices, not a quiet moment in one of them, quite without the slow and sleepily hypnotic passages, the lazy days of summer in which little or nothing happens, that occur in Proust, for instance;

In that respect she managed what few people can, which was to erase the discrepancies between what was new and what was old, between what was expensive and what was cheap, by looking away from those properties and looking instead at the inherent properties of each item, each accessory. Labels didn’t exist for her; brand didn’t come into it when I thought about her clothes.

If Njaal wore anything from H&M, it never stood out as H&M but was absorbed by other, independently selected and subtly coordinated items.

I was a writer, I made a living out of making things up,

They were settling on the containers, and on the blanket again. They crawled on my shoes, shorts, and T-shirt. It was creepy. Ladybugs were among the most appealing of insects. So delicate and flowerlike in their beauty, they were the very antithesis of the monstrous. Mosquitoes could occur in huge swarms and be everywhere, there was nothing unnatural about that, but with ladybugs there was something ominous about it, as if something had gone wrong, as if something that ought to have been closed had been opened, and as I looked out over the sound, where the gigantic structure of the Öresund Bridge rose up disconcertingly near us to the south and the contours of the Barsebäck nuclear power plant were visible to the north, the blue sky above the glittering blue sea teeming with tiny black dots I knew to be ladybugs, I thought to myself: this is how the world ends.

I could not call him by any other name. So I solved the problem by not using his name at all. Neither his first name nor his surname appears in the novel. In the novel he is a man without a name.

he talks abouvt The Novel as if the first 5 are separate

Instead of saying “that little crybaby with the buck teeth” they said “Karl Ove.”

it simply as an experiment in realism that would reach only a very small number of interested readers and be hurled against the wall out of sheer boredom and frustration by anyone else who might venture into its pages.

The inauthentic life of Emma Bovary, the ruthless ambition of Lucien Sorel, the loss of meaning felt by Hamlet, the ideological unyieldingness of Brand. The Austrian writer Ingeborg Bachmann points out in an essay how the literature of our own time strikingly comprises no such names. Don DeLillo is one of the best novelists of our time, yet how many recall even a single name among his many characters? Bachmann writes that Thomas Mann was the last great conjurer of names:

In no other work of the bourgeois period does the name play so great a part as in Proust’s In Search of Lost Time.

while Proust was working on In Search of Lost Time, in Paris, Kafka was writing his novels and stories in Prague, and in them the name has changed radically;