The interview with Søndagsavisen went pretty well. Afterward Siss Vik met me in reception and we went up to her office and did the interview for Ordfront. For the first time that day I spoke about literature. What I said was vague and not very good, but it was about literature and that in itself felt cathartic. I imagined it was a bit like how a shy plumber might feel after having to speak all day to the media about himself and his feelings, his family and friends, when at long last, late in the afternoon, he was able to talk about pipes and washers.
* * *
I took a taxi from NRK to Axel’s, he didn’t live that far away, and when I arrived he had made fårikål, lamb and cabbage stew, the whole apartment was full of a smell that took me straight back to the autumns of my childhood. He said he figured I didn’t get much of this stew in Sweden, at any rate that had been his experience when he lived there, it had been one of the things he missed. He was right about that, apart from once during the first autumn Linda and I were together, when I was busy explaining to her who I was and where I came from and therefore made both fårikål and pinnekjøtt, mutton ribs, I hadn’t tasted it since I moved to Sweden.
Linn, Axel’s wife, had to go somewhere after work. I sat in the kitchen with Axel’s sons, Erik and Johan, eating lamb stew and drinking beer. I had arranged to visit them for exactly this reason, being with a family was balm for the soul, there was something good about it, maybe also something innocent, certainly uncorrupted. If I had gone to a hotel room after the interviews everything that had been said and done in the course of the day would have still been there, washing back and forth inside me, and it was not beyond the bounds of possibility that I would have ended up lying on the bed crying, it had happened before. Geir Angell had laughed when once I told him this, he said that was just like Arthur Arntzen, the comic, performing as Oluf, he ordered sandwiches and milk to be brought up to his hotel room and then, after the shows, he sat there crying and eating. I’d laughed too, but when I was caught up in it I didn’t laugh, I had more than enough to do just trying to survive. What actually upset me I had no idea, it was utterly indefinable, but it was as though all the malice I had in me opened up and had free rein on days like that. At the interviews it was all about pinning something down, giving form to something, in a way, in order to keep it at a distance, while that which was given external form created ever greater turbulence internally. When, some years ago, a TV channel ran a series of twenty-four-hour interviews with people in their own homes, including one with Jan Kjærstad, I discussed this with Tore, who told me I would have maintained the mask if they had done one with me, answering good-humoredly and politely throughout the day, but the minute they went out the door I would have gone to bed and burst into tears. I had never told Tore I cried after being on live TV, and I occasionally did so after run-of-the-mill literary events as well, so I gaped at him in puzzlement, how had he worked that out? Was I so easy to read?
So this, stew and beer, at a kitchen table in Oslo, with Axel and his sons, the sun low and the air cold outside, was exactly what I needed.
I had met Axel in Stockholm four years earlier, one evening Helena’s actor friends had called her, they had a football team and were short of players and asked if Jörgen, her partner, could play for them. He phoned me and asked if I felt like coming out. I did. On a soft shale pitch somewhere outside Stockholm, in a sort of industrial area, it was cold and dark, the floodlights a bright yellow. I hadn’t kicked a ball for many years and was put at left back, where I could cause the least damage. The team consisted entirely of actors, and it was comical, at half-time most of them talked about their own performances, what they had or hadn’t done, with no regard for the team as a whole, in a cacophony of egocentricity. The coach, a man of around thirty who played at center half, gave his instructions in a dark Stockholm accent. He and the other center half came over to me after the game, it turned out they were both Norwegians. The coach’s name was Axel, an Østlander, the other was Henrik, a Kristiansander, they had gone to acting school in Stockholm together and both lived in the capital. Karl Ove, Henrik said. You wouldn’t be Knausgaard, would you? Yes, I said, and they laughed because they had both read my books and they must have thought the odds of bumping into me out here on a muddy field on the edge of Stockholm in the autumnal gloom were fairly low. I continued to play for them and then one Saturday Axel texted me, wondering whether I would like to go to his son’s birthday party. I was sure he had made a mistake, sent the text to the wrong person, and I politely declined. But it hadn’t been a mistake, he still got in touch now and then, we met a few times outside the football context, and when he and Linn came on the occasion of Vanja’s second birthday, Linn was surprised to see a poster for a short film for which Linda had written the script and asked how it came to be hanging there. It transpired that Linn had produced the film. Their children were the same age as ours and we started seeing each other regularly.
