My Struggle, Book 6

by Karl Ove Knausgaard

  “Yes. I had to present my case. It’s a very unusual project. They listened and agreed.”

  That decided, I had to split the novel once more. In principle, I could just put two and two together of the twelve, making each book about two hundred and fifty pages. But that would be the same length as any average Norwegian novel, and with the subscription and serial idea abandoned it would be odd to simply break the narrative in one book to pick it up again in the next. Six books that weren’t independent of each other, that didn’t seem good to me. I needed to divide them differently so that each became a standalone book in its own right, which was to say I had to end up with six novels that could also be read as a single, continuous narrative. Doing it that way, the first book came to four hundred pages, the second to five hundred and fifty, and the third to three hundred. After that I ran out of material. If I was going to do it that way, I would have to write three new books in ten months. Which wasn’t implausible, I’d been doing about ten pages a day for the past six months as it was, in the region of fifty pages a week given the fact that I wasn’t allowed to work weekends. Subtracting ten pages for unforeseen difficulties, I could do around a hundred and sixty pages a month. If I rounded that down to a hundred and fifty, I could spend two or three months on each book and still easily do three, even having a month in hand.

  I was almost burning with impatience and expectation as I sat down at the computer and scrolled through the manuscript. It was obvious I couldn’t just divide it up into stand-alone books as it was, I would have to write beginnings and endings, bridges and transitions, move and delete sections, but that wouldn’t be hard, the various parts differed from each other already because of how I’d tried to write my way into the period in which each narrative took place, not least by matching my reflections as closely as possible to the age of the first-person narrator in each book. The ten-year-old reflected on sweets, the twenty-nine-year-old on pop music, the thirty-five-year-old on parenting. Oh, it was going to be brilliant! Six books! Fuck, I was going to wipe the floor with them!

  This afternoon in August, as I sat down to work after having read Gunnar’s short e-mail, the first book was ready for typesetting; the last thing I’d done, after receiving two reader’s reports, was to turn the mainly fragmentary and disconnected account of the year I’d spent living with Dad when I was sixteen into a cohesively told story, and the only thing left to do, as far as I could see, was to alter names if any of the people I had written about so wished. The second book was largely finished, all that remained was some minor work at the end, after which Geir Gulliksen was going to read it one last time, and once I’d gone through his suggestions and criticisms, that too would be ready for typesetting. The third book still needed a good deal of work. It wasn’t where I wanted it to be, it was far too anecdotal, lacking in epic sweep, and had no clear thread besides the chronology.

  This was perhaps the greatest difficulty in writing autobiographically, finding out how material was relevant. In real life, of course, everything was relevant and in principle equal, since it was all there in existence at the same time – the great oil tankers at anchor in the Galtesund in the seventies, the plum tree outside my window, Mom’s job at Kokkeplassen, Dad’s face when he drove by in the car and I was out somewhere and saw him, the pond where we skated in winter, the smells inside the neighbors’ house, Dag Lothar’s mom that time she made milkshakes for us, the strange car that was parked one night down at Ubekilen, all the fish we had for dinner, the way the pine trees in next door’s garden swayed back and forth in the strong autumn winds, Dad’s rage if I happened to dig my knee into the back of his seat in the car, the waffles we made every Tuesday, my great infatuation with Anne Lisbeth, the footballs Mom and Dad brought back for us from a trip to Germany, mine green with red hexagons, Yngve’s yellow with red hexagons, the way we stood one day and kicked them as high into the air as we could to see if they could reach the military helicopter that happened to come sweeping low over the playground. The last of these recollections alone brought with it a host of other recollections, because while they were in Germany I had stayed with Grandma and Grandad on Dad’s side, and Yngve with Grandma and Grandpa on Mom’s side, a week I remembered so much from, and so very clearly, in particular the days we spent at the cabin. 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 novel was one of the forms of relevance. The poem was another, less obvious, since it was shared by fewer people. Quality was bound together with exclusiveness, and everything to do with high and low literature, popular and elitist, was all about that. The wider the reach of the novel, the greater the community it strove toward, the easier it was to grasp, and the less challenging it became, in the sense that the reader’s own efforts and participation diminished. In this there was a simplification, too. A novel that was meant to say something true about reality could not be made too simple, it had to contain an element of exclusiveness in its communication, something not common to or shared by all, in other words something of its own, and there, at some point between the madman’s own particular and therefore uncommunicated ramblings, meaningless to everyone but the madman himself, who found them fascinatingly relevant, and the genre novel’s fixed formulations and clichés, which had become clichés by being familiar to everyone, was the domain of literature. The highest ideal for any writer was to write a text that worked on all levels at the same time. The only writers I could think of who had done that were the authors of the first two Books of Moses – Genesis and Exodus – and Shakespeare. The Odyssey and the Iliad had achieved that once, but what at the time had been broad in reach, the epic poem, was now foreign in the sense that its relevance had radically declined. Not that I thought about any of this as I wrote, the problem there being real and tangible, how to turn all these recollections, which were almost inexhaustible, into a coherent narrative? And how to do so in such a way as to remain faithful to what was mine about them?

