My Struggle: Book 6

by Karl Ove Knausgård

a hand, putting the plates on the counter next to Marie, who began to rinse them in the sink. She was pushing sixty but came across a lot younger, the way so many writers do; only now and then, in the briefest of glimpses, did her true age become visible in her face. The impression of the face and the face itself are two different things, interwoven, a bit like those drawings that look like one thing if you look at the shading and another if you look at the other parts, perhaps, apart from the fact that a face is so much more complex. Not only does it change from hour to hour depending on the moods that ebb and flow behind and all around it, but also from year to year depending on the kind of relationship you have to it. My mother’s face, for instance, appears mostly unchanged to me, what I see is “Mom,” the way she has always been, but then she can turn her head slightly in a certain way and all of a sudden, like a shock, I see that she has become elderly now, a woman approaching seventy with perhaps no more than ten years left to live. Then she can turn again and say something, and once more all I see is “Mom.”

Love the description of “two faces”

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. That was why a figure like Hamlet could be so important. He was a work of fiction, someone had made him up, given him thoughts and actions and a space in which to act, but the point was that fiction was no longer a valid dividing line, a valid distinction, the moment one stepped beyond the horizon of death. Hamlet was neither more nor less living than the historical figures who had once occupied the earth; in a certain sense anyone from then was fictional. Or, since Hamlet was made of words and ideas, the others of flesh and bone, was it only he and his life form that could overcome time and mortality?

Horizon of death great analysis of Hamlet

The English word vapor is the same one as was used of the darkened mind, and the space that opens out there, between the mind’s and the world’s darkening, appears like an abyss.

Nietzsche

I thought about Heidi and smiled. She invariably wanted to be carried. If it was up to her she would never walk a single step. She had always been like that, right from the start. I was so close to her then, after she was born. Vanja was jealous and claimed Linda’s attention as much as she could, while I carried Heidi around until she was eighteen months and John came along. It stopped then, our closeness to each other. Every now and again I felt a twinge of sadness about it. But that was how kids were, everything came in phases, and phases came to an end. Before long they would be grown up, and the children they used to be, whom I had loved, would be gone. Even seeing photos of them from as recently as a year before could make me feel sadness at the fact that the children they were then no longer existed. But mostly they took up so much of our lives now and whirled up our days with such intensity there was no room left for such feelings. It was all here and now with them.

Accurate about parenting

A sudden movement in the upper corner of my eye caused me to look up. It was a leaf falling to the ground. Or rather, not falling at all. It was twirling, round and round, like the rotor blades of a helicopter, descending gently through the air.

Minute attention to detail

Why had I written such things? I had been so despairing. It was as if I had been shut away inside myself, alone with my frustration, a dark and monstrous demon, which at some point had grown enormous, as if there was no way out. Ever-decreasing circles. Greater and greater darkness. Not the existential kind of darkness that was all about life and death, overarching happiness or overarching grief, but the smaller kind, the shadow on the soul, the ordinary man’s private little hell, so inconsequential as to barely deserve mention, while at the same time engulfing everything.

Dante’s Inferno

And that was what my entire childhood was like inside me – a thick garland of memories, one on top of another. To write was simultaneously to retrieve them from my mind and put them into words, and as long as this retrieval went from the inside to semioutside, by which I mean the words as they came to me in the process of writing, there was no problem, but what the novel as a form required was that my recollections be moved one place further still, to the unfamiliar reader. Relevance was a matter of communication, establishing community out of what was one’s own, and the

I really like this condensed definition of writing

Instead I sat and stared at Heidi as she bombed around on her bike, John, who had climbed up next to Karin and now sat gazing up at the roof, Vanja, whose legs were now almost buried in sand, a stiff smile on my face to indicate how great I thought it was having children. I stood up and went over to Vanja. “Time to go home,” I said. “No buts.” “But I’ve got no legs!” she said. “Look!” “Is there a shark in this sand?” I said. “No,” she said. “I was born like this.” “All right, but it’s still time to go.” “Why?” “Because.”

