My Struggle: Book 6

by Karl Ove Knausgård

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...