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”