Karl Knausgaard - My Struggle - Book Two

‘There are two things you’ve said that I’ve taken note of and have made me think a lot,’ Geir said, looking at me with his knife and fork hovering over his plate. ‘The first was when you were talking about Harry Martinson’s suicide. He cut open his stomach after receiving the Nobel Prize. You said you could understand exactly why.’

‘Yes, but that’s obvious,’ I said. ‘Getting the Nobel Prize for literature is the greatest dishonour of all for a writer. And his prize was systematically called into question. He was Swedish, he was a member of the Swedish Academy, it was clear there was some kind of cronyism going on, that he didn’t really deserve it. And if he didn’t deserve it, the whole affair was a mockery. You have to be bloody strong if you’re going to get over that sort of mockery. And for Martinson, with all his inferiority complexes, it must have been unbearable. If that was why he did it. What was the second?’

‘Hm?’

‘You said there were two things I’d said which had stuck in your mind. What was the second?’

‘Oh, that was Jastrau in Tom Kristensen’s Havoc . Do you remember?’

I shook my head.

‘There’s no safer place for secrets than in you,’ he said. ‘You forget everything. Your brain’s like Swiss cheese without the cheese. You told me Havoc was the scariest book you’d ever read. You said the fall in it wasn’t a fall. He just let go, let himself go, gave up everything he had, to drink, and in the book that seemed like a real alternative. A good alternative, that is. Just letting go of everything you have, letting yourself go. Like from the quayside.’

‘Now I remember. He writes so well about what it’s like to be drunk. How fantastic it can be. And then you have the feeling it’s not such a big deal. I hadn’t thought about the lazy, unresisting side of the fall before. At the time I saw it as something dramatic, something far-reaching. And it was shocking to think of it as everyday routine, arbitrary and maybe even wonderful. Because it is indeed wonderful. The second day of inebriation, for example. The thoughts that come into your mind…’

‘Ha ha ha!’

‘You could never let go,’ I said. ‘Could you?’

‘No. Could you ?’

‘No.’

‘Ha ha ha! But almost everyone I know has done. Stefan boozes all the time on his farm, doesn’t he. Boozes, grills whole pigs and drives a tractor. When I was at home this summer Odd Gunnar was drinking whisky from a milk tumbler. The pretext for filling it to the brim was that I was visiting him. But I didn’t drink. And then there’s Tony. But he’s a drug addict, that’s a bit different.’

From one of the tables on the other side a woman who’d had her back to us until now stood up, and as she headed for the door where the toilets were I saw it was Gilda. In the few seconds I was within her sight I bowed my head and studied the table. Not that I had anything against her, I just didn’t want to talk to her right now. She had been one of Linda’s best friends for years, they had even lived together for a while, and at the beginning of our relationship we spent quite a bit of time in one another’s company. She’d had a lot to do with the Vertigo publishing house for a period, I never quite worked out what she did there, but at any rate there were photographs of her on one of their covers, a book by the Marquis de Sade; otherwise she worked at Hedengrens bookshop a few days a week, and recently she had started a company with a girlfriend who also had some connection with literature. She was unpredictable and volatile, but not in any pathological way, it was more a surfeit of life, which meant you never knew what she was going to say or do. One side of Linda was a perfect match. The way they met was typical. Linda had spoken to her in the street, they had never seen each other before, but Linda thought Gilda looked interesting, went over to her and they became friends. Gilda had wide hips, a large bosom, dark hair and Latin features, in appearance she was reminiscent of a 1950s female type, and had been courted by more than one well-known Stockholm writer, but a conspicuous girlishness often shone through this façade, an ill-mannered sullen wild quality. Cora, a more fragile nature, had once said she was frightened of her. Gilda was with a literature student, Kettil, who had just begun a doctorate. Having had a proposal about Herman Bang turned down, he had gone for what they wanted, what they would not reject, namely Holocaust literature, which went through without a problem of course. The last time we had seen each other had been at a party at their place, he had just been to a seminar in Denmark where he had met a Norwegian who studied in Bergen, what was his name? I had asked, Jordal he had said, not Preben by any chance? I had said, yes, that was his name, Preben Jordal. I said he was a friend of mine, we had edited Vagant together and I had a high opinion of him, he had both wit and flair, to which Kettil answered nothing, and from the way he said nothing, the slight embarrassment that came over him, a sudden urge to fill my glass and thus create a distance to make the breakdown in communication less obvious, I gathered that Preben might not have mentioned me in equally glowing terms. Then the thought flashed through my mind that he had panned my last book with such vehemence, and twice at that, first in Vagant , afterwards in Morgenbladet , and that this must have been the topic of conversation in Denmark. Kettil was ill at ease because my name had been dragged through the mud. True, this was little more than a theory, yet I was fairly sure there was something in it. It was strange that I hadn’t remembered the panning straight away, but no stranger than my recognition of what lay behind it: Preben belonged to the Bergen section of my memory, that was where he was, while the panning belonged to the Stockholm period, the present, and was tied to the book, not the life around it. Oh, it had hurt, it had been like being stabbed in the heart, or perhaps back would be more apt since I knew Preben. However, I didn’t blame Preben so much, more the fact that my book was not infallible, it was not immune to that kind of criticism, in other words, it was not good enough, and at the same time I was also afraid this verdict would be the one that would be passed on the book, these words the ones that would be remembered.

But surely that wasn’t why I didn’t want to talk to Gilda? Or was it? For me incidents like this lay like a shadow over all those involved. No, it was her company I didn’t want to hear about. It was some kind of link between publishing houses and bookshops, as far as I was informed. Some event management stuff? Festivals and stunts…? Whatever it was I didn’t want to hear about it.

‘Nice evening at your place, by the way,’ Geir said.

‘Was that the last time we saw each other?’

‘Why?’

‘That was five weeks ago. Strange you should bring it up now.’

‘Ah, I see. I was talking about it with Christina yesterday, perhaps that’s why. We were thinking of inviting you all over soon.’

‘Good idea,’ I said. ‘By the way, Thomas is here. Have you seen him? He’s at the back there.’

‘Oh? Have you talked to him?’

‘Briefly. He said he’d come over later.’

‘He’s reading your book now. Did he say?’

I shook my head.

‘He really liked the essay about angels. Thought it should have been much longer. But that’s typical of him not to say anything to you. He must have forgotten you wrote it. Ha ha ha! He’s so terribly forgetful.’

‘I suppose he’s just immersed inside himself,’ I said. ‘The same happens to me. And, for Christ’s sake, I’m only thirty-five. Do you remember when I came here with Thure Erik? We stayed here drinking all day and night. As the hours passed he began to talk about his own life. He told me about his childhood, his mother, father and sisters, about generations of his family. Firstly he’s pretty damned good at storytelling, and secondly there were a couple of quite sensational things he said. However, even though I listened very carefully and even though I thought to myself, this is bloody fantastic, by the following day I had forgotten everything. All that was left was the narrative structure. I remembered that he had talked about his childhood, his father and his family. And that it had been sensational. But I couldn’t remember what it was that constituted the “sensational”. Not a thing! A black hole!’