Axel was a friendly, considerate person, but on the football field I had seen another side to him, an aggression and a drive that seemed alien to his usual self; once we had been to see a football match in Råsunda, on the way back we were in the crowd catching the metro when a man sat down on the seat I was about to occupy, Axel almost flew at him in a rage. I couldn’t get these sparks to tally with the person he normally was because if anything typified his personality it was gentleness, and it was genuine, an innate quality from what I could see, not something he had learned. Linn was also considerate, although inside her there was an edge too, she wasn’t afraid to be direct and she couldn’t care less what others thought about what she said or did. As far as family life was concerned, they were on a different plane from us, they had a house and a car and order in their finances. She worked as a TV producer for SVT; he worked as a freelance actor. They had met on set while making an ad; that was one of the first things he told me. Sometimes we had lunch at my regular place next to the office, often we got together over the weekend, and every Monday during the season when we played a match. We kept in touch even after we moved to Malmö and they moved to Oslo, though the intervals between seeing each other were becoming longer and longer. Axel and Linn were generous sorts who invited us to all kinds of things and resolved all the practical details along the way. One Easter they asked us to stay with them at a mountain cabin his father owned, and once they invited us to Berlin, where he had been given the use of an apartment. We hadn’t invited them to anything, how could we, there were no cabins or houses in our family and we didn’t have the money to rent one. But they didn’t seem to keep a tally.
After eating we flopped down on the sofa with a beer to wait for Linn to return so that we could go out. I was so tired that I barely knew what I was saying. It had been a terrible day. And tomorrow everything would be in the papers.
Sometime later, walking toward the center along the streets in the western part of town, the night sky was dense and star-spangled. Leaves lay under all the trees. The air was crisp, crystalline, though not cold, it still retained the heat of the day, which died away very slowly. We sat down at a table outside Tekehtopa, just by the hotel, had a couple of beers and chatted. As I had to do a reading at the Opera House the next day and the last thing I needed was a hangover, I left after an hour to go to bed. Axel accompanied me into the hotel as Silje had promised they would drop off two copies of the book when it came out, and the receptionist passed me the packet with a smile and glanced over furtively as I opened it. I signed one and gave it to Axel, said goodbye, and took the other up to my room, where I put it in my backpack, then undressed, switched on the TV, and lay watching until I could no longer keep my eyes open. At some point in the night I must have woken up and switched off the television because when I opened my eyes at around six the screen was black and silent. I showered, dressed, and went down for breakfast. All the newspapers were laid out on the table, but I gave them a wide berth, I didn’t want to know. Got myself some scrambled eggs, bacon, sausages, and some bread, a little juice
and a cup of tea, sat down, glanced across at the pile of newspapers. What I didn’t want to see was the interviews. They were in Dagbladet Magasinet, Dagens Næringsliv, and Dagsavisen. But the reviews? I had decided not to read them. But I had to find out whether they were a catastrophe or had gone well. I had an agreement with Geir that he would text me when he’d read them, to say how they were. But it was only seven o’clock, he could be hours yet.
What the hell, a quick look at the intro couldn’t hurt.
I got up and picked up Dagbladet, carefully avoiding the magazine section, flicked through to the culture pages. There it was.
I was burning inside as my eyes ran down the lines.
It looked good.
It had gone well.
I wondered if it had gone just as well in Dagens Næringsliv?
I put Dagbladet back and picked up Dagens Næringsliv instead, went to the table, did the same, avoided the interview and flipped through to the review.
This one had gone well too.
Phew.
With a cup of coffee in my hand I had a smoke outside the hotel entrance and watched the few people walking along the street at such an early hour. The sky was as blue as it had been yesterday and the sunlight was already streaming down over the roofs and spires.
* * *
The reading at the Opera House was part of a kind of book day organized by the book clubs. I didn’t want to read anything from the first volume and had instead chosen a passage from the second, it was about a Rhythm Time baby class I had once been to in Stockholm, and I had selected this because I hoped it would make people laugh. I had done two readings from Book 1, the first at the invitation of Ingvar Ambjørnsen, who was the honorary resident writer at Bergen International Festival, on which occasion I chose the opening I had just written; the second was at a Litteraturhuset event, when I chose the scene where Yngve and I arrived at the house in Kristiansand. Both passages were about death, and if there was anything that dampened the atmosphere at a function it was of course a reading about death and decay, and as this was an autobiographical novel and not something I had made up I felt as though I was forcing myself and my gloomy personality on them and ruining their evening by my mere presence. After the last time at Litteraturhuset I had decided I wouldn’t do it again. Hence comedy, hence the Rhythm Time scene. Book 2 was a comedy, but a comedy deep, deep below the surface. It was about a man who was trapped in his own self-delusions and a family which was also trapped in its self-delusions, and this led them into highly undignified situations, which would have resolved themselves if they had only looked at each other and said they had been deluding themselves, this is the reality and it didn’t matter. But they couldn’t, it was precisely this that was impossible, they did the opposite, they looked at each other and said it mattered.
