Karl Knausgaard - My Struggle - Book One

Aah.

Aah.

Then, all of a sudden, everything cleared, it was as though all the emotion and the haze that had filled me for the last fifteen minutes had retreated, like the tide, and the immense distance I gained as a result caused me to burst into laughter.

Ha ha ha, I heard myself chuckle.

I held up my forearm and rubbed my eyes with it. The thought that the woman beside me had seen me sitting there with my face distorted in constant lachrymose grimaces, and was now listening to me in gales of laughter, brought on another fit.

Ha ha ha. Ha ha ha.

I looked at her. She didn’t look away; her gaze was fixed on the page of the book in front of her. Directly behind us two of the stewardesses sat down on the fold-up seats and buckled their seat belts around their waists. Outside the window, it was sunny and green. The shadow following us on the field came closer and closer, like a fish being reeled in, until it was under the fuselage the moment the wheels hit the tarmac and it stayed there attached during the braking and taxiing.

Around me people were starting to get up. I took a deep breath. The sense that I had cleared my mind was strong. I wasn’t happy, but I was relieved, as always when a heavy burden was unexpectedly removed. The woman beside me, who had closed her book and now allowed me a chance to see what she was reading, got up with it in her hand and stood on tiptoe to reach the overhead compartment. The Woman and the Ape by Peter Høeg was what was engaging her. I had read it once. Good idea, poor execution. Would I, under normal circumstances, have initiated a conversation with her about the book? When it would be so easy to do, as now? No, I wouldn’t, but I would have sat thinking I ought to. Had I ever initiated a conversation with a stranger?

No, never.

And there was no evidence to suggest I ever would.

I leaned forward to look out the window, down onto the dusty tarmac, which I had once done twenty years ago with the bizarre but clear intention of remembering what I saw, forever. On board an airplane like now, in Sola airport like now, but on my way to Bergen then, and from there to my grandparents in Sørbøvåg. Every time I traveled by plane I recalled this memory I had imposed upon myself. For a long time it opened the novel I had just finished writing, which now lay in the case in the hold beneath me, in the form of a six-hundred-page manuscript I had to proofread within a week.

That at least was one good thing.

I was also looking forward to meeting Yngve. After he had moved from Bergen, first to Balestrand, where he met Kari Anne, with whom he had a child, and then to Stavanger, where another child was born, our relationship had changed, he was no longer someone I could go and see when I had nothing to do, go to a café or a concert with, but someone I visited now and then for days at a stretch, with all that implied for family life. I liked it though, I had always liked staying the night with other families, having your own room with a freshly made bed, full of unfamiliar objects, with a towel and washcloth nicely laid out, and from there straight into the heart of family life, despite there always being, no matter whom I visited, an uncomfortable side, because even though people always try to keep any existing tensions in the background whenever guests are present, the tensions are still noticeable, and you can never know if it is your presence that has caused them or whether they are just there and indeed your presence is helping to suppress them. A third possibility is, of course, that all these tensions were just tensions that lived their own lives in my head.

The aisle was less crowded now, and I stood up, retrieved my bag and jacket, and made my way forward, from the cabin into the corridor to the arrivals hall, which was small but self-contained with its jumble of gates, kiosks, and cafés, travelers rushing to and fro, standing, sitting, eating, reading. I would immediately recognize Yngve in any crowd, and I didn’t need his face to identify him, the back of his head or a shoulder was enough, perhaps not even that, you have a kind of receptivity to those with whom you have grown up and to whom you have been close during the period when your personality is being shaped or asserting itself, you receive them directly, without thought as a filter. Almost everything you know about your brother you know from intuition. I never knew what Yngve was thinking, seldom had an inkling as to why he did the things he did, didn’t seem to share so many of his opinions, but I could make a reasonable guess, in these respects he was as unknown as everyone else. But I knew his body language, I knew his gestures, I knew his aroma, I was aware of all the nuances of his voice, and, not least, I knew where he came from. I could put none of this into words, and it was seldom articulated in thought, but it meant everything. So I didn’t need to scan the tables in the pizzeria, didn’t need to search the faces of those sitting by the gates or those crossing the hall, for as soon as I stepped into the concourse I knew where he was. My eyes were drawn there, to the front of the mock-old, mock-Irish pub where indeed he was, arms crossed, wearing greenish, but not military, pants, a white T-shirt with a picture of Sonic Youth’s Goo , a light-blue denim jacket and a pair of dark-brown Puma shoes. He hadn’t seen me yet. I looked at his face, which I knew better than anything. The high cheekbones he had inherited from Dad, and the slightly awry mouth, but the shape of his face was different, and around his eyes he was more like Mom and me.

