Karl Knausgaard - My Struggle - Book Two

‘I understood that, and while taking advantage of it, for I was not strong enough to resist all that his openness gave me, it also frightened me.

‘He knew something I didn’t know, he understood something I didn’t understand, he could see something I couldn’t see.

‘I told him.

‘He smiled.

‘“I’m forty years old, Karl Ove. You’re thirty. That’s a big difference. That’s what you’ve noticed.”

‘“I don’t think so,” I said. “There’s something else. You have some sort of insight into things, which I lack.”

‘“Tell me more! Tell me more!”

‘He laughed.

‘His aura was centred around his dark intense eyes, but he was not himself dark, he laughed a lot, the smile barely left his slightly twisted lips. His aura was strong, he was the kind of person whose presence you noticed, but it wasn’t a physical presence because you simply didn’t notice his light slim body. At least I didn’t. Arve, he was a shaven head, dark eyes, a permanent smile and a hearty laugh. His reasoning always led, for me, to unexpected conclusions. The fact that he had opened up for me was more than I could have hoped for. All of a sudden I could say everything that I had kept inside me so far, and more, for it was as if it had rubbed off on me. Now my reasoning set off on expected paths, and the feeling it gave me was one of hope. Perhaps I was a writer after all? Arve was. But me? With all my ordinariness? With my life of football and films?

‘How I prattled on.

‘The taxi arrived, I opened the boot lid and babbled away, hungover and the worse for wear. We put our two bags in, got in the car, I babbled the whole way through the Swedish countryside to Biskops-Arnö, where the seminar had long started. They’d just had lunch when we rolled out of the taxi.’

‘And that was how it continued?’ Geir asked.

‘And that was how it continued,’ I said.

A man stepped forward and introduced himself as Ingmar Lemhagen. He was the course director. He told me he had enjoyed my book and that it had reminded him of another Norwegian author. ‘Who?’ I asked, he smiled wryly, said it would have to wait until we went through my texts in the plenary.

I pondered. Had to be Finn Alnæs or Agnar Mykle.

I deposited my bags outside, went into the hall, shovelled some food onto a plate and devoured it. Everything swayed, I was still drunk, but not so much that I didn’t feel my chest bursting with the excitement and pleasure of being there.

I was shown to a room, dropped off my luggage, went over to the building where the course was being held. That was when I saw her. She was leaning against the wall, I didn’t say anything to her, there were lots of people around, but I looked at her, and there was something about her I wanted, the second I saw her, it was there.

A kind of explosion.

We were put in the same group. The group leader, a Finnish woman, said nothing as we took our places, it was some sort of teaching trick she was employing, but no one was taken in, everyone was silent for the first five minutes, until it became too unpleasant and someone took the initiative.

I was aware of her the whole time.

What she said, how she spoke, but most of all her presence, her body in the room.

Why I don’t know. Perhaps the state I was in made me more receptive to what she had or the person she was.

She introduced herself. Linda Boström. Her debut had been a collection of poems called Gör mig behaglig för såret , she lived in Stockholm and was twenty-five years old.

The course lasted five days. I circled round her the whole time. In the evenings I got drunk, as drunk as I could, I hardly slept. One night I followed Arve into a crypt-like cellar, down there he danced round and round, it was impossible to communicate with him, and when we left and I realised he was beyond reach I cried. He saw. You’re crying, he said. Yes, I said. But you’ll have forgotten by tomorrow. One night I didn’t sleep a wink. When the last ones left for bed at five, I went out for a long walk in the forest, the sun was up, I saw deer leaping between the old deciduous trees and was happy in a mysterious way I didn’t recognise. The writing I did during the course was unusually good, it was as if I was in touch with a spring, something all of my own and yet foreign to me gushed up, clear and fresh. Or perhaps it was just the euphoria that caused me to misinterpret. We had classes together, I sat beside Linda, she asked me if I remembered the scene in Blade Runner where the light through the window fades. I said I did, and that the moment when the owl turns is the most beautiful in the whole film. She looked at me. A questioning look, not acknowledgement. The course directors went through the texts we had written. They came to mine. Lemhagen started to talk about it, and it was as though what he said elevated itself higher and higher, I had never heard anyone talk about a text in that way, elevate what was actually the bare essence, and he didn’t deal with characters or themes or what lay on the surface, he dealt with the metaphors and the unseen function they performed, bringing everything together, uniting them in an almost organic fashion. I had never known that was what I did, but now he said it I knew, and for me it was trees and leaves, grass and clouds and a glowing sun, that was all, I understood everything in the light of this, also Lemhagen’s interpretation.

He looked at me.

‘What this reminds me of, above all else, is Tor Ulven’s prose. Are you familiar with his work, Karl Ove?’

I nodded and looked down.

No one was allowed to see the blood foaming in my veins, trumpets blaring and knights galloping in my insides. Tor Ulven, that was the summit.

Oh, but I knew he was mistaken, he was exaggerating, he was Swedish and probably didn’t understand the finer points of the Norwegian language very well. But the mere mention of Ulven’s name… Wasn’t I a pulp fiction writer? Was there anything in my writing that had resonances of Tor Ulven?

My blood roared, my elation rushed screaming along my nerve channels.

I looked down, wishing intensely that he would stop and go on to the next person, and when he did I slumped back with relief.

That night all the drinking continued in my room, Linda said we could smoke if we took down the fire alarm, I did, we drank, I played Wilco’s Summerteeth , she didn’t seem to be interested in it, from what I could see, I showed her a Roman cookery book I had bought on an excursion to Uppsala the day before, so wonderful to cook the way the Romans did, I thought, but she didn’t agree, quite the contrary, she turned abruptly away from me and her eyes sought something else. People began to drift off to their rooms, I hoped Linda would not follow suit, but then she was gone too, and I went into the forest again, roamed around until seven, and when I returned an angry man came running after me. ‘Knausgaard, are you Knausgaard?’ he shouted. ‘Yes, I am,’ I said. He stopped in front of me and began to tear me off a strip. Fire alarm, dangerous, irresponsible, he yelled. I said yes, I’m sorry, wasn’t thinking, apologies. He stood glowering at me with fury in his eyes, I swayed to and fro, I couldn’t care less, went to my room, slept for two hours. When I appeared for breakfast Lemhagen came over to me, he apologised profusely for what had happened, the caretaker had gone too far, it wouldn’t happen again.

I understood nothing. Was he apologising to me?

What had happened fitted all too well, in my view, with the person I had become in the course of these days: a sixteen-year-old. My feelings were the feelings of a sixteen-year-old, my actions the actions of a sixteen-year-old. All of a sudden I was as unsure of myself as I had ever been. Everyone assembled in one room, we were going to read our texts, one after the other, the idea being that all of us together would form a choir with individual voices chiming in. Lemhagen pointed to someone; he started reading. Then he pointed to me. I looked at him, disconcerted.