* * *
It has been an experiment, and it has failed because I have never even been close to saying what I really mean and describing what I have actually seen, but it is not valueless, at least not completely, for when describing the reality of an individual person, when attempting to be as honest as possible is considered immoral and scandalous, the force of the social dimension is visible and also the way it regulates and controls individuals. Its power is enormous, for what I have written about have been exclusively everyday events, there has been nothing sensational about any of it, these things happen all the time, every single day, and everyone knows they do: alcoholism, infidelity, mental illness, and masturbation, just to cite some of what has found its way from the novels into newspaper headlines. The only unusual aspect in this case has been that normality has been associated with real names in a novel and communicated for what it is, something specific tied to certain persons. The novel is a public form, and therein lies the contravention of the norm, the specific and the personal have been transported into the public arena. It happens to all people in the public eye – actors, politicians, TV journalists, pop stars – but they have chosen it of their own free will and want nothing more than this. The only nonpublic people who find themselves thrust there are criminals. In this novel it has happened to ordinary people, who are not criminals. Accordingly their names have taken on criminal form, an ordinary name has crossed the bounds of normality and become so abnormal that journalists track down the person and write about them in the newspapers. What these people did, which was perfectly normal, also took on criminal form and found itself being judged. And I was the person who had turned them into criminals. But I didn’t think about any of this at the time, during the many mornings I spent in the Internet café and my study, and the scant defense I was able to erect for my actions, such as that I was only writing about myself, crumbled as soon as one of the people I had written about turned and looked at me. They did it one after the other and I looked down, I looked away, I stared at a page in the novel and continued to write.
* * *
The same day that Geir read the Aftenposten review to me on the balcony, Asbjørn and Yngve came to Malmö. We were going to the Wilco gig in Copenhagen that evening and they would be staying with us over the weekend. I shook Asbjørn’s hand, then Yngve’s, and made a point of looking them in the eye, and I knew they were thinking that I was thinking about what I had written about this very thing. They’d brought candy for the children, and Asbjørn had framed the cover photo that he had taken in his capacity as a book designer and we had used for the first novel, and gave it to me along with a pile of books he had doubles of. Heidegger’s Sein und Zeit, which I only had in English, Pascal’s Pensées – I had the old, much-abridged edition – plus many more. They had also brought the day’s papers with them. I held up a hand and turned my head away, but Linda took them, she was curious, and even though I said she shouldn’t, she sat at the kitchen table reading them while Ingrid looked over her shoulder. I saw the front-page headline: EXPOSES FAMILY – ALCOHOL AND MENTAL PROBLEMS, and I saw the headline inside: EXPOSES WIFE. Then I returned to Yngve and Asbjørn, who were putting their luggage in the living room. We went to the balcony and smoked a cigarette. Asbjørn said he’d been a bit wary when he heard that Linda’s mother would be here, he wasn’t quite sure what the atmosphere would be like between us after what I’d written. I said she was the larger-than-life type and it would be fine. But it was Ingrid rather than Linda I wanted to keep away from the newspapers. Because Linda was her daughter, and now the papers were saying I had hung her daughter out to dry with her mental problems. And ALCOHOL, that couldn’t refer to anyone else but Ingrid. I knew how deeply this had hurt her as she had told Linda so, and she had also maintained it wasn’t true. The pain was there, still smoldering and glowing. But a pile of newspapers was one thing, a book another, and an article in the press about it a third. It was getting closer all the time. For Swedes Norway was a distant country, but if the book came out in Sweden, in her own language – a decision hadn’t been taken yet, but it was likely – it would impinge on her life and the consequences would be real.
Linda left to pick up the children, and when Asbjørn walked past the kitchen on his way to the bathroom, he saw Ingrid reading the newspaper, she looked up and gave him a thumbs-up. He laughed when he saw that. I wondered what she was thinking. That it was good for the book that it was receiving attention, and thus for the family, her grandchildren, who might finally get a house to live in? And a car to be driven around in?
