Karl Knausgaard - My Struggle - Book One

Here lies a man who never complained

A happy life he never gained

His last words before he died

And went to cross the great divide

Were: Oh, Lord, there’s such a chill

Can someone send a happy pill?

Or perhaps better:

Here lies a man of letters

A noble man of Nordic birth

Alas, his hands were bound in fetters

Barring him from knowing mirth

Once he wrote with dash and wit

Now he’s buried in a pit

Come on, worms, take your fill,

Taste some flesh, if you will

Try an eye

Or a thigh

He’s croaked his last, have a thrill

But if I have thirty years left you cannot take it for granted that I will be the same. So perhaps something like this?

From all of us to you, dear God

Now you have him beneath the sod,

Karl Ove Knausgaard is finally dead

Long is the time since he ate bread

With his friends he broke ranks

For his book and his wanks

Wielded pen and dick but never well

Lacked the style but tried to excel

He took a cake, then took one more

He took a spud, then ate it raw

He cooked a pig, it took a while

He ate it up and belched a Heil!

I’m no Nazi, but I like brown shirts

I write Gothic script until it hurts!

Book not accepted, the man blew his top

He guzzled and belched and couldn’t stop

His belly it grew, his belt got tight,

His eyes glared, his tongue alight

“I only wanted to write what was right!”

The fat it blocked his heart and vein

Till one day he screamed in pain:

Help me, help me, hear me wailing

Get me a donor, my heart is failing!

The doctor said no, I remember your book

You’ll die like a fish, like a fish on a hook.

Do you feel much pain, are you near the end?

The stab in the heart, this is death, my friend!

Or perhaps, if I am lucky, a bit less personal?

Here lies a man who smoked in bed

With his wife he wound up dead

Truth to say

It is not they

Just some ashes, it is said

When my father was the same age as I am now, he gave up his old life and started afresh. I was sixteen years old at the time and in the first class at Kristiansand Cathedral School. At the beginning of the school year my parents were still married and although they were having problems I had no reason to suspect what was about to happen with their relationship. We were living in Tveit then, twenty kilometers outside Kristiansand, in an old house on the very edge of the built-up area in the valley. It was high in the mountains with the forest at our backs and a view of the river from the front. A large barn and an outhouse also belonged to the property. When we moved in, the summer I was thirteen, Mom and Dad had bought chickens, I think they lasted six months. Dad grew potatoes in a patch beside the lawn, and beyond that was a compost heap. One of the many occupations my father fantaszed about was becoming a gardener, and he did have a certain talent in that direction — the garden around the house in the small town we came from was magnificent, and not without exotic elements, such as the peach tree my father planted against the south-facing wall, and of which he was so proud when it actually bore fruit — so the move to the country was full of optimism and dreams of the future, where slowly but surely irony began to rear its head, for one of the few concrete things I can remember about my father’s life there during those years is something he came out with as we sat at the garden table one summer evening barbecuing, he and Mom and I.

“Now we’re living the life, aren’t we, eh!”

The irony was plain, even I caught it, but also complicated because I did not understand the reason for it. For me an evening like the one we were having was living the life. What the irony implied ran like an undercurrent throughout the rest of the summer: we swam in the river from early morning, we played soccer on grass in the shade, we cycled to the Hamresanden campsite and swam and watched the girls, and in July we went to the Norway Cup, a youth soccer tournament, where I got drunk for the first time. Someone knew someone who had a flat, someone knew someone who could buy beer for us, and so I sat there drinking in an unfamiliar living room one summer afternoon, and it was like an explosion of happiness, nothing held any danger or fear anymore, I just laughed and laughed, and in the midst of all this, the unfamiliar furniture, the unfamiliar girls, the unfamiliar garden outside, I thought to myself, this was how I wanted things to be. Just like this. Laughing all the time, following whatever fancies took me. There are two photographs of me from that evening, in one I am lying under a bundle of bodies in the middle of the floor, holding a skull in one hand, my head apparently unconnected with the hands and feet protruding on the other side, my face contorted into a kind of euphoric grimace. The other photo is of me on my own, I am lying on a bed with a beer bottle in one hand and holding the skull over my groin in the other, I am wearing sunglasses, my mouth is wide open, roaring with laughter. That was the summer of 1984, I was fifteen years old and had just made a new discovery: drinking alcohol was fantastic.

For the next few weeks my childhood carried on as before, we lay on the cliffs beneath the waterfall and dozed, dived into the pool now and then, caught the bus into town on Saturday mornings, where we bought sweets and went round the record shops, while expectations of upper secondary school, the gymnas , which I was soon to start, loomed on the horizon. This was not the only change in the family: my mother had taken a sabbatical from her job at the nursing school, and was going to study that year in Bergen, where Yngve already lived. So the plan was that my father and I would live alone up there, and we did for the first few months, until he suggested, presumably to get me out of the way, that I could live in the house my grandparents owned on Elvegata, where Grandad had for many years had his accounting office. All my friends lived in Tveit, and I didn’t think I knew the kids at my new school well enough to spend time with them after school, so when I wasn’t at soccer training, which I had five times a week in those days, I sat on my own in the living room watching TV, did my homework at the desk in the loft, or lay on the bed next door reading and listening to music. Once in a while I popped up to Sannes, as our house was called, to pick up clothes or cassettes or books, sometimes I slept there as well, but I preferred the digs at my grandparents’, a chill had settled over our house, I suppose because nothing went on there anymore, my father ate out for the most part, and did only a minimum of chores at home. This left its mark on the aura of the house which, as Christmas was approaching, had taken on an air of abandonment. Tiny, desiccated lumps of cat shit littered the sofa in front of the TV on the first floor, old unwashed dishes on the kitchen drainer, all the radiators, apart from an electric heater which he moved to the room where he was living, were turned off. As for him, his soul was in torment. One evening I went up to the house, it must have been at the beginning of December, and after depositing my bag in my ice-cold bedroom I bumped into him in the hall. He had come from the barn, the lower floor of which had been converted into a flat, his hair was unkempt, his eyes black.