This is such an perfectly understated and yet hilariously true picture of fatherhood! I found Vanya to be so amazing throughout KOK's books

And writing was such a fragile thing. It wasn’t hard to write well, but it was hard to make writing that was alive, writing that could pry open the world and draw it together in one and the same movement. When it didn’t work, which it never really did, not really, I would

Yes, this is my daily struggle: to write something that will pry open the world. So well put.

“How are you feeling?” “I haven’t jumped off the balcony yet. I take it all out on the kids instead.” “You’re not the type to commit suicide,” he said. “Your method’s to stick your head in the sand.” “True,” I said. “But the most fascinating thing about the ostrich isn’t that at all. I saw this documentary about them once. They’re huge and really strong, and with the claws they have they can be lethal, so do you know what the farmers do to get close to them?” “Put a sack over the ostrich’s head?” “Well, once they get that far, yeah, they go completely still. But before that. Before they go up to them and put the sack on.” “No, what?” “They hold a stick up above their own heads. A broom handle, whatever. As soon as the ostrich sees something taller than itself it won’t attack. Its brain is that tiny. Ha ha ha!” “Ha ha ha!” “It’s got three rules it lives by. If a broom handle comes along that’s taller than me, I stand still. If I’m threatened, I stick my head in the sand. If someone puts a sack over my head, the world disappears and I no longer exist.” “Those are your rules you’re talking about.” “Why do you think I mention it? Still fascinating, though, don’t you think? The ostrich is such an ancient creature. It doesn’t need a bigger brain, it’s looked after itself perfectly well all this time.” “You can keep your fascinations to yourself.” “It’s the same with crocodiles and sharks. They’re so ancient. They behave quite mechanically, there’s no improvisation, no element of...

KOK’s primitivism

I had thought about none of this while I had been writing, neither the manufacture of reality, representation, nor my father’s integrity, everything took place intuitively, I began with a blank page and a will to write, and ended up with the novel as it was. In that there lies a belief in the intuitive that is as good as blind, and from that basis a poetics might be derived, and an ontology too, I suppose, since for me the novel provides a means of thinking radically different from that of the essay, the article, or the thesis, because reflection in the novel is not hierarchically superior as a pathway to understanding, but coordinate with all the other elements in it. The room in which it is conceived is as important as the thought itself. The snow falling through the darkness outside, the headlights of the cars gliding past on the other side of the river. This was perhaps the most important thing I learned at university, that practically anything at all can be said about a novel or a poem, and what is said may be as likely as it is plausible, but never exhaustive, perhaps not even important, since the novel and the poem are always entities in their own right, singular and existing as they are, and the fact that what the novel or the poem says cannot be said in any other way makes them essentially mysterious. The world is mysterious in exactly the same way, and yet we tend to forget this all the time, always giving precedence to reflection whenever we look at it. What doe...

Death doesn’t finish anything. Faulkner: “The past isn’t dead. It isn’t even past”

This section reminds me of Dostoevsky’s Grand Inquisitor and the fake trial he gives a returning Jesus

The ripple effect of such cases, the impact on the individual and the next of kin, is ignored or briefly referred to as something external. Moreover, it has to be something spectacular to be written about. What I’m talking about is day-to-day life. The metaphor for that is death. Death is present in all our lives, firstly in the shape of something that happens to someone we know, then, eventually, to ourselves. People die in droves every single day. It’s something we don’t see, it’s kept from us. We don’t like to talk about it either. Why not? It touches the very depths of everyone’s existence. Why do we suppress that? It’s the same with aging and human deterioration. If you get too old to look after yourself you’re put in an institution, hidden away from everyone. What kind of a society are we living in, where everything that is sick, deviant, or dead is kept from sight? Two generations ago, sickness and death were both very much closer to us, if not a natural part of life then at least unavoidable. I could have written an article about all this, but it wouldn’t have said much because arguments have got to be rational, and this is about the opposite, the irrational, all the feelings we have about what it means to confront what has withered away into death, and what that actually is.

What I was trying to do was to reintroduce a closeness, trying to get the text to penetrate that whole series of conceptions and ideas and images that hang like a sky above reality, or cling to it like a membrane enclosing the eye, to reach into the reality of the human body and the frailty of the flesh, but not in any general way because generality is a relative of the ideal, it doesn’t exist, only the particular exists, and since the particular in this case happens to be me, that was what I wrote about. That’s how it is. It was the only goal I had, and that’s the reality of the matter.

