Karl Knausgaard - My Struggle - Book Two

‘Shall we go then?’ I said.

It was a bit awkward standing together and getting dressed to go out, the hall was too narrow, they were too close, no one said anything. I called goodbye to Linda and we went down the stairs and out. On the front doorstep I lit a cigarette. The temperature was biting cold. The photographer drew me over to the step across the street, where I posed for a few minutes with the cigarette cupped behind my hand until the photographer said he would like it in the picture, if I didn’t mind. I understood what he meant, it gave a bit of life, so I stood on the step smoking while he clicked away and I moved according to his instructions, all of which was registered by the many passers-by, then we walked to the tunnel entrance, where he continued for a further five minutes until he was happy. He left, and I walked in silence with the journalist over the hill and down to the Metro station on the other side. A train pulled into the platform at once, we stepped on and sat by the window facing each other.

‘Taking the Metro still reminds me of the Norway Cup,’ I said. ‘When I catch a whiff of that special smell in the concourses that’s what I think of. I come from a small town, you see, and then the Metro was the most exotic invention in existence. And Pepsi-Cola. We didn’t have that either.’

‘Did you play football for a long time?’

‘Until I was eighteen. But I was never any good. It was a very low level, all of it.’

‘Is everything you do at a low level? You said you hadn’t read any of your books. And in interviews with you that I’ve seen you often talk about how poor what you do is. Aren’t you being a bit too self-critical?’

‘No, I don’t think so. It depends how high you set the bar, of course.’

He peered out of the window as the train emerged from the tunnel at T-Central.

‘Do you think you’re going to win the prize?’ he asked.

‘The Nordic Council one?’

‘Yes.’

‘No.’

‘Who will then?’

‘Monica Fagerholm.’

‘You seem sure?’

‘It’s a very good novel, the author’s a woman and it’s ages since Finland has won it. Of course she’s going to get it.’

The conversation went quiet again. The time before and after an interview was always uneasy; he, and I didn’t know him, was there to elicit my innermost thoughts, but not yet, the situation hadn’t arisen, the roles hadn’t been allocated, we were on an equal footing, but there were no points of contact, nonetheless we had to talk.

I thought about Ingrid. I couldn’t say anything to anyone, not even Linda, until I was absolutely sure that I was right. I would simply have to mark the bottles. Would have to do it this evening. Then have a look tomorrow. If the levels were down I would have to take it from there.

We arrived in Skanstull, and with the town glittering in the darkness around us we walked in silence to Pelikanen, where we found ourselves a table at the back of the pub. We sat chatting for an hour and a half about me and my work, then I got up and left while he, not having to fly back to Norway until the next day, remained where he was. As always after long interviews I felt empty, drained like a ditch. As always, it felt as though I had betrayed myself. Merely by sitting there I had gone along with the premise, which was that the two books I had written were good and important, and that I, the writer, was an unusual and interesting person. That was the starting point for the conversation: everything I said was important. If I didn’t say anything important, well, then I was just hiding it. Because it obviously had to be somewhere! So when I told stories about my childhood, for example, some perfectly normal, ordinary story everyone had experienced, it was important because it was me who said it. It said something about me, the writer of two good and important books. And I not only went along with this view, which formed the basis for the conversation, but did it with great enthusiasm. I sat there jabbering away like a parrot in the zoo. All while knowing the reality of the situation. How often did a good meaningful novel come out in Norway? Somewhere between every ten to twenty years. The last good Norwegian novel was All Ablaze by Kjartan Fløgstad, and that was published in 1980, twenty-five years ago. The last good one before that was The Birds by Vesaas, which appeared in 1957, so a further twenty-three years previously. How many Norwegian novels had there been in the meantime? Thousands! Yes, thousands! Some of them good, a few more passable, most weak. That’s how it is, nothing to shout about, everyone knows this. The problem is what surrounds all these authorships, the flattery that mediocre writers thrive on and, as a consequence of their false self-image, everything they are emboldened to say to the press and TV.

I know what I’m talking about. I’m one of them myself.

Oh, I could cut off my head with bitterness and shame that I have allowed myself to be lured, not just once but time after time. If I have learned one thing over these years which seems to me immensely important, particularly in an era such as ours, overflowing with such mediocrity, it is the following:

Don’t believe you are anybody.

Do not bloody believe you are somebody.

Because you are not. You’re just a smug mediocre little shit.

Do not believe that you’re anything special. Do not believe that you’re worth anything, because you aren’t. You’re just a little shit.

So keep your head down and work, you little shit. Then at least you’ll get something out of it. Shut your mouth, keep your head down, work and know that you’re not worth a shit.

This, more or less, was what I had learned.

This was the sum of all my experience.

This was the only true bloody thought I’d ever had.

This was one side of the coin. The other was that I was preoccupied, to an unusually high degree, by being liked, and always had been, ever since I was small. I had attached huge importance to what other people thought about me ever since I was seven. When newspapers showed some interest in what I was doing and who I was, it was, on the one hand, confirmation that I was liked and therefore something part of me accepted with great pleasure while, on the other, it became an almost unmanageable problem because it was no longer possible to control other people’s opinions of me, for the simple reason that I no longer knew them, no longer saw them. So whenever I had done an interview and there was something in the interview I hadn’t said or what I had said was cast in a different light, I moved heaven and earth to change it. If it wasn’t possible, my self-image burned with shame. The fact that despite all this I went on giving interviews, and once again sat facing a journalist somewhere, was the result of my desire for flattery being stronger than both my fear of looking an idiot and any ideals of quality I had, as well as acknowledging that it was important for the books to reach a readership. When I had written A Time to Every Purpose Under Heaven I said to Geir Gulliksen that I didn’t want to do any interviews, but after talking to him I decided to do them after all, such was the effect he had on me, and I justified the about-turn with the excuse that I owed the publishing house nothing less. But it was no good: I was a writer, not a salesman or a whore.

All this turned into one unholy mess. I often complained I was presented as an idiot in the newspapers, but it was no one’s fault but my own because I saw how other writers were presented — for example Kjartan Fløgstad — they definitely never came across as idiots. Fløgstad was a man of integrity, he stood as tall as a tree whatever was going on around him, and had to belong, I guessed, to that rare breed of whole person.