Karl Knausgaard - Some Rain Must Fall

In the autumn I slaughtered Stig Sæterbakken’s novel The New Testament over a full-page spread in Morgenbladet, it was all the various styles and pastiches I didn’t like, and when the main protagonist sits in a wing chair at a party and inwardly abuses all those present it was so like Thomas Bernhard that I couldn’t see the novelty in it. It was a big novel, it had been many years since a young novelist had dared to invest such commitment, but sadly it hadn’t come off. I had sat up all night at the radio station, writing; when Tore arrived in the morning I read it to him. I wrote that the novel was like a giant dick, impressive at first sight but too big for the blood to create a fully functional erection, it only got semi-stiff. Tore screamed with laughter when I read it out.

‘Are you going to write that in Morgenbladet ? Ha ha ha! You can’t do that, Karl Ove! No way! ’

‘But it’s an apt image. That’s exactly what the novel is. Big and ambitious, yes, but too big and ambitious.’

‘All right, all right. It might be exactly like a giant dick, ha ha ha, but that doesn’t mean you can write that, you twonk!’

‘Shall I delete it?’

‘You have no choice.’

‘But that’s the most precise image of the novel.’

‘Come on! Delete it and we’ll go for a coffee.’

A few weeks later Alf van der Hagen from NRK’s P2 rang, he wondered if I would be willing to review a novel, the first in Thomas Mann’s four-part series Joseph and His Brothers, for the radio programme Kritikertorget, I was enormously flattered, of course I would. I caught the bus to Minde, where NRK had its base. I was expected, my name was registered in the receptionist’s book, the very idea of it, Knausgård 1 pm, Kritikertorget, Studio 3. Kritikertorget was the most important literature programme in Norway by a long chalk, all the good critics reviewed there, Hagerup as well as Linneberg, now I had a foot in the door. They would ring again, I would become a known voice, it would be heard every Saturday afternoon, my name would be one to be reckoned with. Knausgård asserts his writing is overrated, do you agree? Knausgård has chosen your novel as the pick of the crop this autumn, what do you say to that? Naturally I’m flattered. The man knows what he is talking about.

I was guided through the corridors in Minde by a woman, past the editorial staff at work in an open-plan office, computer screens shone, voices buzzed, and into a studio bigger and smarter and more open than ours, where I put on a headset and spoke directly to Alf van der Hagen. Just the name, aristocratic and noble, sent shivers down my spine. He was friendly and welcoming, said the manuscript was good, all I had to do was read it. He interrupted me on occasion, asked me to repeat, but that was the way it had to be. And there I sat, the radio critic van der Knausgård, the new voice, the new generation of critics, reading a manuscript about Thomas Mann. Reading aloud on radio was something I could do, I had been doing it every day now for close on a year, but van der Hagen was not satisfied, I had to read it again and again, and when we finally stopped I had the impression he didn’t think my rendition was good enough, he was stopping because we couldn’t keep on going ad infinitum without making any progress.

The review was broadcast, I got everyone I knew to listen, this was the real McCoy, this was NRK, not some poky local radio station in Sørland or Student Radio in Bergen. Everyone thought it was good, but the follow-up phone call never materialised, NRK never made a further approach, they didn’t want anything to do with me, obviously it hadn’t been good enough.

Nevertheless my name was doing the rounds, I received a request from Kritikkjournalen to review a novel by a Japanese writer by the name of Murakami, the book was about someone hunting special sheep, and I slated it, mainly because it was so Western. I slated several novels for Vinduet, did several interviews for Studvest, worked at Student Radio, went to Rica, Garage, Café Opera, the Football Pub and drank beer with the others from the radio station, sometimes I walked home alone, sometimes I walked home with a girl, for something had happened to me too, they no longer said no to me, perhaps because I no longer cared so much that I was rendered speechless, capable only of staring at them with those wild desperate eyes of mine, or perhaps because they knew who I was already. But I had no friends there, apart from Tore, who had moved with Inger into a big flat below the university. I often went there — trudged up with a bag of beers in my hand, shall we drink them and then go for a walk — so often I had to restrict my visits in case they began to form suspicions about me and realise that actually I had nowhere else to go.

Inger considered it a bit too much, I could see that in her face, she joked that Tore’s personality had changed after he met me, now he wanted to go drinking all the time, there was something in that, and I knew it, both of them were rooted somewhere, they had something, whereas I had no roots and I saw myself through their eyes, a tall hapless guy with no friends, forcing himself on Tore, who was four years younger.

In town, sitting at a table in Garage drinking and chatting, I forgot about all this, then what we had was good. Every Saturday morning we met and made a programme in our Popkarusell series. So far we had done the Kinks, the Beatles, The Jam, the Smiths, Blue and the Police. I recommended Tore to Morgenbladet, they were interested, he started reviewing poetry books for them while still writing himself, now he was working on short texts. He showed me some of them, and they were good, really good. Suddenly he had his own language. Green-eyed with jealousy, I read them with him next to me, but I kept my feelings well hidden, Christ, Tore, I said to him, this is really good. He shone like a little sun, put the texts on top of his disturbingly high pile and said he was beginning to find his feet. After such sessions it was straight home to the computer. I started a new short story, which I called Blank, it was about a man who woke up in a park not knowing who he was. Walked around town, recognised nothing. Someone waved to him and called him Sean. Sean, was that me? he wondered. I wrote three pages, polished every single sentence like a diamond, yet they didn’t sparkle. They were like sentences in a bad detective novel or, even worse, in a school literature essay. There was nothing of the personality Tore had managed to conjure up in his writing, the unprecedented concentration of atmosphere he had achieved, which lay not in the descriptions, not in the space where the action took place, but in the language. In other words, he wrote like a poet. Not to mention Espen, who was a poet. This wasn’t about atmospheres but bursts of language, sudden revelations, images that were so unexpected they opened new associations.

Espen had been there ever since I first met him, so I didn’t feel any envy towards him, but with Tore it was different, especially the ignominy of him being four years younger than me. I ought to have been a kind of Nestor, an older experienced student who could cautiously lead him to where he wanted to go, an older-brother figure in his life, instead I found myself left behind after six months.

We kept shifting positions with respect to each other, immature or mature, experienced or inexperienced, it was all up in the air, one moment I saw his vulnerability, which normally he showed no one, it appeared when you were close to him, the next he was utterly superior to everyone else I knew. It was the same with Inger. Sometimes I saw them as children and felt like the oldest twenty-four-year-old in the world when I was with them, at others they laughed at me and my plastic bags and they were two independent academically gifted students on their way to the top while I was a dropout with a second-rate university qualification, three years old now, as my sole achievement.