Karl Knausgaard - My Struggle - Book One

Nice tie! said the bass player, whom I immediately followed into the band’s room. He was dressed all in black, had huge tattoos on his arms, long, black hair and cowboy boots, and was extremely friendly; he gave me a beer and answered in great detail all the school newspaper-type questions I had written down. Another time in Bergen, I interviewed Blaine Reininger, who had just left Tuxedomoon, on one of the soft leather sofas at Café Galleri. I never entertained a moment’s doubt that this was where I would move, to this metropolis with all its cafés, concert venues, and record shops, after I finished school.

After the Wall of Voodoo gig we sat in Hulen and decided to start up a band when I came: Yngve’s friend Pål could play bass, Yngve guitar, and I could play drums. We would find a singer eventually. Yngve would write the music, I would write the words, and one day, we told each other that night, we would play here, at Hulen. Going to Bergen, then, for me was like stepping into the future. I left my current life and spent some days in my next life before having to return. In Kristiansand I was alone and had to fight for everything; in Bergen I was with Yngve and whatever he had, also belonged to me. Not only clubs and cafés, shops and parks, reading rooms and auditoria, but also all of his friends who not only knew who I was when I met them but what I was doing, I had my own music program on local radio and reviewed records and concerts in Fædrelandsvennen , and after these meetings Yngve always told me what had been said about me, it was usually girls who had something to say, that I was good-looking or mature for my age and so on, but boys did too, one comment particularly stuck in my mind, Arvid’s, that I looked like the young man in Visconti’s Death in Venice . I was someone for them, and that was thanks to Yngve. He took me with him to Vindilhytta, a cabin where all his friends gathered every New Year’s Eve, and one summer when I was selling cassettes on the street in Arendal and financially flush, we went out almost every night, and on one of the nights, I can remember, Yngve was surprised but also proud that I could drink five bottles of wine and still more or less behave. The summer ended with me getting together with the sister of Yngve’s girlfriend. Yngve took loads of photos of me with his Nikon SLR, all in black and white, all dreadfully posey, and once we went together to a photographer’s, the idea was to give each of our grandparents a photo of us for Christmas, and we did do that, but the photo also turned up in the photographer’s display case in the foyer of the Kristiansand Cinema, where anyone who wished could see us posing in our eighties clothes complete with eighties hairstyles. Yngve in a light-blue shirt with leather bracelets around one wrist, long hair down his neck, short on top, me with my black-and-white plaid shirt, my black jacket with rolled-up sleeves, my nail belt and my black trousers, with hair longer at the back and even shorter on top than Yngve’s, and with a cross hanging from one ear. I went to the cinema a lot in those days, mostly with Jan Vidar or some others from Tveit, and when I saw the photo-graph exhibited there, in the illuminated display case, I could never quite associate it with me, that is, with the life I was living in Kristiansand, which had a certain external, objective quality to it, in the sense that it was tied to particular places, such as school, the sports hall, the town center, and to particular people, my friends, classmates, teammates, while the photograph was connected in quite a different way with something intimate and hidden, first and foremost the core family, but also the person I would become once I got away from here. If Yngve ever talked about me to his friends I never mentioned him to mine.

It was confusing and annoying that this internal space should be exhibited for external appraisal. But apart from a couple of isolated comments no one gave it a second thought, since I was not someone to be given a second thought.

When at last I left school in 1987, for some reason, I didn’t move to Bergen after all, instead I went to a little village on an island in northern Norway, where I worked as a teacher for a year. The plan was that I would write my novel in the evenings, and with the money I saved travel in Europe for a year; I bought a book which described all sorts of possible and impossible short-term jobs in European countries and that was what I had imagined, traveling from town to town, country to country, working a bit, writing a bit, and living a free and independent life, but then I was accepted by the new Academy of Creative Writing in Hordaland for some work I had done that year and, immensely flattered at this acceptance, I changed all my plans and headed, nineteen years old, for Bergen where, despite all my dreams and notions of an itinerant life in the world outside, I stayed for the next nine years.

And it started well. The sun was shining as I alighted from the airport bus in the fish market, and Yngve, who was working as a receptionist at Hotel Orion on weekends and over the holidays, was in a good mood when I entered the reception area. He had to work another half an hour and then we could buy some shrimp and beer and celebrate the beginning of my new life. We sat on the steps in front of his flat drinking beer with music by the Undertones belting out to us from the stereo in the sitting room. By the time night fell we were already a bit drunk, we ordered a taxi and went to Ola’s, one of Yngve’s friends, had a bit more to drink, then went on to Café Opera where we remained until closing time at a table to which a stream of people kept coming. This is my little brother, Karl Ove, Yngve said again and again, he’s moved to Bergen to study at the Academy of Creative Writing. He’s going to be a writer. Yngve had organized a studio for me in Sandviken — the girl who lived there was going to South America for a year — but until it became free I would be sleeping on a sofa at his place. Where he told me off for minor transgressions, as he always had on the few occasions we had lived together for more than a few days, right from his Alrek days when I got into hot water for slicing the cheese too thickly or not putting records back where I had found them, and it was the same level of reprimand this time: I didn’t dry the floor well enough after I had showered, I dropped crumbs on the floor while eating, I wasn’t careful enough with the stylus when putting on a record, until, standing by his car and being told how I had banged the car door too hard the last time I got in, I suddenly had had enough. Furious, I shouted that he should stop telling me what to do. And he did, after that he never corrected me again. But the balance in the relationship stayed the same, it was his world I had stepped into, and in it I was, and would remain, the younger brother. Life at the academy was complicated, and I didn’t make any friends there, partly because everyone was older than me, partly because I simply could not find anything in common with them, so that meant I was frequently running after Yngve’s heels, calling him up and asking if he had anything happening over the weekend, and of course he invariably did, could I tag along? I could. And after wandering around town for a whole Sunday or lying in bed at home reading, the temptation to drop by in the evening, even if I told myself I shouldn’t, that I had to make my own life, was too great for me to resist, so often I wound up on the sofa in front of his television.

Eventually he moved into a collective, and for me that was bad news because then my dependence on him became so visible; hardly a day passed without my appearing at their door, and when he wasn’t at home I sat in their living room, either dutifully entertained by one of the collective’s members, or alone, leafing through a music magazine or a newspaper, like a poster child of a failed human being. I needed Yngve, but Yngve didn’t need me. That was how it was. I might be able to chat with one of his friends when he was present, there was a framework, but on my own? Go up to one of them on my own? That would just seem weird and forced and obtrusive, that was not on. And in fact my behavior was not very good, to put it mildly, I was getting drunk too often, and I did not flinch from harassing someone if I got the idea into my head. Usually something to do with their appearance or silly, small mannerisms that I might have observed.