Karl Knausgaard - My Struggle - Book Two

‘The lights are red!’ he said. ‘Didn’t you see? Fire-engine red!’

I hadn’t even seen any lights.

‘Well, that’s it then, isn’t it?’

‘I’m afraid so,’ he said. ‘If we have to intervene, you’ve failed. Those are the rules. Do you want to drive a bit more?’

‘No. Let’s go back.’

The whole test had lasted three minutes. I was home by half past nine. Linda regarded me with tense eyes.

‘Failed,’ I said.

‘Oh no!’ she said. ‘Poor you! What happened?’

‘Went through on red.’

‘Really?’

‘Yes, really! Who would have imagined when I got up early this morning that I would jump the lights during the test! It’ll be fine next time. I won’t do it again in the next test.’

It wasn’t a big issue. We didn’t have a car, and it didn’t matter whether I got my licence in January or March. And I had already squandered such an incredible amount of money on driving lessons that a handful more wouldn’t make much difference. The only problem was that we had planned a trip at the end of the month. I had agreed to do a job in Søgne, in southern Norway, with the idea of going there as a family and afterwards travelling back via Sandøya, outside Tvedestrand, and staying at a guest house for a couple of days to see what it was like. In fact, I had checked out Sandøya a few years ago and thought it would be a perfect place for us to live. An island with around two hundred inhabitants, a nursery, a school with classes for children up to ten and no cars. The countryside was exactly like the area I had grown up with, and for which I felt such a deep yearning, except that it wasn’t, it wasn’t Tromøya or Arendal or Kristiansand, which I would not have returned to for the whole wide world, but something different, something new. Sometimes I thought the longing for the terrain we had grown up with was biological, somehow rooted in us, that the instinct which could make a cat travel several hundred kilometres to find the place it came from also functioned in us, the human animal, on a par with other deeply archaic currents within us.

Sometimes I looked at pictures of Sandøya on the Net, and the sight of the landscape gave me a rush that was so strong it completely overshadowed the potentially lonely and abandoned existence there. Not for Linda, of course, she was more sceptical, but not entirely closed to the idea. Living in a forest by the sea would suit us a great deal better than living on the sixth floor in the centre of the town. So we spent hours speculating, long enough for us to want to go there and check it out. But then I didn’t get my licence, so I had to go to Søgne alone, which meant the whole point of the job was lost. What was I going to talk about?

That evening, Geir rang me as I was booking the flight online. We had already spoken during the day, but he hadn’t been himself over recent weeks, in his own controlled way, so there was nothing strange about him phoning again. I sat back in my armchair and put my feet on the desk. He told me a bit about the biography he was writing, about Montgomery Clift and how he always strove to get the maximum out of life in all ways. My only reference point to Montgomery Clift was via The Clash, their line ‘Montgomery Clift, honey!’ from London Calling , and it transpired that was also where Geir had heard his name, although in a different context: in Iraq he had been living in a waterworks with Robin Banks, an English junkie who had been one of the band’s best friends, he travelled with them on tour, he even had a song dedicated to him, and he had told him how Montgomery Clift had occupied an important place in their lives, which prompted Geir to find out more about him. Another reason was that The Misfits was one of his favourite films. I spoke about Thomas Mann’s Buddenbrooks , which I had just started rereading, about how perfect the sentences were, how high the quality of the writing was, for which reason I enjoyed, truly enjoyed, every page, which was a rare occurrence, and about how this perfection, like the setting and the form incidentally, belonged to a different era from Thomas Mann’s, which made it more like an imitation, a reconstruction, or in other words, a pastiche. What happened when the pastiche surpassed the original? Could it indeed? This was a classic problem; writers as far back as Virgil must have grappled with it. How closely is a style or a form tied to the particular era and the particular culture it first appeared in? Is a style or a form destroyed as soon as it appears? In Thomas Mann’s hands it wasn’t destroyed, that was not the right word, more ‘ambivalent’ perhaps, endlessly ambivalent, whence the irony, the irony that would destabilise all foundations, flowed. From there we moved on to Stefan Zweig’s The World of Yesterday , the fantastic portrait of the turn of the last century, when age and gravity and not youth and beauty were desirable, and all young people tried to look middle-aged with their stomachs, watch chains, cigars and bald patches. All blown to pieces by the First World War, which, followed by the Second World War, formed a chasm between us and them. Geir then talked about Montgomery Clift again, his tumultuous life, his unbridled vitalism. He realised that all the biographies he had read over the last year had this in common: they were all about vitalists. Not in theory, but in practice, they were always out to get the most from life. Jack London, André Malraux, Nordahl Grieg, Ernest Hemingway. Hunter S. Thompson. Mayakovsky.

‘I can easily understand why Sartre took amphetamines,’ he said. ‘Life in the fast lane, achieve more, burn. That’s how it is. But the most consistent one of them all was Mishima. I always go back to him. He was forty-five when he took his own life. He was consistent. The hero had to be good-looking. Couldn’t be old. And Jünger, who went the other way. On his hundredth birthday he sat drinking cognac and smoking cigars, as sharp as a razor. Everything’s about strength. That’s all I’m interested in. Strength, courage, determination. Intelligence? No. I think you get that if you want. It’s not important, it’s not interesting. Growing up in the 70s and the 80s is a joke. We don’t do anything. And what we do do is just rubbish. I write to recapture my lost gravity. That’s what I do. But of course it serves no purpose. You know where I sit. You know what I do. My life is so trivial. And my enemies, they’re so trivial. It’s not worth wasting your strength on. But there’s nothing else. So here I sit, thrashing around in my bedroom.’

‘Vitalism,’ I said. ‘There is another vitalism, you know, the one connected with land and kinfolk. Norway in the 1920s.’

‘Oh, I’m not interested in that. There’s not a trace of Nazism in the vitalism I’m talking about. Not that it would matter if there was, but there isn’t. What I’m talking about is anti-liberal culture.’

‘There wasn’t a trace of Nazism in Norwegian vitalism either. It was the middle classes who imported Nazism, converted it into something abstract, an idea, in other words something that didn’t exist. It was about a longing for a plot of land, a longing for family. What makes Hamsun so complicated was that as a person he was so rootless, so anchorless, and as such modern, in an American sense. But he despised America, mass humanity, rootlessness. It was himself he despised. The irony that results from this is a great deal more relevant than Thomas Mann’s because it has nothing to do with style, it deals with basic existence.’

‘I’m not a writer, I’m a farmer,’ Geir said. ‘Ha ha ha! But, no, you can keep your land. I’m only interested in the social world. Nothing else. You can read Lucretius and shout hallelujah. You can talk about forests in the seventeenth century. I couldn’t be less interested. It’s only people that count.’