Karl Knausgaard - Some Rain Must Fall

To me he was like a character from one of the many Stompa books I had read when I was smaller, a young Norwegian boy at a boarding school in the 1950s.

I told him about Ingvild, he advised me to go and see her, sit down with her and tell her everything.

‘Tell it as it is!’ he said. ‘What have you got to lose? If she loves you she’ll obviously be happy to hear it.’

‘But I have done,’ I said.

‘When you were drunk, yes! Do it now you’re sober. It requires courage, my boy. And that’ll impress her.’

‘The blind leading the blind,’ I said. ‘I saw you in action downstairs, didn’t I.’

He laughed.

‘But I’m not you. What works for one person doesn’t necessarily work for another. I think we two should pay a visit to Christian one evening. We can take Rune along. All of us boys. What do you say?’

‘I haven’t got a phone,’ I said. ‘So if Ingvild wants to get hold of me she would have to walk up here. And I would have to be at home.’

Morten got up.

‘Naturally. But I don’t think staying on the premises is the be-all and end-all.’

‘I don’t either. But I’d like to be here anyway.’

‘OK, we’ll wait then. Goodnight, my son.’

‘Goodnight.’

I went out and rang Yngve, he wasn’t at home, I remembered it was Sunday and he was probably working at the hotel. I rang mum. We first went through the events in my life, that is, at the Academy, then through the events in hers. She was looking for somewhere new to live, and she was working hard on plans to introduce an FE course at her school.

‘We must try to meet soon,’ she said. ‘Perhaps you and Yngve could come to Sørbøvåg one weekend? It’s a long time since you’ve been there. We could all meet up.’

‘Good idea,’ I said.

‘I’m busy next weekend. What about the weekend after?’

‘I’ll see what I can do. Yngve has to be free too.’

‘Let’s start there then. And we’ll see what happens.’

It really was a good idea. Grandma and grandad’s smallholding was a completely different world because it was rife with childhood memories, untouched somehow, as I was there so seldom and because of its location, on a little hill with a view of the fjord and the mountain behind, so close to the sea, far away from everything. It would be wonderful to spend a few days there, where no one cared about what I was or what I wasn’t, I had always been enough for them.

This week we were going through short prose at the Academy. The pointillist novel was all the rage, a form whose Norwegian history began with Paal-Helge Haugen’s Anne, from what we were told, this and other pointillist novels were situated somewhere between prose — the line, that is — and poetry — the point. I read it, and it was fantastic, permeated with darkness much like Paul Celan’s Death Fugue, but I couldn’t write like that, there was no chance, I didn’t know what created this permeation of darkness. Even though I went through it sentence by sentence, it was impossible to say, it wasn’t in any defined place, wasn’t conjured up by any particular words, it was immanent everywhere in the same way that a mood is immanent in a mind. Mood isn’t in a particular thought or a particular part of the brain, nor in a particular part of the body, such as a foot or an ear, it is everywhere, but nothing in itself, more like a colour in which thoughts are thought, a colour through which the world is seen. There was no such colour in what I wrote, no such hypnotic or evocative mood, in fact there was no mood at all, and that was the heart of the problem, I assumed, the very reason I wrote so badly and immaturely. The question was whether you could acquire such a colour or mood. Whether I could fight my way there or whether it was something you either had or you didn’t have. At home, writing, I thought what I did was good, and then came the round of critique at the Academy, where the same was said every time, a bit of polite praise for appearance’s sake, such as, there is a lively narrative style, before they weighed in with clichéd, stereotyped, perhaps even tedious. But what hurt me most was that my writing was immature. When the prose course began we were given a simple task, we had to write about one day or the start of a day, and I wrote about a young man waking up in his bedsit to the sound of the post, he slept on the other side of the wall to the post box, and it made a racket. After breakfast he went out, on the way he saw a girl, whom I described, and whom he decided to follow. When I read this out the atmosphere became rather uncomfortable. They came up with the usual vague praise, said it was good, said it was easy to visualise, suggested I deleted this and that … It was only when it came to Trude’s turn that what I had sensed in the air was articulated. It’s so immature! she protested. Listen: ‘… he looked at her well-formed 501 bottom’. I mean, honestly, a well-formed 501 bottom?! She’s just an object, and, not only that, he follows her as well! Had this been an exploration of immaturity and the objectivisation of women I wouldn’t have said anything, but there’s nothing in the text that suggests it is. In short, it’s a bit creepy to read, she concluded. I tried to defend myself, conceded she had made some good points, but insisted my text dealt with exactly what she had said and there was a distance in the writing. I could of course have added a meta-level in the text, I said, as Kundera does, but I didn’t want to, I tried to stay on the same level as the character.

‘That isn’t apparent from what I read anyway,’ Trude said.

‘No,’ I said. ‘Maybe it isn’t visible enough.’

‘I thought it was fun!’ said Petra, who for some reason often defended me during these critique sessions. Presumably because she also wrote prose. Whenever we discussed our texts feelings became heated and more and more often the group tended to divide into two camps: on the one side were those of us who wrote mainly prose and, on the other, those who wrote poetry, with Nina, who wrote equally brilliantly in both genres, in the middle. Not that she said that much, she was perhaps the one student who found it hardest to formulate her views orally, it was almost impossible to grasp what her opinion was, if she had an opinion at all, that is. Judging by what she said, it didn’t seem so, it was all vague, completely directionless, she might just as well have been presenting arguments about coats as about literature, but what she wrote was crystal clear, not in the sense that her opinions became coherent there, no, it was the language, her sentences, they were as clear and exquisite as glass. She was the best, Trude was the next best, Knut the third best. Petra, whose sentences resembled beetles at the bottom of a bucket, wasn’t in the competition, I reckoned, she wasn’t the finished article in the way that the other three were, but one day she would utterly outshine them, her talent was so obvious and it lay in her unpredictability: anything could happen in her texts, it was impossible to predict from the person she was or what she wrote, with the others you often could, but not with Petra, something unusual or unexpected was always on the cards. I was at the bottom, with Kjetil. The last two students, Else Karin and Bjørg, were above us, they had both had novels published, in a way they were fully fledged writers, and what they handed in during the course was also always accomplished and reliable. But sparks never flew in their writing in the way that they did in Nina’s and Petra’s, they were more like two horses hauling logs through the forest in the winter, it was heavy work, they made slow progress, their eyes were firmly set on the path ahead.

If I was at the bottom I had to rise. If I accepted that I belonged down there, in the terrible abyss of immaturity and ineptitude, I had failed. I couldn’t fail. After a stint at the Academy I often weakened and told myself it was right, I wasn’t a writer, I had no business being there, but never for long, maximum one evening, then my mind rose in opposition, it wasn’t right, I might not be a writer now, but this was a temporary state that had to be, and would be, overcome, and when I woke in the morning, showered and packed my things to go to the Academy it was with a newfound self-confidence.