Karl Knausgaard - Some Rain Must Fall

What I had learned over the course of the year at the Writing Academy was that there was a literature that was real literature, the true lofty variety, which stretched from Homer’s epics and the Greek dramas through the course of history up to the present day with writers such as Ole Robert Sunde, Tor Ulven, Eldrid Lunden, Kjartan Fløgstad, Georg Johannesen, Liv Lundberg, Anne Bøe, Ellen Einan, Steinar Løding, Jon Fosse, Terje Dragseth, Hans Herbjørnsrud, Jan Kjærstad, Øystein Lønn, Svein Jarvoll, Finn Øgeland, the Danes Søren Ulrik Thomsen and Michael Strunge, the Swedes Katarina Frostenson and Stig Larsson. I knew that the great Scandinavian poet of this century was Gunnar Ekelöf, and the great Finnish — Swedish modernist Gunnar Björling, I knew that our own Rolf Jacobsen wasn’t fit to tie their shoelaces and Olav H. Hauge was rooted in tradition to a far greater degree than they were. I knew the last great innovation in the novel took place in France in the 1960s, and that it was ongoing, especially in the novels of Claude Simon. I also knew that I couldn’t reinvent the novel, I couldn’t even copy those who were being innovative as I didn’t understand where the novel’s essence lay. I was blind, I couldn’t read; if I read Stig Larsson’s Introduction, for example, I couldn’t say what was new about it or what the essence was, I read all novels the way I had once read crime fiction and thrillers, the endless series of books I had read as a thirteen- or fourteen-year-old, about the Black September group and the Jackal, about spies during the Second World War and randy elephant-hunters in Africa. What had changed during this year was that now I definitely knew that there were differences. But this hadn’t had any impact on my own writing. To solve this problem, I had made a sub-genre of the modern novel my own, this was the one I marketed as my ideal, American novels and short stories written by Bret Easton Ellis, Jayne Anne Phillips, Jay McInerny, Barry Gifford. This was how I excused what I wrote.

I had gained an insight. At great expense, but it was real and important: I was not a writer. What writers had, I did not have. I fought against this insight, I told myself I might be able to have what writers had, it might be attainable provided I persisted for long enough, while knowing in fact this was only a consolation. Probably Jon Fosse had been right: probably my talent did consist in writing about literature and not writing literature itself.

This was my final assessment, some days after going on a bender with Yngve and Asbjørn, walking home from the Academy after handing in my manuscript. The novel wasn’t finished, and I had decided to spend the rest of the spring and summer on it. When it was completed I would send it to a publisher. I had decided on Cappelen, to whom I felt some loyalty after the personal rejection by Lars Saabye Christensen. I assumed I would get another rejection, but I wasn’t entirely sure, they might see something in my writing that Jon Fosse and Ragnar Hovland hadn’t, after all they too had seen something inasmuch as they had accepted me onto the course — this was a small hope, but it was there and would be there right until a letter from Cappelen landed in my post box. It wasn’t over until then.

The light in the town had been changing character during the spring. The dampness and the gloom of the autumn and winter hues were gone. Now the colours were dry and light and, with the white houses reflecting the light, even the indirect light when the sun was behind the clouds, shimmering and bright, it was as though the whole town had risen. In the autumn and winter Bergen was like a bowl, it lay still and took whatever came its way; in the spring and summer it was as though the mountains folded back like the petals of a flower, and the town burst forth in its own right, humming and quivering.

You couldn’t sit inside in the evenings then.

I knocked on Morten’s door, asked if he wanted to go with me to Christian and if so could he lend me some money, he could, and we perched at a table staring at all the beautiful girls out walking, not the black-clad, intellectual kind, but the nicely dressed blonde conventional kind, while we discussed how difficult everything was and we slowly got drunk and the evening dissolved into the usual darkness. I woke up under a bush by Lille Lungegård Lake with someone tugging at me, it was a policeman, he said I couldn’t sleep there, I got up sleepily and went home.

I knocked on Ingvild’s door in her new collective, she was surprised to see me but also happy, I sensed, and I was happy too. It was a big collective with a corner window facing Nygårdsgaten and the Grieg Hall, I said hello to the others living there, faces I had seen but not spoken to, all in some way or other connected with Yngve. Ingvild was fully integrated into student life, that was good to see, at the same time it made her harder to reach, I was on the outside, she said twice she wanted me as a friend and I assumed that probably meant she didn’t want me as a boyfriend.

We sat there on the big sofa, she had made some tea, seemed happy, I looked at her, tried not to show how depressed I was, how sorry I was that we weren’t together and never would be, then I smiled and talked about more pleasurable matters, and when I left she must have thought it was all over as far as I was concerned and now we were actually only friends.

Before leaving I asked her if she could lend me a hundred kroner or two. I was flat broke, didn’t even have enough money for a smoke.

‘Yes, of course,’ she said. ‘But I want it back!’

‘Goes without saying,’ I said. ‘Have you got two hundred?’

I owed both Yngve and Asbjørn so much that I couldn’t borrow any more. I also owed Morten quite a bit, and Jon Olav and Anne. I had also begged a hundred here and a hundred there when I had been out, off Yngve’s friends, no one was that careful when they were out drinking, and I didn’t have to pay everyone back.

Ingvild had two hundred. I stuffed the money in my pocket and went downstairs as she returned to her room.

Strange, I thought as I emerged and felt the warm air on my face and saw the row of trees that had begun to burst into leaf behind the Grieg Hall. The moment she was out of sight, I missed her. I had seen her only a few minutes earlier, she had been sitting a metre away from me, her knees together and her upper body leaning over the table, and now I was both excited and sad at the thought that she might be sitting alone in her room at this minute, at the mere knowledge that she existed.

At the end of May Yngve had exams and I joined him and his friends in the evenings when they were out celebrating. The town was awash with people, they were everywhere, the air was warm, the trees were an explosion of green, and as I walked around in the evening beneath the light sky, in the dusk-grey streets that never really became dark, all of this gave me strength, all of this lifted my mood, I had such a strong feeling of being alive and, not least, that I wanted to live more.

The year was over, the next day we would be having the end-of-year meal at the Academy and be given a certificate, or whatever it was, to prove we had attended the course. I would go, say goodbye to everyone and then I would turn my back. Never think about it again.

Among Yngve’s student friends spirits were high, beer after beer was brought to our table, and even though I didn’t say that much, even though I was temporarily my silent self, I was still there, I drank and smiled and looked at the others, who babbled away about this and that, Ola was the only person I knew, the others I had only seen, so I sat down beside him, he had always taken me under his wing in the sense that he took me seriously and listened to what I said, as though there was something sensible or interesting in it, although he himself was light years above it. He even laughed at my jokes. But I didn’t want to impose on him, or Yngve, who sat there with his head raised, clinking glasses and talking.