KOK manifesto

“Of course I have. But this is the best solution. I’m going to be wearing clogs until he gives in. If it takes a year, I’ll wear clogs for a year. If it takes ten, I’ll wear them for ten.” “You’re out of your mind.” “Not in the slightest! I’m involved in a conflict with my downstairs neighbor.

Geir’s battle of the clogs!

The ideal doesn’t get inherited, that’s the point.” “A kind of dialectics of hopelessness, is that it?” “Exactly. Having a decent dad doesn’t help in the slightest.”

Harmony, happiness, and no more deaths in traffic. Give me a useless dad who doesn’t give a shit! Give me a godforsaken awful childhood! Because something comes of that. Something gets created there. In the disharmony and the dissonance.”

For Geir, art requires tragedy

“The road from sociology to paranoia is shorter than one might think,” I said.

Everyone works like mad now, because it’s good for them. The same with consumption. We find our identities in the purchase of goods that are mass-produced. You’d think it was a joke. But the worst thing is you’re not allowed to say that, it means you’re paranoid. And what’s more, that criticism has turned into a cliché, it’s become invalid by virtue of being repeated too many times. I remember when I was a student and read all that criticism and was totally in agreement with it at the same time as I was living my life in exactly the same way as what I was criticizing. It didn’t even occur to me then. And even if it had, I wouldn’t have done anything about it. The two spheres are separate. What you know, and what you do. They never join up. They’re like east and west. Or, at best, like the tie and the vest.”

“No, just the opposite. Things have changed, beyond doubt. And all of us are a part of that change. I think it’s a response to something. I think the very fact our kids are in nurseries from the age of one, and that we surround ourselves with all sorts of crap that just alienates us, TV, computer games, all that kind of stuff, on its own means we just have to get close to our children. Kids used to be at home all day, a place they felt was theirs, and there were grown-ups around, maybe not close in that sense, but they were there. When that place no longer exists there has to be some compensation. That has to be compensated for. No one planned it that way or probably even thought about it. It just gets like that, and becomes an imperative.

They were making the same tools, hunting by the same methods, eating the same food. Nothing about them changed. Fascinating, don’t you think? The fact that our closest relatives were incapable of change. The fact that progress was a completely unknown concept to them. No improvisation, no spontaneity, it just didn’t exist. The first humans were an inconceivable revolution when they turned up. What set us apart from the Neanderthals was exactly what we’re now trying to get rid of.”

“Not far off. But do you know what the biggest difference was between the first humans and the Neanderthals?” “No hot dogs?” “The humans had jewelry. They wore the teeth of the dead around their necks. Meaning they were thinking in symbols. There’s something more than this. And to the Neanderthals that was a completely impossible thought.”

“There’s a decent chance we’ve still got Neanderthal genes in our DNA somewhere. Not in Africans, because there weren’t any humans when the Neanderthals left Africa. But in Europeans, certainly. I don’t think the Neanderthals died out. I think they mixed with humans and merged into them.”

Actually all humans except for on the African continent have trace amounts of Neanderthal DNA proving interbreeding between the two species. His argument is similar to that of the deplorable book Homo Sapiens

“So we’ve gone from a world without mystery to one that’s full of mysteries, then back to one without again.” “It’s amazing the state actually gives money to people like you to sit around and ruminate, and write books about what you’ve been ruminating on.”

“No! But the fact that history is over, that there’s no future anymore other than the repetition of what we’ve got now, makes me feel insanely claustrophobic. I don’t necessarily have to do anything different, or be anything different, that’s not what I mean, but I do want the possibility of a completely different life to exist.” “We live in the age of Vision Zero. It means we have zero visions.” “That was neat.”

As it dissolved in the water, the white powder not only became liquid, it turned yellow, too. I was fond of yellow. Yellow on white, yellow on green, yellow on blue. I liked lemons, their shape as well as their color, and I liked the great fields of rape that spread their intense yellow out across the Skåne landscape in the spring and summer, beneath the tall blue sky, amid the green. And I liked the white Ajax powder that turned yellow when it dissolved in water.

