My Struggle: Book 6

by Karl Ove Knausgård

If only I’d had a really profligate, sleazy past in the docklands of Buenos Aires, lived at the bottom like a crab, and gorged myself shamelessly on everything I came across, preferably killed someone with a rock to the head, as Rimbaud may have done, and, like him, fled to Africa and made a living as an arms smuggler, yes, anything but this, on a hotel balcony in the Canary Islands with two small children and a pregnant wife sleeping on the other side of the sliding-glass door, and all that this loaded the future with in terms of propriety and responsibility.

There are very few people that could pull off references to TS Elliott and Rambeau with such flair from a hotel balcony in the Canaries. This particular trip description in the book had me in stitches.

But there, too, Gombrowicz had given me a little hope, lit a barely perceptible flame in the great darkness of my banality. Didn’t he write, “Physical comfort can sharpen the sensibilities of the soul, and behind the cozy curtains, in the suffocating sitting rooms of the middle classes, engenders a toughness of which those who attacked tanks with Molotov cocktails could never dream.” Oh, to hell with everything.

What happened? Had he got old or was it the loss of exotic surroundings that did it? Europe is an old continent and that is where he came from, where he grew up, it was in him. In those days he was on familiar ground, he was strong, he was young. Could it be that this vitality, which otherwise would have died along with his curiosity, in his forties to judge from others, could it have been prolonged by his foreign adventures? Or was it just that he was dying in a dying culture, a bit like the composer in Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice?

It is through feelings we connect with one another and it is the feelings which are good and bad, not the days. I seemed to sense something behind me and turned at once, but the room was empty. May as well go to bed, I thought. Sink into a world that was beyond the world, the wonderful void.

“They speak applish. Look, if I shake it a bit, it might say something. Shall I try?” She pushed her glass away. “It can’t speak,” she said. “You’re teasing me.” “No, I’m not. It’s very unusual. That’s probably why you’ve never heard of it.” I gave a start. “There! Did you hear it?” She stared at the apple, shaking her head. I lifted the apple to my ear and made big eyes. “It said something,” I said. “No, it didn’t.” She laughed. “It did not.” “Yes, it did. Here, you listen.” I held up the apple and she leaned over and put her ear to it. “Can you hear anything?” I said. She shook her head. “Daddy,” she said. “Apples can’t talk.” “It just did,” I said. “What did it say then?” “I’m not sure. It was applish. But I think it said, ‘I’m so lonely.’” “You can’t speak applish.” “Yes, I can. Not very well. But I understand a little.” “How did you learn it?”

so I pulled a chair over to the window, sat down, ate her food, and drank a Pepsi Max looking out the window and watching the rain fall and the lamp hanging from a thin wire across the street swing back and forth in the wind.

The gravel crunched beneath the tires and the car glided forward like a barge up the narrow canal-like road, past gate after gate until I stopped outside ours.

I wished I could have made myself not care, say to hell with the idiots who sat scrutinizing other people’s gardens, this feeble-minded bunch of wrinkled old folk with sagging skin who were unable to think about anything except what was right and fair and spent their remaining years and days, replete with all the experience a long and unique life had given them, keeping a lawn manicured and foaming with indignation when others did not. I wished I didn’t care about them, but I did. The truth was that I feared them and really wanted to make peace with them.

That autumn and winter I had been out here writing, alone in this great expanse of cabins, I collected water in a canister from over by the parking lot, went shopping in a supermarket a few kilometers away, knocked off page after page, three or four days in a row, returned home, stayed there for some days, then came back here. Where I was completely disconnected. No newspapers, no Internet, no TV, no radio, just a cell phone, but no one had the number. And not a soul around. In the evening and at night a hedgehog, which slunk through the garden and occasionally, if I was sitting still, nudged its snout against my shoe.

Now the small differences that existed had become bigger, but he was still the same person he had always been; the differences were in the layers of experience that time had deposited.

I think this is also a very intimately true statement from KOK. Oh, to write so succinctly.

I am going to be interviewed onstage, after which it will be her turn, because her own book has come out and it glitters and sparkles like a star-filled night sky. Afterward we will catch the train to Malmö, where we will get in the car and drive back to our house, and the whole way I will revel in, truly revel in, the thought that I am no longer a writer.