Karl Knausgaard - My Struggle - Book Two

‘Of course,’ Linda said, and went to the end of the counter, where we took our turn in the queue.

Cora was the first of Linda’s friends I had met. She loved Norway and all things Norwegian, had lived there for some years and was prone to speaking Norwegian when she was drunk. She was the only Swede I had met who understood that there were big differences between our two countries, and she understood in the only way it could be understood, physically. The way people bump into each other in the street, in shops and on public transport. The way people in Norway always chat, in kiosks, queues and taxis. Her eyes had widened in surprise when she read Norwegian newspapers and saw the tone of debates. They really give each other a tongue-lashing! she said with enthusiasm. They give it everything they’ve got! They’re not afraid of anything! Not only have they got every opinion under the sun and the courage to say things no Swede would ever say, they also do it while going at each other hammer and tongs. Oh, how liberating that is! Her reaction made it easier to get to know her than Linda’s other friends, who were sociable in quite a different, formal and more polished way, not to mention the office collective where she had got me in. They were kind and friendly, often invited me to lunch, and just as often I declined, apart from a couple of occasions when I sat silently listening to their conversations. On one of the occasions they were discussing the imminent invasion of Iraq and the neighbouring eternal conflict between Israel and Palestine. Discussing is perhaps not the right word; it was more like small talk about the food or the weather. The following day I met Cora, and she told me her friend had resigned her post at the collective in a fury. Apparently there had been a heated exchange of opinions about the relationship between Israel and Palestine, she had lost her temper and resigned her post on the spot. And sure enough, her place had been cleared the next day. But I had been present! And I hadn’t noticed anything! No aggression, no irritability, nothing. Only their friendly chatty voices and their elbows sticking out like chicken wings as they plied their knives and forks. This was Sweden, these were the Swedes.

But Cora also got annoyed that day. I told her that Geir had gone to Iraq two weeks before to write a book about the war. She said he was a conceited egotistical idiot. She wasn’t a political person, so I was surprised by her violent reaction. In fact, there were tears in her eyes as she cursed him. Was her empathy that strong?

Her father had gone to the war in the Congo in the 1960s, she said then. He had worked as a war correspondent. It had destroyed him. Not that he had been injured or anything like that, nor that the experiences had shaken him in such a way that he bore mental scars; more the opposite, he wanted to go back, he wanted to have more of the life he had lived there, close to death, a need nothing in Sweden could fulfil. She told us a strange story about how he had ridden a motorbike at a circus afterwards, the motorbike of death she called it, and of course he had started drinking. He was destructive and had died by his own hand when Cora was young. The tears in her eyes were for him, she was grieving for him.

Fortunate then that she had such a strong, authoritative and strict mother?

Well, not necessarily… My impression was that she viewed Cora’s life with some disapproval, and Cora took that more to heart than she should. Her mother was an accountant, and it was clear that Cora’s wanderings in a vaguely cultural landscape did not quite correspond to her expectations of what constituted a suitable life for her daughter. Cora had earned her corn as a journalist on a variety of women’s magazines, although that didn’t leave much of a mark on her self-image, and she wrote poems, she was a poet. She had been to Biskops-Arnö, the writing school where Linda had also been, and she wrote good poetry from what I could judge; I heard her do a reading once and was surprised. Her poems were neither language poetry, which most young Swedish poets went in for, nor delicate or sensitive, like those of the others, but something else, unrestrained and exploratory in a non-personal way, written in expansive language it was difficult to associate with her. She remained, however, unpublished. Swedish publishers were infinitely more budget-conscious than their Norwegian counterparts and much more careful, so if you didn’t align yourself perfectly with the literary surroundings you didn’t have an earthly. If she held her nerve and worked hard she would succeed in the end because she had talent, but when you looked at her, endurance was not the first quality to leap up at you. She was given to self-pity, spoke in a low voice, often about depressing matters, although she could also turn on a five- øre piece and be lively and interesting. When she drank she could take centre stage and make a scene, the only one of Linda’s friends who would. Perhaps that was why I found her so congenial?

Long hair hung down on either side of her face. The eyes behind the small glasses had a kind of dog-like melancholy about them. Whenever she drank, and occasionally when sober as well, she expressed her great admiration for and feelings of identity with Linda. Linda never really knew quite how to react.

I gently stroked Linda’s back. The table we were standing beside was covered with cakes of all shapes and sizes. Dark brown chocolate, light yellow custard cream, greenish marzipan, pink and white meringue kisses. A little flag with the name on every dish.

‘What would you like?’ I asked.

‘I don’t really know… Chicken salad maybe. And you?’

‘Lamb meatballs. I know what I’m getting then. But I can order yours. You go and sit down.’

She did. I ordered, paid, poured water into two glasses, cut some slices from the loaves at the end of the enormous cake table, took some cutlery, grabbed a couple of small packets of butter and some serviettes, put everything on a tray and stood beside the counter to wait for the food to be brought from the kitchen, the top half of which I could see over the swing door. In the atrium-style courtyard, tables and chairs stood unoccupied between all the green plants, which the grey concrete floor and the grey sky set off to perfection. The combination of these particular colours, grey and green, drew your eye. No artist would have known how to exploit them better than Braque. I remembered the prints I had seen in Barcelona when I was there with Tonje, of some boats on a beach under an immense sky, their almost shocking beauty. They had cost a few thousand kroner, too much, I had thought. When I reconsidered, it was too late: the next day, our last in Barcelona, a Saturday, I stood vainly pulling at the gallery door.

Grey and green.

But also grey and yellow, as in David Hockney’s fantastic painting of lemons on a dish. Detaching colour from motif was modernism’s most important achievement. Before it, pictures like Braque’s or Hockney’s would have been unthinkable. The question was whether it was worth the price, bearing in mind all the baggage it brought to art.

The café I was in belonged to Liljevalch’s art gallery, whose rear was formed by the fourth and last wall of the garden area, and the cloistered passage at the top of the steps was a part of it. The last exhibition I had seen there was of Andy Warhol’s work, which I was out of my depth to judge as far as quality was concerned, whatever perspective I took. This made me feel ultra-conservative and reactionary, which I certainly did not want to be and definitely didn’t want to cultivate being. But what could I do?

The past is only one of many possible futures, as Thure Erik was wont to say. It wasn’t the past you had to avoid and ignore, it was its ossification. The same applied to the present. And when the movement art cultivated became static, that was what you had to avoid and ignore. Not because it was modern, in tune with our times, but because it wasn’t moving, it was dead.