Half an hour later, when the children came in through the door, they behaved differently from usual. As always when there was a visitor in the apartment, they reminded me of animals. Alert, watchful, cautious, they sniffed around. Hm. Unfamiliar shoes. Unfamiliar jackets. Best to be on your guard here. Vanja was the most guarded, Heidi the next, and John definitely the least. He smiled at everyone. We ate at the table in the living room, the children slipped down from their chairs after a few minutes and disappeared into their room with their bags of candy. I was happy, I always was when I was with Asbjørn and Yngve, although it was a bit odd because it was the two of them who were friends and formed a unit, I was more of a spectator or a distant associate, and not Yngve and I, who were brothers and had the same blood. The dynamics between us were exactly the same as they had been in Bergen when I arrived there in 1989, they were the experienced, worldly-wise ones, I was the novice who didn’t know his way around, and nothing of what had happened in our lives since then had changed that. Perhaps that was what I liked, not being in charge, tagging along, being the little brother.
Heidi came in, sent Asbjørn a mischievous look, and asked him what his name was again.
“Asbjørn,” he said.
“Isbjørn,” Heidi said. Polar bear.
“No,” Asbjørn said. “Asbjørn.”
“Isbjørn,” Heidi said, laughed, and ran off to join the others.
“Actually we’re all characters in a novel sitting around this table,” Yngve said.
“That’s true,” Asbjørn laughed.
“We should set up a web page for characters in a novel so that we can discuss our experiences,” Yngve said.
“I can be the moderator,” I said.
“What was it like to read that you’d been exposed?” Yngve said, looking at Linda.
“No problem,” Linda said. “The worst part is being in the paper, if you know what I mean. Then people believe I’ve been exposed. Otherwise I’d just have been a description in a book. And, of course, that’s not the same.”
“In fact you two are the only ones who have censored me,” I said. “Over such trivialities though. I wrote one thing about you,” I said, focusing on Yngve, “I was sure you would be proud of. But no. So, out it went.”
“What was that?” Asbjørn said.
“I can’t tell you,” I said. “But it was something to do with a note we once put on his door.”
“Groupies must leave before breakfast?” Asbjørn said.
“Maybe,” I said. “And Linda said she really hadn’t whipped the donkey at the fun fair.”
Ingrid laughed.
“I don’t want that on my record, that I whip animals. Anyway, it didn’t happen.”
“No, it really didn’t,” I said. “I must’ve been trying to capture the atmosphere of aggression.”
“Thank you for the meal,” Asbjørn said, looking at Ingrid. “It was fantastic.”
“It was,” I said.
We got up and took our plates into the kitchen. Then we went to the balcony for a smoke, Linda and Yngve in the two chairs, Asbjørn and I standing with our backs to the railing.
“This vaguely reminds me of my fortieth,” I said. “Wasn’t everyone out here at some point? I just remember us standing here packed in like sardines. And I thought about that crack.”
I pointed to the crack in the wall, which presumably was just on the surface because if not the whole balco
ny would have crashed down.
“Oh shit,” Asbjørn said.
“Helena thought everyone at the party was so rar,” Linda said in Swedish. “She returned to it again later. The man sleeping in the children’s room, wasn’t he fantastic? And the one who didn’t say a word all evening, what was up with him? And the one … you’ve got the idea.”
“Well, we are,” Yngve said in Norwegian.
“Are what?”
“Rar, strange,” he said.
“Rar in Swedish means nice,” I said.
* * *
The Wilco gig took place in the old theater in Copenhagen, we had bought tickets separately, so I was sitting right out on the edge of a balcony close to the stage, but the sound probably wouldn’t be very good, I thought as I took my seat, while Yngve and Asbjørn, I discovered after painstakingly scanning the audience, were like two birds on a perch under the ceiling, where the sound would probably be much better.
I sat back in the seat, which was upholstered in red velvet, and gazed across, not focusing on anything in particular. I was exhausted, and it was good to be surrounded by other people and to have peace and quiet. I hadn’t been to a concert since I lived in Norway. It was a big thing when a band came to town then. Now David Byrne could play in a pub two hundred meters from our apartment and I wouldn’t go. I had lost music, which had once meant so much to me, it was no longer relevant, a bit like watching TV. Now and then it returned with the force of an ax biting into ice, bringing a sense of grief for everything else I had lost on the path I had trodden.
The warm-up band was Norwegian. They stood in the middle of the stage, which wasn’t theirs, they’d rented it, and for some reason I was reminded of a tent pitched in a parking lot, that was what they made me think of. Their sound was low and the lights remained on. But they were pretty good. Hukkelberg, I think that is what they were called.