  I went back and forth through the text without being able to collect my thoughts, or even to read what I’d written, my concentration was nonexistent, the only thing I could think about was Gunnar and his reaction. After a quarter of an hour like that, I got to my feet and went out of the study. As I went through the hall I heard the elevator on its way up. Most likely it was Linda; at this time of day there was hardly any activity in the building. I stood still and waited, heard the elevator doors open, and the next moment she stepped into the hall. She was wearing her blue and white sailor dress, she had eye shadow on, and her lips were painted red. In each hand was a carrier bag, and she had her little black backpack on her back. There was a busy air of eagerness about her; she’d hardly put her bags down on the floor before she came up to kiss me, then bent down and took off her red shoes while telling me about all the things she’d bought.

  “They had these filing boxes or whatever down at Granit, the ones I was saying we could use for our mail, one for you and one for me. So now we don’t need to leave all those letters and bills lying around all over the place. Do you want to see?”

  I nodded and she produced the two boxes, which were like little sets of drawers.

  “Nice, don’t you think?”

  “Yes,” I said. “What’s in the other bag?”

  “A dress from Myrorna, a shawl, and a skirt. Dirt cheap, they hardly cost anything at all.”

  She took the three items out and held them up against herself one by one.

  “Nice, don’t you think?” she said again.

  “Yes,” I said.

  “They h
ardly cost anything at all,” she said.

  “It would have been all right even if they had,” I said. “It’s not that.”

  “What, then?”

  “It doesn’t matter.”

  “Yes, it does! Tell me. Have you had lunch, by the way?”

  I shook my head.

  “There’s some bolognese left over from yesterday, is that OK?”

  “Yes.”

  “Go on, tell me, then. What is it? Something wrong?”

  “No, not at all.”

  She went over to the mirror and held the dress up against herself again.

  “It is nice, isn’t it?” she said. “We can heat it up in the microwave, no?”

  “I’ll do it.”

  I went into the kitchen, took the plastic container with the meat sauce out of the fridge, then the spaghetti, divided it between two plates, and started heating the first one in the microwave as I stared out the window, all the roofs in their various shades of red which seemed so close, the light blue sky above them. I’ve felt a twinge of guilty conscience from boyhood at being inside on such a fine day. It was one of the things Dad would never tolerate. If the weather was fine, you had to be outside, no excuses. Stupid as I was, I could wander around the neighborhood finding no one to hang out with and nothing to do, it was the holidays, people had gone away, either for the day in their boats or their cars, or else farther afield, enjoying bigger adventures. All I wanted was to be inside with my books, and as I walked aimlessly about I could make myself cry with self-pity.

  “How’s your day been?” asked Linda, sitting down at the table and opening the newspaper that was folded in front of her.

  “I got an e-mail from Gunnar,” I said.

  “Oh? What did he say?”

  “Nothing. He just wanted the address of the publisher. But it was enough to stop me working.”

  “You needn’t be so worried,” she said.

  I took a deep breath. She looked up at me.

  “What’s wrong?”

  “I thought you didn’t like shopping,” I said. “I thought you loathed it.”

  She stuck her tongue out at me.

  “You’re so stingy sometimes,” she said.

  “Stingy?”

  “You’re not begrudging me, are you? I’m feeling happy, that’s all. I thought I’d get myself something for when I go away, and I’ve been thinking about what to do about our mail for months. Aren’t you glad I’ve figured it out? So we can keep things neat?”

  “Of course.”

  “Good.”

  She returned to the newspaper.

  Then she looked up at me again.

  “Anyway, you buy all your clothes from Spirit, fifteen hundred kronor for a pair of trousers. I’ve never said a thing about that.”

  “That’s because it’s my money.”

  “That we could have spent on something else. The clothes I buy cost a third of the ones you buy, if not a quarter.”

  “All right, yes, but that’s not the point. Forget it. The last thing I want to do is argue.”

  “Who wants to argue? Not me.”

  The microwave pinged. I took the plate out and put it down in front of her. She got up and turned the radio on.

  “We’re friends, then,” I said, and put the second plate in the microwave, set the timer to four minutes, shut the door, and pressed the start button.

  “Karl Ove, I love you. Of course we’re friends.”

  “OK,” I said.

  She carried on reading the paper. The news came on the radio. The microwave hummed, the green plate and its mound of spaghetti bolognese rotated sedately in its chamber. I got the knives and forks out, and two glasses, and filled a jug with water.

  “Can you pick them up today?” she asked.

  I didn’t answer until she looked up at me.

  “Yes,” I said, charging the word with as much reluctance as I could. “If you can’t, then I suppose I’ll have to.”

  “Of course I can. But it was my turn this morning. So it’s your turn this afternoon.”

