Karl Knausgaard - Some Rain Must Fall

I wondered if Hanne might still be living in Kristiansand and, if so, whether to call her. I decided not to. I contacted Jan Vidar, it was a long time since I had seen him, we went out, a stunningly beautiful girl, perhaps twenty-five, blonde, came over to me and asked if I was Karl Ove Knausgård. I said yes and I went home with her, she lived not very far from where I’d had a bedsit as a sixteen-year-old, in a basement flat under her parents’ house. She was curvy and lovely, but as I stood there in the middle of the night, well drunk, fortunately I realised what was about to happen and halted my advances, she made tea, I kept my distance and talked about dad’s death, of all things. As I left I felt like the idiot I was, but I was also happy, it had been a close shave. I loved Tonje, I didn’t want to ruin our relationship, it was the only blessing I had.

In the winter I went to the archipelago of Bulandet, I had rented a house on a little island where I would stay to write for three months. The island was so small that I could walk from end to end in ten minutes. The sea lay straight ahead, the winter storms were as wonderful as they were terrible. Five other people lived on the island, one died while I was there, I saw the ambulance take him one morning, it was snowing, four figures stood on the quay as the paramedics carried the stretcher on board.

I wrote nothing of any use. I went fishing every day, I read for a couple of hours, then I worked all evening and night. The results were worthless, but at some point surely it would have to flow, wouldn’t it? Or was I a one-book writer? Had I shot my bolt?

Geir Gulliksen rang me on my mobile, he said my novel had been bought by an English publisher. I imagined English journalists coming out here to interview me, their photos of me standing with my fishing rod by the stormy sea in the Guardian, The Times, the Independent and the Daily Telegraph.

I went up to northern Norway and rented a run-down shack in Lofoten so that I could write. Nothing.

Then something freed up. John Erik Riley rang me and asked if I had anything for Vinduet. I said I would see and get back to him. I probably had four or five hundred pages’ worth of openings to novels, I read through them, found one that might be usable and worked on it as a short text, not a novel.

It was published on their website a few days later.

FIRE

Fire belongs to the group of phenomena that has never undergone any evolution. Change is therefore alien to its form, it will not be moved in any direction by the many fluctuations of its settings, it rests in its own completeness. Fire is perfect. But fire’s unique feature, that which sets it apart from many of the other unchanging phenomena that exist, is that it has managed to detach itself from the tyranny of time and place. While water is doomed to be situated in a particular place for ever, in some form or other, as air and mountains also are, fire has this remarkable ability to cease existing, quite simply — not only to disappear from view, to go into hiding, but indeed to allow itself to be extinguished — only to reappear exactly as before, in a new place, in a new time. For us, this makes fire difficult to understand, used as we are to regarding the world as a coherent system of continuous events, which at countless different speeds — from the tree’s endlessly slow growth to the rapid fall of raindrops — progress temporally. Fire stands outside this system and that must have been why in the Old Testament the Divine revealed itself to man in the form of a flame: the form of revelation and fire are the same. The Divine also has this ability to reveal itself suddenly, in its complete form, only then to disappear. The Divine also has this mysterious alien and merciless nature, which causes us to both fear and admire it. Anyone who has witnessed a house burning will know what I mean. Fire moves through the rooms and consumes everything in its path, the eerie roar of the flames, the blind will that only hours ago was non-existent, but which has suddenly returned and wreaks havoc in front of our eyes with such abandon you would have thought it was happening for the very first time.

But now, in this, our world of fire alarms, sprinkler systems, fire engines with ladders, breathing equipment, hydrants, hose pipes and powder extinguishers, no one fears fire any longer. It has been brought under control and takes its place in the world in much the same way that wild animals in zoos do, something we look at when we are relaxing, such as a fire in the hearth or a flame on a candle; states in which its former abandon is only seen as a residue: the crackle of wood, the swirl of flames in a draught, the shower of sparks against the wall as we push the logs closer together. And the Divine? Who talks about the Divine nowadays? You can’t. It is impossible to talk about the Divine without feeling ridiculous. There is now a sense of shame attached to talking about the Divine. And as shame is based on a disparity between two entities — most often the person you are to yourself in relation to the person you are to others — it would not be unreasonable to assume that the Divine’s somewhat comical status is due to the fact that it is out of sync with the era we live in and thus joins the succession of past customs and objects that time has left behind, such as airships, top hats, polite forms of address, the chamber pot and the electric typewriter. Things disappear, new things appear, the world slowly changes. Then we wake up one day, we rub the sleep from our eyes, draw the curtain aside and look out: clear air, bright sunshine, sparkling snow. We amble into the kitchen, switch on the radio, start the coffee machine, butter some bread, eat, drink, take a shower, dress, go to the hall, put on a hat and coat, lock the door and set off in this Østland dormitory town towards the station, which every morning is crowded with commuters. They stand on the platform with rolled-up newspapers under their arms and bags in their hands, strolling up and down in the cold, yawning, staring at the clock, peering down the railway line. Then, when the train thunders into the station, they form small queues in front of the doors, board a carriage, find a seat, fold up their coats, place them on the luggage rack and sit down again. Oh, the tiny pleasures of commuting! Take out a ticket, place it on the armrest, unfold a newspaper and start reading as the train slowly glides out of the station. Occasionally raise your eyes to look out: the blue sky, flashes of sun on the bonnets of cars driving along the road across the river, the smoke from farmhouses in the valley, snow-capped mountains. The sudden noise as the door is opened, the bang as it is closed again, the conductor’s voice approaching your seat. You give him your ticket, he scribbles his mark, you carry on reading. The next time you look out you have entered a forest. Dark green spruce trees huddle together on both sides of the track. Their branches exclude the light, but you think it is the opposite, they are preventing the darkness from rising, as if remnants of the night are still here, along the snow-covered ground beneath the trees in the forest you are speeding through. Sometimes the forest extends into small copses, you see fences, glistening wires, small piles of timber. Then, as you turn your head back and look down at the newspaper on your knees, the train crashes. The carriage where you are sitting folds like paper, you find yourself pinned up against the seat in front and lose consciousness. When you come to a few minutes later you can’t move. Diesel from the locomotive has sprayed into the carriage, you can hear the roar of the flames, passengers screaming, you try to free yourself but to no avail. In the snow beneath the rails passengers from the rear carriages file past. You can hear the flames approaching your seat, you are trapped and can only wait until the fire reaches you. Outside, flakes of ash settle on the snow. Soon the first ambulances arrive. You can smell melting plastic, you can smell burning diesel. You sit there unable to move, in the escalating heat, until it becomes unbearable and in your helplessness you pray to your God, the Almighty, the Creator of Heaven and Earth, whom you have never been closer to than at this moment, for this is how He reveals himself to us now, in his purest and most beautiful form: a blazing train in the forest.