I looked across the rows of seats and saw the two of them sitting at the top, glowing, sort of, they were the only two faces I recognized in a sea of strangers.
After reading Proust it was impossible not to see such an old theater as an underwater scene, a kind of coral reef with mussels or shells for seats and fishtails or jellyfish tentacles for women’s dresses. The way he transformed everything and imbued it with magic is no longer possible, I thought, because everything has already changed, everything is already something else, pervaded by fiction as it were. We can strip down reality, layer by layer, and never reach its core, for what the last layer covers over is the most unreal of all, the greatest fiction of them all, the true nature of things.
The lights dimmed. A spotlight focused on the stage. Jeff Tweedy, chubby, almost a bit fat, came straight to the microphone, started playing at once and sang in a pure, clear voice, effortless. You could never count on this with English bands, at least not those I had seen live in my time. The exception was Blur, whom I saw with Tore at Sentrum in 1993. Everything they did was not only pitch perfect, but also full of the energy only young people have who want something and suddenly realize they can actually achieve it. But Wilco was American, the music wasn’t for show, they were inside it. The other band members came on, they played for an hour and a half, maybe two, it was so peaceful sitting there, and at times the music had such an emotional intensity that I lost all control and just cried. Afterwards, excited after this excursion back into early adulthood, we met outside and went and got drunk. I’d told them that trains ran all night, but when we arrived at the station, it was closed and we had to take a taxi the whole way to Malmö. Over the bridge the night felt like enclosing walls, the lights shivering as they lit up more and more meters of grayish asphalt, I felt as if I were in a dream. The next day the angst was immense, but I still went out with them, we ate at an Asian restaurant and Asbjørn regaled us with stories he’d heard from a doctor friend, who had told him about all the objects people stuffed up their asses when they were alone and then were unable to retrieve.
* * *
In late autumn my first novel was nominated for the Brage Prize and I flew to Oslo with Linda to attend the award ceremony. After we had dropped off our luggage at the hotel she went to the hairdresser’s to have her hair done, or styled, maybe the term is, while I popped into the publishing house to talk to Geir. On my return I knocked on the door and Linda opened up sporting her new hairstyle.
“What do you think?” she said. “Honestly.”
At first I didn’t answer, I went into the room and sat down. Did she want me to confirm what she herself thought and say it was great or did she want, as she said, an honest answer?
I thought it looked terrible and had a feeling that she might think so too.
“It looks like what a fifty-year-old might consider nice,” I said.
“Yes, doesn’t it. Isn’t it awful?”
“It is.”
“Good. Then I’ll wash it out and go as normal.”
Elisabeth, who worked at the publishing house, came to pick us up, then we took a taxi to the ceremony. Big building, lots of people, a room for the nominees. To my horror, I saw an Aftenposten journalist that I had written about in Book 2, and I hadn’t minced my words. As soon as he saw me he came over and introduced himself. Did I remember him? Indeed I did, I said. He laughed and said it was an honor to appear in my book, even in the way he did. And then he said, But you were wrong about one thing. I’m not a privileged Oslo West kid. No? I said. I’m sorry. And then I noticed Kjartan Fløgstad, my old hero, the gentleman socialist writer I had also written about. I introduced Linda, he introduced his wife, we exchanged a few words while I kept looking around, I didn’t want to be here, I couldn’t stay here, I couldn’t stand this. Ragnar Hovland, my old writing teacher, he was there. I stood around, and then I persuaded Linda to go out for a smoke by the entrance where people were still streaming in. The darkness was good, the rain was good, all the wet, slippery brown leaves on the grass were good, but not the feeling that you were being watched, that wasn’t good. When we sat down at the front, where two seats were reserved for us, beside Kjartan Fløgstad and his wife, a photographer leaned over from the balcony and took a photo of Linda. She didn’t see, I said nothing, maybe I was wrong. The show started, there was music, there were readings and sketches, and I was close to throwing up because I could see the stage and feel the audience at my back, and if I won I would not only have to go up there, but also say something. Unfortunately it was me who had to go up. The statuette was as heavy as a murder weapon. Holding it in my hand, I had planned to say that many people who had read the book probably imagined that I would shed a tear, but I didn’t dare, so I mumbled something about a character in the novel I had met in the bar, and talked about the time I had moved away from home and what books I had been reading then, which had been written by the other nominees. It was true, Roy Jacobsen had just brought out The New Water that year, and I had bought it and the first