The End: My Struggle: Book 6 - Hardcover

Knausgaard, Karl Ove

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 034580998X ISBN 13: 9780345809988

Publisher: Knopf Canada, 2018

Synopsis

The sixth and final book in Knausgaard's epic My Struggle cycle--the most talked about literary project of its time.

The sprawling, intimate, and spectacularly unorthodox literary autobiography that unleashed a media frenzy upon its release in Norway, became a global publishing sensation, and sold millions of copies worldwide, now reaches its climactic conclusion.
     In My Struggle, Karl Ove Knausgaard examines with ruthless, unsparing rigour his life, his ambitions and frailties, his uncertainties and doubts, and his relationships with friends and exes, his wife and children, his mother and father. It is an opus in which life is described in all its nuances from moments of great drama to the most trivial everyday details. It is also a project that is full of risk, where the borders between private and public worlds cross, not without cost for the author himself and the people portrayed.
     The End, the sixth and final book, reflects back on the personal fallout from the earlier volumes, with Knausgaard facing growing literary acclaim and the often shattering repercussions that came with it. It is a book about literature itself and its relationship with reality, the capstone on a magnificent achievement. Translated from the Norwegian by superstar literary translators Don Bartlett and Martin Aitken.

About this title

About the Author:

KARL OVE KNAUSGAARD's first novel, Out of the World, was the first ever debut novel to win The Norwegian Critics' Prize and his second, A Time for Everything, was widely acclaimed. A Death in the Family, the first of the My Struggle cycle of novels, was awarded the prestigious Brage Award. The My Struggle cycle has been heralded as a masterpiece wherever it appears.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.:

PART EIGHT

* * *

Today is 26th August, 2011. It is 05.59. I am writing this in an unfurnished loft in Glemmingebro, in what we have begun to call the ‘summer house’ as it isn’t insulated. I have just been to the main house to wake Linda up; in two hours Vanja and Heidi go to school. It is a stone’s throw away and there are only thirty pupils in total in the four classes.  We never planned to move here, it just happened, like so much else. The plan was that we would have the house as a summer residence, come here every weekend and holiday, but only eight months after we had taken it over we moved in. So now we live here, right out in the country. I get up at four every morning, have a cup of coffee and a smoke before coming over here, into the freezing cold loft, then I write through till eight, when I take Vanja and Heidi to school, and afterwards have a thirty-minute nap before resuming my writing for the rest of the day. In the afternoon and evening I am in the garden, I have been going wild cutting down trees and bushes in the central part where, it transpired, there were beautiful flagstone paths, completely hidden by soil and undergrowth. I removed the worst, and last week I sowed grass, which has already started coming up. On the first afternoon I started clearing away the branches and twigs, tearing up bushes and plants, I couldn’t stop; at nine the children were hanging out of the window in their pyjamas asking me what I was doing running back and forth, dragging whole trees after me, and I didn’t stop until close on midnight, and it has been like that ever since; once I start working I don’t want to stop and I have to force myself to go to bed to ensure I have enough strength to write the following day. That was what my father did when I was a boy, he was always in the garden working, and I had never been able to understand why - what could it possibly give him? - until now. Previously I thought it was boring, a duty, and when for example I helped my mother at home or when we were at the allotment it was a chore, I always preferred to sit and read. Now I understand. From the outside, and invariably I did regard my father and what he did from the outside, gardening is the very symbol of bourgeois stasis, utterly ridiculous and superficial, an artificial way of ordering the world’s chaos by limiting the world to a lawn and a few bushes and subjugating them completely. The garden is also part of your private life others can see and therefore functions as a kind of display window for those around. In other words, a façade.
            Yesterday I sat in the garden reading a text Yngve had written about The Aller Værste! and their album Materialtretthet, in which he also interviewed the surviving band members about that period. One of them, I think it was Harald Øhrn, described himself as a vagabond, a man who had lived the life of a vagabond. That instant the attraction was back: seeing the world open up before you, always travelling, no roots, only that, the world continuing to open. That was what I dreamed of when I was in my teens, but I didn’t know what it was and I never realised the dream. The band they had in 1979 was about that, the freedom to do exactly what they wanted, completely unfettered by anything that had gone before. Chris Erichsen put it best, punk was about out with the old, all history, all the old heroes, all the bygones, and in with the new, what is here, right now, this is what counts, follow it wherever it may lead.  This is what it is like being twenty, everything is open, but as that which isn’t open still hasn’t revealed itself, you don’t know about it, what it entails, until it is too late and then the next generation has the world at their feet while you potter around in a suburban garden with children and a car and perhaps soon even a dog, if our eldest gets her way, which of course she will.
            That is how I felt yesterday as I read Yngve’s text with Heidi swinging under an apple tree and occasionally shouting whatever came into her head at me, for example she asked me if I knew what she was going to be when she was big. No, I said. I’m going to be a pixie, she shouted. She laughed at that for a long time. I said it sounded like a good idea, and read on. Taking life into your own hands: not studying, not working, just jamming with a few pals in a band. Or travelling down through Europe, finding a job, earning some money, always on the move.
            That was the attraction. It was about being open to the world, letting what happened, happen, and not being governed by the fixed structures that education, job, children and a house constituted, this calcification of life that came with institutions: nursery and school for your children, hospital and a care home for your parents perhaps, a job for you.
            So when I was running around the garden like a crazy man, with a petty bourgeois fire burning in my insides, not dissimilar to my father, although his beard was thick and mine was wispy, his upper torso strong and mine weak, it was hard to regard this as anything other than an escape inwards. Yet there was something about it that I liked. The smell of soil, all the worms and the beetles wriggling and crawling in it, the pleasure of a big branch falling to the ground and the light flooding across the previously overshadowed flagstones, the children wandering over sometimes to see what I was doing or to say something to me.
            I’d had the chance when I was twenty. I hadn’t taken it. Now they had the chance. Now it was their turn. It was their future.
            This is the voice of resignation speaking here, but also of necessity and sudden insight: this is how it must always have been. I never knew. But someone has always known, for someone has always been there. Ulysses deals with this as well, the difference between being the son, which Stephen Dedalus is, and about being the father, which Leopold Bloom is. Stephen outdoes Bloom in everything, but not in this. Leopold has nothing of Stephen’s yearnings and aspirations, he doesn’t want anything else, he is at home. Leopold is a complete person, Stephen Dedalus an incomplete person. Only Stephen can create, for to create is to want everything, to create is to want to come home and the whole person doesn’t feel that unrest, that urge, those yearnings. Hamlet, like Stephen, is a son and actually no more than that. It is his father’s death that triggers his crisis and his mother’s desertion that keeps it alive. Hamlet has no home. Jesus wasn’t a father either, but a son, and he had no home. Hamlet, Stephen, Jesus, Kafka, Proust were all sons and not fathers. So there was something about being human which they didn’t know and perhaps didn’t know about, either. But what was it? What is it to be a father? Being a father is a commitment, so it is possible to have children without being a father. But what are you committing yourself to? You have to be at your post; you have to be at home. Yearnings and aspirations are irreconcilable with this because what you hunger for is limitless and what home does is set limits. A father without limits is no father, but a man with children. A man without limits is a child, that is, the eternal son.  