He turned his head and met my gaze. I was about to smile, but at that moment my lips twisted, and with a pressure it was impossible to resist, the emotions from earlier rose again. They released in a sob, and I began to cry. Half-raised my arm to my face, took it back down, a new wave came, my face puckered once again. I will never forget the look on Yngve’s face. He watched me in disbelief. There was no judgment in it, it was more like him watching something he could not understand, and had not expected, and for which therefore he was completely unprepared.

“Hi,” I said through tears.

“Hi,” he said. “I’ve got the car below. Shall we go?”

I nodded and followed him down the stairs, through the entrance hall, and into the parking lot. Whether it was the special sharpness of Vestland air, which is always present irrespective of the temperature, and which was particularly noticeable as we first walked into the shade proffered by a large roof, that cleared my head or the immense feeling of space the surrounding landscape opened, I cannot say, but at any rate I was out of it again by the time we reached his car, and Yngve, now wearing sunglasses, bent forward and inserted the key in the lock on the driver’s side.

“Is this all the luggage you’ve got?” he said, motioning toward my bag.

“Oh shit,” I said. “Wait here. I’ll run over and get it.”

Yngve and Kari Anne lived in Storhaug, a suburb slightly outside Stavanger town center, in an end-of-terrace house with a road on the other side and a forest behind that stretched down to the fjord a few hundred meters away. There was also a collection of allotments close by, and behind that lived, in another estate, Asbjørn, an old friend of Yngve’s with whom he had just started up a graphic design business. Their office was in the loft, it was already fitted out with the equipment they had bought, which they were currently learning to use. Neither of them had had any training in this branch, apart from Media Studies at Bergen University, nor did they have any contacts of any significance in the industry. But now they sat there, each behind powerful Macs, working on the few commissions they had. A poster for the Hundvåg Festival, a few folders and leaflets, that was all for the time being. They had put all their eggs in one basket, and for Yngve’s part I could understand it; after finishing his studies he had worked as a cultural consultant on Balestrand District Council for a few years, and the world was not exactly his oyster. But it was a risk, all they had to offer was their taste, which, however, was well-grounded, and had become quite sophisticated, developed as it had been through twenty years of dealing with a variety of pop cultures, from films and record sleeves through to clothes, music, magazines and photo albums, from the obscure to the most commercial, always ready to distinguish between what was good from what was not, whether past or present. Once we went to Asbjørn’s, I remember, we had been drinking for three days, when Yngve played the Pixies to us, a then-new, unknown American band, and Asbjørn lay on the sofa convulsed with laughter because what we were listening to was so good. That’s so good! he shouted over the loud music. Ha ha ha! That’s so good! When I went to Bergen as a nineteen-year-old, he and Yngve were in my studio on one of the first days, and neither my John Lennon picture, which I had hung above the desk, nor the poster of a cornfield with the small patch of grass glowing with such miraculous intensity in the foreground, nor the poster of The Mission starring Jeremy Irons found any favor in their eyes. No chance. The Lennon picture was a reminder of my last year at gymnas, when with three others I had discussed literature and politics, listened to music, watched films and drunk wine, extolled the inner life and distanced myself from all things external, and that was why the apostle of impassioned sincerity, Lennon, was hanging on my wall, even though I had always, right from childhood, preferred McCartney’s saccharine sweetness. But here the Beatles were not an icon, not under any circumstances, and it was not long before the Lennon picture came down. But their sureness of taste did not apply only to pop culture; it was Asbjørn who first recommended Thomas Bernhard, he had read Concrete in Gyldendal’s Vita series, which appeared ten years before all the literati in Norway began to allude to him, while I, I remember, was unable to understand Asbjørn’s fascination with this Austrian, and it was only ten years later, together with the rest of literary Norway, that I discovered his greatness. Asbjørn had a nose, that was his great talent, I had never met anyone with such sureness of taste as him, but what use was it, apart from being the hub student life revolved around? The essence of a nose is judgment, to judge you have to stand outside, and that is not where creativity takes place. Yngve was much more inside, he played guitar in a band, wrote his own songs, and listened to music from there; moreover, he also had an analytical, academic side that Asbjørn did not have, or use, to such an extent. Graphic design was in many ways perfect for them.