My Struggle: Book One by Karl Knausgaard Read Free Book Online Page B

whole life. Not mine at any rate. Soon I will be forty, and when I’m forty, it won’t be long before I’m fifty. And when I’m fifty, it won’t be long before I’m sixty. And when I’m sixty, it won’t be long before I’m seventy. And that will be that. My epitaph might read: Here lies a man who grinned and bore it. And in the end he perished for it . Or perhaps better:
    Here lies a man who never complained
A happy life he never gained
His last words before he died
And went to cross the great divide
Were: Oh, Lord, there’s such a chill
Can someone send a happy pill?
    Or perhaps better:
    Here lies a man of letters
A noble man of Nordic birth
Alas, his hands were bound in fetters
Barring him from knowing mirth
Once he wrote with dash and wit
Now he’s buried in a pit
Come on, worms, take your fill,
Taste some flesh, if you will
Try an eye
Or a thigh
He’s croaked his last, have a thrill
    But if I have thirty years left you cannot take it for granted that I will be the same. So perhaps something like this?
    From all of us to you, dear God
Now you have him beneath the sod,
Karl Ove Knausgaard is finally dead
Long is the time since he ate bread
With his friends he broke ranks
For his book and his wanks
Wielded pen and dick but never well
Lacked the style but tried to excel
He took a cake, then took one more
He took a spud, then ate it raw
He cooked a pig, it took a while
He ate it up and belched a Heil!
I’m no Nazi, but I like brown shirts
I write Gothic script until it hurts!
    Book not accepted, the man blew his top
He guzzled and belched and couldn’t stop
His belly it grew, his belt got tight,
His eyes glared, his tongue alight
“I only wanted to write what was right!”
    The fat it blocked his heart and vein
Till one day he screamed in pain:
Help me, help me, hear me wailing
Get me a donor, my heart is failing!
The doctor said no, I remember your book
You’ll die like a fish, like a fish on a hook.
Do you feel much pain, are you near the end?
The stab in the heart, this is death, my friend!
    Or perhaps, if I am lucky, a bit less personal?
    Here lies a man who smoked in bed
With his wife he wound up dead
Truth to say
It is not they
Just some ashes, it is said
    When my father was the same age as I am now, he gave up his old life and started afresh. I was sixteen years old at the time and in the first class at Kristiansand Cathedral School. At the beginning of the school year my parents were still married and although they were having problems I had no reason to suspect what was about to happen with their relationship. We were living in Tveit then, twenty kilometers outside Kristiansand, in an old house on the very edge of the built-up area in the valley. It was high in the mountains with the forest at our backs and a view of the river from the front. A large barn and an outhouse also belonged to the property. When we moved in, the summer I was thirteen, Mom and Dad had bought chickens, I think they lasted six months. Dad grew potatoes in a patch beside the lawn, and beyond that was a compost heap. One of the many occupations my father fantaszed about was becoming a gardener, and he did have a certain talent in that direction – the garden around the house in the small town we came from was magnificent, and not without exotic elements, such as the peach tree my father planted against the south-facing wall, and of which he was so proud when it actually bore fruit – so the move to the country was full of optimism and dreams ofthe future, where slowly but surely irony began to rear its head, for one of the few concrete things I can remember about my father’s life there during those years is something he came out with as we sat at the garden table one summer evening barbecuing, he and Mom and I.
    â€œNow we’re living the life, aren’t we, eh!”
    The irony was plain, even I caught it, but also complicated because I did not understand the