Vol 6 book cover is yellow. Was it yellow for the original Norwegian one?

These two premises of literature, that on the one hand it should be as individual as possible, meaning it should express the inimitability of the singular I, and on the other hand that it should exist within the boundaries of the general, meaning it should express the we, are at odds with each other, since the more unique I am, the further I am from the we.

What does it mean to write? First of all it is to lose oneself, or one’s self. In that it resembles reading, but while the loss of the self in reading is to the alien I, which, by virtue of being so obviously apart from the reader’s own singular I, does not seriously threaten its integrity, the loss of the self in writing is in a different way complete, as when snow vanishes into snow, one might think, or like any other monochromism with no privileged point, no foreground or background, no top or bottom, only sameness everywhere. Such is the nature of the written self. But what is this sameness of which it is comprised and within which it exists? It is the singular language of the self.

The difference between dreaming and writing must surely be that the former occurs without our control, in one of the body’s unconscious modes, and is without purpose, whereas the latter is controlled and goal-oriented. This is true and yet not, for the crux of the similarity has to do with the absence of any localization of the I, the fact of it being dislocated and no longer centered, and the question that is thereby raised, for is it not the property of being centered that in actual fact makes up the I?

and if I were to attach an image to those influences it would perhaps involve a boy, let’s say he’s fourteen years old, living next to a river, with a section of rapids about three kilometers down from the house, and the rock over which the water rushes, swollen and shiny as steel, is smoothly eroded and covered with algae, meaning that a person can swim out above the rapids and allow themselves to be swept along by the current, something he often does, this boy, together with his best friend and all the others who congregate there in the summer evenings, there being hardly a better feeling in life than this, to sense the might of the river, the increasing velocity, the surge of descent as he is swept away and slung into the depths downstream, plunged into the turmoil of tiny bubbles, allowing himself, if he wishes, to be carried into more gentle waters, there to clamber up onto the land again, or else swim back upstream as far as he is able, until the current becomes too strong and he is brought to a standstill, unable to progress any farther no matter how hard he struggles, eventually to be swept away downstream again. To sail down those rapids is like writing, carried from one point to another by forces beyond your control, but what you experience on your way is experienced by you alone, since I cannot imagine the other kids could have seen or felt the same as he, and if those evenings, with their setting suns and as yet warm rocks through swiftly cooling air, where gre...

He construed me as a kind of baroque entity, abnormal and warped, whose inner being was utterly out of sync with its outward expression – completely the opposite of how I saw myself, which was ordinary to the point of self-erasure, this very ordinariness being my problem as a writer. I enjoyed football, both playing and watching; I enjoyed lightweight American films and could still read comics now and again; I watched the weather forecast on TV, or the news, because of the gorgeous women who sometimes appeared on the screen, and could develop small crushes on them; I enjoyed much the same music as when I was twelve, and if I liked a book or a painting I would never know why and would have to resort to words and thoughts I had picked up from others and which thereby were wholly lacking in authenticity.

What did he tantalize me with? Freedom. What was freedom? To be free was to transgress. To identify everything as being subject to constraints, stuck, ossified, and to remove oneself from that. Not necessarily the social world as a set of rules for behavior, which then Bohemian-like could be ignored, but the mind-set those rules entailed. What

Geir gave me the chance to look at life and understand it, Linda gave me the chance to live it. In the first instance I became visible to myself, in the second I vanished. That’s the difference between friendship and love.

And in the sky, in that fantastic summer of 2002, the sun shone, sinking red into the Mälardalen every night, as if shrouded by a veil of blood, its last rays glittering gold on all the city’s towers and spires, and I was immortal. Seven years later, toward the end of the not-quite-so-fantastic summer of 2009, here I was with Geir again, in the bathroom of our apartment in Malmö, watching the four kids splashing about in the bath as the sky outside, which I couldn’t see but whose light I could sense through the rectangular windows, gradually darkened.

Maybe they caught that dyslexic thief, the one with the misspelled youth.”

