Karl Knausgaard - Some Rain Must Fall

In Africa I asked her if she would marry me.

She said yes, I will.

Back in Bergen, in the new flat, I realised I couldn’t go on like this any more. We were getting married in a few months and I couldn’t let Tonje marry an idiot who thought he could be a writer, someone who was throwing his life away, I prized her too highly for that, so I went out and bought the most important art history books, borrowed the rest from the university library and set about reading them.

Tore, who was still studying literature, writing a dissertation about Proust and his name, told me that an editor in Oslo had rung him, he had read Tore’s reviews in Morgenbladet and wondered whether he would like to work as a reader for him. Tore said he would, had also told him he was a writer, and the editor, whose name was Geir Gulliksen, wanted to read what he had done.

I had also written reviews in Morgenbladet. Indeed, it had been me who got Tore into Morgenbladet. So why hadn’t Geir Gulliksen rung me ?

But then something happened for me too. I received an invitation in the post to contribute to an anthology. The Writing Academy had some anniversary or other and they were looking for contributions from alumni. I sent them Zoom. It wasn’t a competition, the anthology was open only to alumni and I hadn’t even considered the possibility of a rejection. But I was rejected. They didn’t want it.

I had reacted to every other rejection with composure, they were expected, all of them. But this one crushed me. I was completely demoralised for several weeks and this led to me taking the final decision to stop writing. It was simply too humiliating. I was twenty-six years old, I was getting married, I could no longer live with the dream.

Some weeks later I went up to Tore’s, we were going to Verftet to practise with the new band. It consisted of Hans and Knut Olav from Kafkatrakterne plus Tore and me. Lemen, we were called, the hyperactive Norway lemming, after Tore, his shaven head and inexhaustible energy.

We walked downhill to the centre. It was the beginning of March, one o’clock in the afternoon, the streets were dry and filled with that delicate pale spring light that came gradually and imperceptibly after the winter’s endless succession of damp grey dark days.

Tore looked at me.

‘I’ve got some good news,’ he said.

‘Oh?’ I said, fearing the worst.

‘My manuscript has been accepted. It’s coming out this autumn! I’m going to make my debut!’

‘Is that true? But that’s fantastic, Tore,’ I said.

All the energy I had drained away. I walked beside him, black to the core inside. It was so unjust. It was so bloody unjust. Why should he, four years younger than me, have the talent and not me? I had long reconciled myself to the fact that Espen had the talent, his debut was no surprise, it made sense. But Tore ? And so young?

Shit.

Tore was beaming like a sun.

‘ “This has to be published,” Gulliksen said. ‘I sat up all night thinking of titles. I’ve got a list of them here. Would you like to see?’

He took a folded sheet of paper from his inside pocket and passed it to me. I read as we walked.

Julian’s Calendar

Once as Invisible as Nausea

Snowflake

Sleeping Tangle

A Liberated Blush

A Tangled Second

For Shame’s Sake

Once and for All

‘Julian’s Calendar,’ I said. ‘Without any doubt.’

‘I like Sleeping Tangle, ’ Tore said.

‘No, it’s too cryptic. What is a sleeping tangle?’

‘It’s a mood, a problem that exists but hasn’t had any impact as yet. There’s something passive about it. Or abandoned. Above all, though, it creates a mood.’

‘Julian’s Calendar,’ I said, giving him the sheet of paper. He put it back in his inside pocket.

‘We’ll see,’ he said. ‘Actually I’ll soon have finished. Only have to polish it now.’

‘Would you like me to read it?’ I said.

‘Not yet. But if you wouldn’t mind reading the final version.’

I had already read a lot of his work and this much I knew: I couldn’t help him. It was much better than anything I had written. The most disturbing feature of it was that he hadn’t just taken a narrative form and filled it with what he had learned it should be filled with, as one might be tempted to think would be the case with a debutant who was only twenty-two. He had taken a form, that was true, but the whole project, everything he wrote about, was in some unclear but obvious way connected with himself, his very essence, all the fascinations he had and was almost unaware of, and he could therefore write about with the unfettered joy of discovery.

‘Congratulations,’ I said. ‘That’s absolutely fantastic news.’

‘Yes, it bloody is,’ he said. ‘At long last! Seventeen sodding rejections it took. But now I’m there.’

At that time we practised a lot, the band was going to play at the new Studentkvarteret in the spring and we hadn’t been together that long, there was still a lot to work on. Tore, our singer, had written half of the songs, Knut Olav, who played the guitar, the other half, apart from one, which Hans, now the bass player, had written. Knut Olav was prodigiously talented, he played all the instruments and composed fantastic pop songs and could have gone far if he’d had better musicians around him. But he wouldn’t hear of it. As a drummer, he was perhaps a thousand times better than me, but he put up with me slowing and accelerating the tempo of his songs, and when he arranged them all he had in his head was something unfussy. With Tore on vocals as well, utterly undaunted by his high profile as he was, brazen even, everything worked out fine.

There was nothing I liked more than playing with them and then going out afterwards. Maybe ringing Tonje and getting her to come along. All while the light was growing and the leaves were coming out on the trees.

May 19 was the day we were playing at Kvarteret. I turned up a few hours before the sound check, Tore met me at the door, I could see at once that something had happened.

‘Have you heard?’ he said.

‘Heard what?’

‘Tor Ulven’s dead.’

‘Dead? Is that true?’

‘Yes. Geir Gulliksen rang to tell me.’

‘But he was young.’

‘Yes. And Norway’s best writer.’

‘Yes. Oh Jesus. How awful.’

We went into the café and discussed the news further. Both Tore and I considered Ulven quite different from and much better than the rest of Norwegian literature. I thought of Espen, it had been him who had introduced me to Ulven and he had read him more intensely than anyone I knew.

Hans and Knut Olav came, we drifted into the auditorium, did the sound check and gradually stage fright took over, half an hour before we went on I was on the point of throwing up, but as usual the fear vanished the moment we appeared and played the first bars.

Afterwards we sat backstage drinking beer and chatting about the performance — what were you actually doing there, I completely lost it there and had no idea where we were — and someone poked a head in and said the crown prince had been in the audience, we laughed, but Tore wasn’t with us, he was in shock at Ulven’s sudden death, I could see it in his face, the brief moments of total absence that punctuated his otherwise sociable persona. If anyone had inspired him in the writing of his book it had been Ulven. Nonetheless, we moved on, went to Garage, and when it closed I walked home with Tonje, the night was still, the streets spring-light beneath the mountains and the sky with its twinkling stars.