book by Fløgstad I had ever read, Dalen Portland. I thanked Linda and said she was the most generous person I had ever met, and I was happy I hadn’t said anything about shedding a tear, my voice cracked a little when I spoke to Linda, she had been looking up at me from below. Then I went back and sat down. I wished that Fløgstad had been the one to rise to his feet and go up and accept the statuette, a thousand times over, he could also receive awards with dignity, I assumed, unlike me, who only wanted the floor to swallow me up in my shame and humiliation. Afterwards everyone repaired to a big Irish pub nearby. I sat with Linda and Frederik and some of his colleagues in the courtyard, the rain dripping down the walls and tent poles, or whatever they were called, the supports holding up the temporary roof. Frederik had met Linda the summer we got together, at the time he was visiting us with Kjetil and Richard and we all went on a pub crawl. They were talking now, I stared into the distance drinking beer, I occasionally answered a question from the others, that was how life had become, I was someone you asked questions. A well-known writer came over. We said hello, I was embarrassed, I knew he didn’t like what
I wrote. He had mentioned this once and been ironic, which made this even harder. But he didn’t want to say just hello and congratulate me, he wanted to talk, and he spent at least five minutes refining his attitude to me and my books, he couldn’t say straight out that he didn’t like them, that they were bad in other words, but nor could he not say that, so what came out of his mouth was impossible to grasp. Why he was saying what he was saying? Was it something social that had to be cleared out of the way before we could talk? Or were there some aesthetic reflections which he thought it important to state, so that I wouldn’t believe he was there on any other premise? He stood there for so long that his role imperceptibly changed from that of someone who had come over to say hello to someone who had a seat at the table. He was pleasant, he always had been, but why was he at my table? Did he like my books? Apparently not. Did he like me? Perhaps, perhaps not. But the odds of him coming over to my table because I was a reclusive author who tinkered with words in a valley in Vestland were low, I suspected, unless this reclusive author was considered the pick of his colleagues. Then he would have come. As indeed would I. Once I had been talking to a writer and her husband at a table in a restaurant in a tiny Norwegian town during a literary festival, and Lars Saabye Christensen sat down at the same table, I glanced over at him, didn’t quite catch what my conversation partner said, and as soon as I got the chance I turned to him, didn’t we have the same publishing house in England? I did that despite seeing that she had noticed my glances at Saabye Christensen and understood exactly how my mind was working. It still wasn’t too late to save the situation, but my desire to talk to him was greater than the certainty that I was making a bad impression. At the same festival the emcee and I were rebuked by the wife of one of the writers because the emcee had devoted more time and emotion to my book than her husband’s. This mixture of the highest and the lowest and most basic that literature can be is typical of the writer milieu, and it’s hardly surprising, there are few areas of life where people invest so much of themselves to gain so little. The year I made my debut, late one evening I was sitting with Erik Fosnes Hansen in a hotel room, flattered to be talking to him, even if I hadn’t read anything by him since he made his ridiculously young debut with The Falcon Tower, a novel I read when I was at gymnas, I happened to mention Vagant and it was like waving a red rag to a bull. Vagant! he yelled. He had sold hundreds of thousands of books, they were published all over the world, he received good reviews everywhere, but not in Vagant, they barely considered him a writer, this tiny literary magazine that in reality consisted of a handful of young people who gathered in cafés in the East End of Oslo. He despised them. Wishy-washy chitchat and academic intellectualism, he said. Why? He didn’t say, but I imagine a lack of acknowledgment on their part might have played a role. When my first book began to sell I was worried about my status. For a while joining the editing team at Vagant saved me, and it was quite perfect from a strategic point of view, there I was both a big-time and a smalltime writer, wriggling my way upward and meeting more and more names on the way, until one rainy autumn evening I ended up in one of Oslo’s Irish pubs and the big names came to me. Knausgaard had become a trademark, a logo, the newspapers had been full of it that autumn, and now I could feel how much energy lay in its proliferation. People looked at me. People apologized to me before saying anything. People didn’t dare speak. People came over when they were drunk. It was remarkable. And it wasn’t the books I had written because they were pretty run-of-the mill – two sons who bury their dead father and a frustrated father of small children who strips himself naked for the reader – it was the name and all the resonance it contained now.
My Struggle, Book 6 Page 116