Karl Knausgaard - My Struggle - Book Two

And then he didn’t talk about himself.

What had I just done, if not that and only that?

I gave my ticket to the black man in the ticket office window, he stamped it hard and pushed it back with expressionless eyes, and I went back down the escalator to the underground, through the tunnel and onto the narrow platform, where, after confirming that the next train was due in seven minutes, I sat down on a bench.

In late autumn, when Out of the World was published, TV2 News wanted to do an interview. They came to my home to collect me, we drove down to the Hurtigruten terminal, where the interview was going to take place, and on the way there, by the Technology Centre at the end of Nygårdsparken, the journalist turned and asked who I was.

‘Who are you actually?’ he asked.

‘What do you mean?’ I answered.

‘Well, Erik Fosnes Hansen is the sage, the cultural conservative, the child prodigy. Roy Jacobsen is the Socialist Party writer. Vigdis Hjort is the wanton and drunken female writer. Who are you? I know nothing about you.’

I shrugged. The sun was glittering on the snow.

‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘I’m just an ordinary fellow.’

‘Come on! You’ve got to give me something. Something you’ve done?’

‘Had a few odd jobs. Studied a bit. You know…’

He turned round in his seat. Later that day he solved the problem by showing rather than telling: towards the end of the interview he pieced together a series of pauses and hesitations to represent my personality, and brought it to a conclusion with my statement: ‘Ibsen said that he who stood alone was strongest. I think that’s wrong.’

Sitting on the bench, I threw up my hands and took a deep breath as the memory of what I had said overcame me.

How could I have said anything like that?

Had I believed it?

Yes, I had. But it was my mother’s ideas I was expressing, she was the one who was preoccupied by human relationships, who thought that was where value lay, not me. That is, at the time I was, at the time I believed it. But not from any personal experience, it was just one of the things that were as they were.

Ibsen had been right. Everything I saw around me confirmed it. Relationships were there to eradicate individuality, to fetter freedom and suppress that which was pushing through. My mother was never so angry as when we discussed the concept of freedom. When I expressed my opinion, she snorted and said that was just an American notion without any content, vacuous and fallacious. We were here for others. But this was the idea that had led to the systematised existence we had now, where unpredictability had vanished and you could go from nursery to school to university and into working life as if it were a tunnel, convinced that your choices had been made of your own free will, while in reality you had been sieved through like grains of sand right from your very first school day: some were sent into practical jobs, some into theoretical, some to the top, some to the bottom, all while being taught that everyone was equal. This was the idea that had made us, at least my generation, have expectations of life, to live in the belief that we could make demands, make real demands and blame every possible circumstance other than ourselves if it didn’t turn out the way we had imagined, that made us rage against the state if a tsunami came and you didn’t receive immediate help. How pathetic was that? Become embittered if you didn’t get the job you had merited. And this was the thinking that meant the fall was no longer a possibility, except for the very weakest, because you could always get money, and pure existence, one where you stand face to face with a life-threatening emergency or peril, had been completely eliminated. This was the thinking that had spawned a culture in which the greatest mediocrities, warm and with a well-fed stomach, trumpeted their cheap platitudes, thus allowing writers such as Lars Saabye Christensen or whoever to be worshipped as if Virgil himself were sitting on the sofa and telling us whether he had used a pen or a typewriter or a computer and what times of the day he wrote. I hated it, I didn’t want to know about it. But who was talking to journalists about how he wrote his mediocre books as though he were some literary giant, a champion of the written word, if not myself?

How can you sit there receiving applause when you know that what you have done is not good enough?

I had one opportunity. I had to cut all my ties with the flattering, thoroughly corrupt world of culture in which everyone, every single little upstart, was for sale, cut all my ties with the vacuous TV and newspaper world, sit down in a room and read in earnest, not contemporary literature but literature of the highest quality, and then write as if my life depended on it. For twenty years if need be.

But I couldn’t grasp the opportunity. I had a family and I owed it to them to be there. I had friends. And I had a weakness in my character which meant that I would say yes, yes, when I wanted to say no, no, which was so afraid of hurting others, which was so afraid of conflict and which was so afraid of not being liked that it could forgo all principles, all dreams, all opportunities, everything that smacked of truth, to prevent this happening.

I was a whore. This was the only suitable term.

Half an hour later, after I closed the door behind me at home, there was a sound of voices in the living room. I poked my head in and saw that Mikaela was there. They were curled up on the sofa with a cup of tea in their hands. On the table in front of them was a candlestick with three lighted candles, a dish with three pieces of cheese in it and a basket full of various biscuits.

‘Hi, Karl Ove, how was it?’ Linda asked.

They smiled at me.

‘OK,’ I said with a shrug of the shoulders. ‘Nothing worth talking about anyway.’

‘Would you like a cup of tea and some cheese?’

‘No, thanks.’

I unwound my scarf as I stood there, hung it in the wardrobe with my jacket, untied my laces and put my shoes on the shelf by the wall. The floor underneath was grey with sand and gravel. I would have to join them for a while so as not to appear totally unsociable, I thought, and went into the living room.

Mikaela was talking about a meeting she’d had with the minister of culture, Leif Pagrotsky. He was a tiny man and had been sitting on a large sofa, she said, with a huge cushion on his lap, which he hugged as he sat there, and even, according to her, sank his teeth into. But she had the greatest respect for him. He had a razor-sharp mind and an enormous capacity for work. I wasn’t sure what qualifications Mikaela had, since I had only met her in contexts like this, but whatever they were they obviously worked well for her: barely thirty years old, she went from one top post to the next. Like so many women I had met she was close to her father, who had something or other to do with literature. With her mother, a demanding lady who lived alone in an apartment in Gothenburg, from what I had gathered, she had a more complicated relationship. Mikaela often changed her partners, and no matter how different they were they had one thing in common: they were always inferior to her. Of all the stories she had told over the three years since I first met her there was one in particular that stood out in my mind. We were sitting in the bar at Folkoperan and she told us about a dream she’d had. She had been to a party and had gone without any trousers on, so she was naked from the waist down, like Donald Duck. It had made her feel uneasy, she said, but that wasn’t all, there had also been something alluring about it, and then she simply lay down on a table with her naked backside in the air. What did we think the dream could mean?