Karl Knausgaard - My Struggle - Book One

I stopped at the front entrance, tapped in the code and opened the door, found my key while taking the few steps up to the first floor where my office was situated. The elevator droned and I unlocked the door as quickly as I could, darted in, and closed it behind me.

The sudden heat made the skin on my hands and face tingle. Outside, one of the numerous ambulances drove past with siren wailing. I put on some water for another cup of coffee and while I was waiting for it to boil, I skimmed through what I had written so far. The dust hovering in the broad, angled shafts of light anxiously followed every tiny current in the air. The neighbor in the adjacent flat had begun to play piano. The kettle hissed. What I had written was not good. It wasn’t bad but it wasn’t good either. I went to the cupboard, unscrewed the lid of the coffee tin, put two spoonfuls of coffee in the cup, and poured the water, which rose up the sides, black and steaming.

The telephone rang.

I put the cup down on the desk and let the phone ring twice before I answered.

“Hello?” I said.

“Hi, it’s me.”

“Hi.”

“I was just wondering how things were going. Are you managing okay down there?”

She sounded happy.

“I don’t know. I’ve only been here a few hours,” I said.

Silence.

“Are you coming home soon?”

“You don’t need to hassle me,” I said. “I’ll come when I come.”

She didn’t answer.

“Shall I buy something on the way?” I asked at length.

“No, I’ve done the shopping.”

“Okay. See you then.”

“Good. Bye. Hold on. Cocoa.”

“Cocoa,” I said. “Anything else?”

“No, that’s all.”

“Okay. Bye.”

“Bye.”

After putting down the receiver I remained in the chair for a long while, sunk in something that was not thoughts, or feelings, more a kind of atmosphere, the way an empty room can have an atmosphere. When I absentmindedly raised the cup to my lips I drank a mouthful, the coffee was lukewarm. I nudged the mouse to remove the screen saver and check the time. Six minutes to three. Then I read the text I’d written again, cut and pasted it into my jottings file. I’d been working on a novel for five years, and so whatever I wrote could not be lackluster. And this was not radiant enough. Yet the solution lay in the existing text, I knew that, there was something in it I was after. It felt as if everything I wanted was there, but in a form that was too compressed. The germ of an idea that had set the text in motion was particularly important, namely that the action took place in the 1880s while all the characters and tangibles were from the 1980s. For several years I had tried to write about my father, but had gotten nowhere, probably because the subject was too close to my life, and thus not so easy to force into another form, which of course is a prerequisite for literature. That is its sole law: everything has to submit to form. If any of literature’s other elements are stronger than form, such as style, plot, theme, if any of these overtake form, the result suffers. That is why writers with a strong style often write bad books. That is also why writers with strong themes so often write bad books. Strong themes and styles have to be broken down before literature can come into being. It is this breaking down that is called “writing.” Writing is more about destroying than creating. No one knew that better than Rimbaud. The remarkable thing about him was not that he arrived at this insight at such a disturbingly young age but that he applied it to life as well. For Rimbaud everything was about freedom, in writing as in life, and it was because freedom was paramount that he could put writing behind him, or perhaps even had to put writing behind him, because it too became a curb on him that had to be destroyed. Freedom is destruction plus movement. Another writer to realize this was Aksel Sandemose. His tragedy was that he was only able to perform the latter part in literature, not in life. He destroyed, and never moved on from what he had destroyed. Rimbaud went to Africa.

A sudden subconscious impulse made me look up, and I met the gaze of a woman. She was sitting in a bus opposite the window. Night had begun to fall and the sole source of light in the room was the desk lamp, which must have attracted attention from outside as it would a moth. When she realized that I had seen her she averted her gaze. I got up and went over to the window, loosened the blinds, and lowered them as the bus moved off. It was time to go home. I had said “soon” and that was an hour ago.

She had been in such a cheery mood when she rang.

A pang of unhappiness went through me. How could I possibly have met her anxiety and hope with annoyance?

I stood stock-still in the middle of the floor, as if the pain radiating from my body might disappear of its own accord. But it didn’t. It had to be removed with action. I would have to make amends. The very thought was a help, not just through its promise of reconciliation, but also through the practical follow-up it demanded, for how could I make amends? I switched off the computer, slid it into my bag, rinsed the cup and placed it in the sink, pulled out the loose electrical cable, turned off the light, and donned hat and coat in the moonlight filtering through the cracks in the blinds, all the time picturing her in my mind’s eye in the large flat.

The cold stung my face as I stepped into the street. I pulled the hood of my parka over my hat, bent my head to shield my eyes from the tiny snow particles whirling through the air, and started to walk. On good days I would take Tegnérgatan down to Drottninggatan which I followed to the Hötorg area, from where I walked up the steep hill to St. Johannes’ Church and down again to Regeringsgatan, where our flat was. This route was full of shops, shopping malls, cafés, restaurants, and cinemas and was always packed. The streets there teemed with people of all types. In the brightly lit shop windows there was the most varied assortment of goods; inside, escalators circled like wheels inside enormous, mysterious machinery, elevators glided up and down, TV screens showed beautiful people moving like apparitions, in front of hundreds of tills, lines formed, dwindled and reformed, dwindled and reformed in patterns as unpredictable as the clouds in the sky above the city’s rooftops. On good days I loved this, the stream of people, with their more or less attractive faces, whose eyes expressed a certain state of mind, could wash through me as I watched them. On less good days, however, the same scenario had the opposite effect, and if possible I would choose a different route, one more off the beaten track. As a rule it was along Rådmansgatan, then down Holländergatan to Tegnérgatan where I crossed Sveavägen and followed Döbelnsgatan up to St. Johannes’ Church. This route was dominated by private houses, most people you met were types who hurried through the streets alone, and the few shops and restaurants that existed were not especially select. Driving schools with windows veiled in exhaust fumes, secondhand shops with boxes of comics and LPs outside, laundries, a hairdresser’s, a Chinese restaurant, a couple of seedy pubs.

This was such a day. With head bent to avoid the gusting snow I walked through the streets, which between the towering walls and snow-covered roofs of apartment buildings, resembled narrow valleys, occasionally I peered in through the windows I passed: the deserted reception area of a small hotel, the yellow fish swimming around against the green background of the fish tank; large advertisements for a firm that produced signs, brochures, stickers, cardboard stands; the three black hairdressers tending to their three black customers in the African hair salon, one of whom craned around to see two kids sitting on the stairs at the back of the shop and laughing, and then jerked his head back with barely concealed impatience.