  I looked down without saying anything. The microwave pinged again, I took the plate out, put it down on the table, and began to eat. Linda watched me for a moment, then put the newspaper aside before she too started eating. I was finished in a couple of minutes, the food was barely warm and offered nothing in the way of resistance, the only thing to do was shovel it in. Although Linda was still eating, I left the table and went out onto the balcony, where I sat down, put my feet up on the rail, poured myself a cup of coffee from the vacuum jug, and lit a cigarette. The basic rule of our relationship was that we shared everything. From that point of view it was only fair and reasonable that I picked the children up if she had dropped them off. But the thing was I worked in between, while she didn’t. On this particular day I’d got up at four thirty to get some work done before the children woke up, after which I helped her get them dressed and ready to go, and then I’d gone back to work, during which time she had sat in a café, shopped for clothes, and bought a couple of filing boxes. If the kids took up 50 percent of the day, and work another 50 percent, then I was doing 75 percent of the total job and Linda 25 percent. Whenever we argued, I would tell her. But I didn’t want to argue now, so I left it at that.

  I looked out over the city. I could see what looked like the small shadow of a Mercedes logo on a wall across the street below, perhaps cast by the sun shining on a parked car somewhere, I wasn’t sure, but I’d seen it before and it seemed to indicate a habit, someone who always parked in the same place. Far, far away, a crane rose above the rooftops. Since all I could see basically were rooftops, any deviation would always stick out; if a person happened to be up there for whatever reason, I would see them, even if they were several kilometers away, the dark figure of the body against the brightness of the sky.

  I stubbed my cigarette out in the upturned flowerpot I used for an ashtray, swallowed the last mouthful of coffee, and went inside. Passing the kitchen I saw Linda was on the phone. I paused to hear who she was talking to. Helena, I realized after only a few seconds. She looked up at me and lifted her hand as if in acknowledgment, I smiled and carried on into the bedroom to check my e-mails. It was already a quarter to two by the clock on the computer. Half an hour and I’d have to get going.

  No e-mails.

  Relieved, I lay down on the bed and stared up at the ceiling. It was too late to start on anything now anyway. A faint, rather nauseating smell of food filled the air. When we first moved here I thought it came from our nearest neighbor, but after a while it struck me the smell might be coming through the ventilation system, in which case it was most likely from the Chinese takeaway down on the ground floor. I got up and opened the door onto the balcony, then stretched out on the bed again. The sounds of the city trickled into the room. I heard footsteps in the hallway. They stopped and the bathroom door was opened and then closed. The old saxophone player whose spot was by a pillar only a few meters from the entrance to our building, where the flow of people crossing the square was greatest, began to play. He always played the same thing, a minute-long fragment of some tune, presumably on the assumption that his audience was always new. That a man seven floors up had to listen to every note, not just day after day, but month after month, was something that almost certainly didn’t occur to him.

  Diii di daaa da dididi daaaa.

  Diii di daaa da dididi daaaa.

  Diii di daaa da dididi daaaa.

  I closed my eyes. There was a rush of water from the toilet, the door was opened and the footsteps stopped in front of the mirror in the hall. Was she looking at herself or sifting through the letters that lay strewn over the little table against the wall?

  Ba daaaa! The sound the telephone made when returned to the charger.

  Had she taken the phone with her to the toilet? Or just put it down on the table as she went past, only now putting it back in its place?

  She came toward me.

  I opened my eyes and saw
her pause in the doorway.

  “I’ll pick them up,” she said. “After all, you’re going to be on your own with them for a few days.”

  “No, I’ll do it,” I said. “I can’t get any more work done today anyway. You can pack or something.”

  “You sure?”

  “Do you want me to say it again?”

  “OK, OK. You pick them up, I’ll drop them off in the morning before I go.”

  “What time was your train again?”

  “About half past eight,” she said, and sat down at the computer. She was going off to visit Helena and Helena’s new boyfriend Fredrik at an old farmhouse somwhere in mid-Sweden and would be gone until the weekend, when Geir and Christina were coming to stay with us. I hadn’t met Fredrik, but from what I’d heard he was the complete opposite of Helena’s previous partner, the charming and rather dodgy Anders. Fredrik was a fireman, an incident commander working in Stockholm, and had bought a house in the Dalarna region, taken it apart, transported it to Uppsala and rebuilt it plank by plank, and done it so well there had been articles about it in lifestyle magazines. That was all I knew. Apart from that, Heidi, who had met him once, was a little scared of him. He had let her comb his hair on that occasion, and Helena had said it meant she couldn’t be that scared of him, but Heidi said she’d been scared of him the whole time, even when she was combing his hair. Helena laughed about that. Heidi loved her and would always sit as close to her as possible to be sure of her attention, and chatter on about all the things she’d been up to since the last time they saw each other. She talked to her on the phone too, and often made drawings of her. Heidi was attracted by all that glittered and shone, she loved dressing up more than anyone, five outfits a day was by no means unusual, and in Helena she had found her only truly glamorous role model.

  “Are you looking forward to some time on your own?” I said.

  Linda nodded without turning around.

  “But I’m going to start missing you after a couple of hours on the train. Are you sure you don’t want to come?”