The hotel was around the corner from the publishing house, and after a while I strolled over to print out the passage I was going to read; my printer at home hadn’t worked. Geir Berdahl was there packing the books he was going to deliver by car with his daughter Maria, with whom I had only a passing acquaintance, I had never spoken to her. It was irritating that on the very day when the papers were full of reviews the book wasn’t on the shelves, because this focus and interest lasted for only one day, by the following week all the attention would already be on the wane, unless the book was nominated for some prize or other, in which case it might be rekindled for a few days. When my debut book came out the publishers had gone for a very small print run, and when it sold out they printed another two hundred copies, no more than that, and so it went on, with the result that for the whole of December, the sole month when books actually do sell in Norway, it wasn’t in any of the bookshops. Sales figures in themselves meant nothing to me, but money did, especially now that there were five of us in the family and the royalties from the books were our only source of income apart from my scholarship.
I put the printout in my backpack, said goodbye to Geir and Maria, and walked down to the Opera House. I hadn’t seen it before, except for its anonymous façade from the railway station and, standing in front of it, I was surprised. It really was a magnificent edifice. All that white stone gleaming, ablaze almost, in the sun next to the cool blue sea from which it rose. I walked up onto the roof, surveyed the harbor area as I smoked a cigarette, an hour to go to the reading. Leaning against a wall I took out a half-liter bottle of Pepsi Max, had a swig, got out my phone, and called Linda. She had packed and would soon be off to Kastrup, she said. My mother had also arrived; right now they were with the children at a playground. I said I was nervous and that it would be wonderful to go out in Prague this evening. She wished me luck and we hung up. I switched off the phone and put it in my backpack. Once when I was being interviewed onstage it had rung and the audience laughed; it was just the sort of thing audiences laugh at. Audiences wanted to laugh, they zeroed in on anything comical and always burst into laughter when there was something funny, almost irrespective of how trivial. An audience over a certain size has its own dynamics and its own mind-set regardless of the individuals that constitute it. Something they would never have laughed at on their own, they would never have found amusing in a million years because it was so petty, could, in an auditorium, generate howls of laughter. And when they sat there in silence, this silence could be indicative of a variety of very distinct moods. Boredom, indifference: then it was as though what was said dispersed and disappeared like smoke. Responsiveness, interest: what was said hung in the air and it was as though there were a greediness in the room, which was a fantastic and exhilarating response to have. I often read the same texts, but the atmosphere is never the same; sometimes a particular passage makes everyone laugh, at others there is total silence. A scene can be explosive one evening and appear flat and meaningless the next. Some of this depends on my delivery: as I come across as very serious, and occasionally also somber, it’s as if my very presence seems to stifle the comedy, whereas when I am able to chat first the laughter comes more easily. But for the most part it comes down to the audience, its particular makeup and the atmosphere of the venue.
I threw my cigarette down, stepped on it, and made my way toward the entrance. The plaza outside was thronged with people. Right in front of the door I bumped into Vetle Lid Larssen. We had the same publisher once, but I had never spoken to him or even said hello. So what should I do? Pretend I hadn’t seen him? That might seem haughty or dismissive. But greeting him didn’t seem natural either; we didn’t know each other.
“Hi,” I said.
“Hi,” he said. “Congratulations on the reviews!”
“Thank you,” I said.