The number of people we come close to during our lives is small, and we fail to realize how infinitely important each and every one of them is to us until we grow older and can see things from afar.

I thought about all of this. And then I thought about how I had always considered time to be vertical. Time was to me a kind of ladder one climbed, whose rungs were ages – at the bottom one’s time at preschool, then school, gymnas, university, and so on.

It had never occurred to me before. I had thought my life to be lived only in my immediate and most intimate surroundings, and that every place I ever left had gone from my life at that same moment.

I was gone. For that reason it had not been them I had written about, but my recollections of them. The fact that they still existed in their own right, at the same time as my writing

“In the nineties there was some trouble with elephants in South Africa,” I said. “Whether there were too many of them or whatever, I don’t know, but anyway the authorities set up this program. They shot all the adult elephants, captured the young ones, and moved them to a different part of the country. Those elephants are adult now. And they’re deeply traumatized. They’re aggressive, hostile to humans, and antisocial. They’ve got all the symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder. The point is they’re sensitive. They saw their parents killed, and elephants always react when one of the herd dies, they become beside themselves with grief, circling the place where the dead elephant lies or lay for days on end. They’re very social animals. So with seeing what happened and then being moved to a different area, the young elephants freaked out. They’re not well. They’re angry and destructive.”

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.

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. But it was a practical issue, nothing to do with morals. We weren’t bad people for being messy. Our messiness was not a sign of poor moral fabric. I

yet the images were so iconic and powerful that the effect on us was just as devastating, perhaps more so, since we lived in a culture of images. Planes and skyscrapers. Icarus and Babel. They wanted into our dreams. Everyone did. Our inner beings were the final market. Once they were conquered, we would be sold.

so I chose the one with the highest fat content, 3.5 percent, then moved on and picked up half a dozen eggs the box said came from “cage-free hens indoors,” prompting me to scan the other kinds to see if there were any from “mistreated hens crammed together in cages,” which didn’t seem to be the case, and so I carried on toward the checkout, along the deserted aisles, between the refrigerated counters and the shelves of shampoo, through a small section of “organic sweets,” then the glitzy inferno of normal sweets, which took up about the same amount of space as the bread.

The problem was that it belonged to our time, structurally, politically, socially, the whole mentality of it, and that its myriad meanings would evaporate as soon as I tried to insert it into another, counterhistorical reality. Perhaps what I had were two different novels. That would become apparent to me as I went along, I thought to myself. The world was so big and diverse that opposite forces were always at work somewhere, no particular outcome was ever guaranteed, the future was wide open and uncertain, and if the sun went down in that future, it would go down on us, not on those who were to come; for them it would rise.

“Do you remember what Pessoa says? ‘How can I face Leopardi’s atheism with gravity and pain when I know this atheism may be cured by sexual intercourse?’” “Yes, but that’s just it. I can accept reducing things down in order to get to some form of truth, but what I don’t understand is why that reduction always has to end in sex.” “The reason you don’t understand it is because you’re an aesthete. You shun what is base. You shy away from the body. You know what Luther wrote?” “No.” “Dreams are untruthful. Shitting the bed, that’s the only truth.”

It felt like we were in the depths of summer. As if we were a part of some Impressionist painting, for no one had captured that feeling better than the Impressionists, and the question was whether it had actually been they who created it. Whether such a feeling had even existed in the world before they came upon it, with all their conceptions of color, light, and shade, their endeavors to reproduce the exact moment. Before that, painting had always been geometric, had always been concerned with the solidity of objects and people, and with the borders between them.

They were doing it so as to learn how not to think. This is the most important thing of all in art and literature, and hardly anyone can do it, or even realizes it is the case, because it is no longer taught or conveyed. Now everyone thinks art is to do with reason and criticism, that it’s all about ideas, and the art schools teach theory. Which is decay, not progress.

tipped my head back and closed my eyes. Outside, the sound of Geir rummaging in the trunk was neutral, a noise like any other, rising and spreading out into the air, but inside it was different, it was the sound of something going on in the car, in some way belonging to it. The difference was immense. What was going on outside seemed safe and unthreatening, whereas what was going on inside was something one was defenseless against.