“See you,” he said, slipping inside the door. I followed him, plowed my way through all the people, located a young woman who appeared to have something to do with the event, she did, just a minute, she said, and went to find someone else who took me backstage. Narrow corridors with black walls, sudden high-ceilinged areas full of wires and hoisting equipment, doors all over the place, and then a makeshift room behind some half-walls where we were to wait before going onstage. A bowl of fruit, some pots of coffee, and bottles of mineral water. Cathrine Sandnes, who was the emcee, was there, she gave me a hug and said something and laughed, she was one of those rare people who laughed all the time, and Dag Solstad, who was going to read after me, sat there with the head of a book club and some others I didn’t know. I said hello and poured myself a coffee. I asked Cathrine how her children were doing, she told me a bit about them and showed me some photos on her phone, she asked after mine, I said they were fine. I couldn’t remember when I had met her first, probably it had been with Espen and Frederik, I seemed to recall we were watching a football match and she was there, and someone told me she was the Norwegian champion in some martial art. She worked for Dagsavisen then. She had also interviewed me once; afterward, walking to the hotel, I remember we had talked about the mysterious expression “in form” – the immensely successful phase sportsmen and -women can ex
perience when all the shackles fall off them – with respect to writing. As a writer you can also go through a phase where nothing works and then all of a sudden you are in the zone, and everything works. It is all in your head. Football, writing, tae kwon do. Cathrine was now editor in chief at Samtiden, married to Aslak Sira Myhre, whom I remembered from Bergen, initially I knew him only from a distance, as an ultra-left-wing student politician, afterward I got to know him better because he had been Tore’s best friend when they were growing up in Stavanger and was an obvious model for the most important minor protagonist in Tore’s novels about Jarle Klepp. I had written an essay for Samtiden and had a little to do with Cathrine then. Over the years we had run across each other a few times and she hadn’t changed in the slightest. Her most prominent character trait, at least the one that was most obvious, was that she was completely fearless. She wasn’t affected by the terrors and tensions that abound in the art world. As was the case now, standing in the midst of a crowd of people, chatting and laughing with them on all sides.
She led me onto the stage, explained what she had planned: first of all, a brief introduction, then I would come on, stand there, she would ask a witty question about the title, and then I would read.
The blood drained from my head as I stood on the stage gazing at the empty auditorium in front of me. My face must have gone white with fear. We went back through the corridors and into the makeshift dressing room. I poured myself another cup of coffee, glanced warily at Dag Solstad, who was sitting on a chair a couple of meters away. I had met him several times before, most often in a publishing-house context, but I had never managed to say a word to him, not even about the weather. I wasn’t afraid of him, it wasn’t that, it was that I couldn’t view him as a man of flesh and blood. He was already a writer when I was born, and not only that, he had already been hailed as the greatest writer of his generation. Throughout my life he had been “Dag Solstad,” the great writer; so as a social fixture he was as well established as Gjensidige Forsikring insurance, the Ringnes Brewery, or the cup final, a status which incidentally he shared with Jan Erik Vold, who had also always been there, on TV and in the classroom, they were in a sense representatives of the writing fraternity, iconic images – the mild-looking man with the strange voice who read the poem about the loaf of bread and the bespectacled man with the unruly hair who mumbled and snuffled when he was asked about something. So there was an immense distance to be covered when I grew up and started reading their books in earnest, as works relevant to the present, and the wonderful part about this, when the iconic image breathes with life because you suddenly invest yourself and your experience and knowledge in it, can be compared to how your perception of your own parents changes when you become a parent yourself: suddenly their distant lives, their incomprehensible behavior, reflect something deeply human and universal, and they come to life. In this way “Dag Solstad” had come to life, but not as a person, only as a writer, for if there was one thing that characterized Dag Solstad’s literary work it was that he wrote iconic books; they expressed something unclear and invisible in such a way that they became clear and visible, not just once but again and again. So the unmasking of “Dag Solstad” that the reading of his books brought about led only to another mask, for as icons the books weren’t a reflection of the writer but the writer’s time, and perhaps also contributed to forming it. One of his books opens with a person who is alone and out of shame raises his hands to his face. Reading that, I thought I had done a much better job and with greater profundity in my debut novel, in which the main character is constantly ashamed and no stranger to the gesture and impulse that occasions the shame. In my hubris I even suspected Dag Solstad of having lifted it from my book. Back then I hadn’t understood the value of the iconic, it was too alien to me, nothing in my life and writing coalesced to form an image, everything overflowed its banks. Now I understand. The iconic is the pinnacle of literature, its real aim, which it is constantly striving to achieve, the one image that contains everything within but still lives in its own right. The lonely man raising his hands to his face: the shame. The man who sets the scene for his own paralysis: inauthenticity. And the most pregnant and terrible of all of Solstad’s images: the father witnessing his son accepting money to drive his friends around. That must be why Solstad was so preoccupied with Thomas Mann and Henrik Ibsen in his later books: they are the last great iconic writers. Mann’s sanatorium in The Magic Mountain is the perfect setting for a novel, it is both a symbol and a place, in the same way that Peer Gynt and Brand are symbols and characters. All literature wants to go there, to the one essential symbol that says everything and is at the same time everything. Heart of Darkness, Moby-Dick, Riverrun.
My Struggle, Book 6 Page 100