The eternal son takes or gets, he doesn’t give, and he takes or gets because he isn’t whole and he isn’t his own person. It is not some accidental detail that dad moved into his mother’s house before he died; he died a son. He had abrogated his responsibility as a father, and you can only do that if paternal duty is an external entity, a role you have assumed out of obligation. I believe that is how it was for him. He didn’t want to be there. He became a father at twenty and must have suppressed all his urges to break with propriety, combated all the yearnings and aspirations because that aggression, that anger and frustration he had, which characterised the whole of my childhood, could only exist in someone who didn’t want to be there, who didn’t want to do what he was doing. If that was so, he had sacrificed the whole of his young adult life, the years between twenty and forty, doing something he didn’t want to do but was forced to do. I was sixteen, as good as grown up, when he left the family, which suggests he took his responsibilities seriously.  But he was no father, he was a son. He wasn’t whole, he had no inner peace, no inner gravity, which adults have. Mum was also twenty when she became a mother, but she was an adult or grew into adulthood with the responsibilities that came. She was also his mother, in the sense that she set his limits, which was what he was unable to do himself, and no sons can. This is a simple explanation, but I believe it to be true. Linda’s father was without limits in a very different way: he had been diagnosed as a manic depressive, which is as good as a complete disclaimer of any responsibility for his own life, since the self cannot control the mania’s frenzied activity and the depression’s inactivity, there is something inside that constantly drives the self up or down, which means it is never present, it either expands into the world or implodes, and of course the disclaimer applies to the lives of his children as well. Both Linda and I were the children of sons, and we had experienced fathers without limits first-hand, Linda from the time she was quite small, me from the age of sixteen, but actually also from the time when I was quite small, as what I witnessed and experienced with respect to dad was a limitless man setting limits, which in the absence of any inner peace or gravity was defined by the outside, and for someone born in 1944 that was the authoritarian, rule-setting father. The mother of Linda’s father died when he was thirteen and he alone had been responsible for his siblings. He had been in the hospital when she died, he had been lying beside her on the bed. He had been very attached to his mother and perhaps it was as simple as this: his attachment never weakened because her life ceased before he had cut himself free. It remained strong inside him, I suppose. I don’t know, I met him only three times. Once in our flat in Regeringsgatan, once in his flat and once by chance on the street. He was a warm, open person, perhaps too open for his own good. In my life with Linda he was a distant figure, I imagined she had distanced herself from him long ago and she had done so because she had no choice. When she was in her mid-twenties she was also diagnosed with manic depression, or a bipolar disorder, as it is called, and had spent more than a year in hospital. Her increasingly intense life was suddenly out of control, as though she had fallen over an edge. She fell into the limitless. It was one of the options in her life, one of the paths that were open to her. When we met, the manic phase had passed and was over. At that time her father was living alone in a flat only a hundred metres from ours, somehow outside the community, because he hadn’t had a job for many years, from when he fell ill, and he had organised his life in the best way he could for himself. He died alone in a new flat, just after moving in. It was New Year’s Eve. By the time Linda found out, it was New Year’s Day, she sat down on the hall floor with her back against the wall. The children were asleep. She wept. Christina and Geir packed their bags and left to give us some space. In the night I woke to Linda crying beside me, I stroked her back and fell sleep again. I never realised that for the next three weeks she went through exactly the same as I had gone through with my father, when he had died eleven years earlier. She travelled to Stockholm, dealt with the undertakers, dealt with the solicitor, pored over her father’s worldly chattels in the flat with her brother Mathias and grieved.  She mourned the loss of her father, but I, her husband, wasn’t there for her. I was writing. And what was I writing about? I was writing about the death of my father, which at that time, eleven years ago, had consumed me totally, darkened my life as it were and it still consumed me. When it happened to Linda I saw it from a great distance and my attempts to console her and be sympathetic were mechanical. When it came to the crunch, I failed her. I told myself my role was to take care of the children and I had to write, not only for my own sake, but for the family’s, as we needed the money. I was also angry with Linda and had been for a long time. But sometimes you have to be big enough to rise above the trivial and the mundane, all the pettiness and self-absorption in which we live our lives, or at least I do, because now, when it really counts, when it is a life or death situation, the minutiae don’t matter and the person who clings to them is small-minded.
            On the morning before the funeral we caught a plane to Stockholm. John was a year and a half old, Heidi was three and a half, Vanja approaching five. A friend of Linda’s had given us the use of her flat, which the children turned into bedlam within seconds. Late in the afternoon Linda’s mother, Inger, arrived, then Linda’s brother, Mathias. We shared a bottle of wine and chatted for a couple of hours. Mathias, a warm, attentive person, asked me how my writing was going. I said I was busy with an autobiographical novel and he was in it. His eyes widened. Linda said with a smile that she thought I was performing a character assassination on her in the novel. I countered that she had the right of veto, if she wanted something excised all she had to do was say. Mathias said Linda could use the veto on his behalf as well. I had such a bad conscience about what I had written that I decided there and then to delete everything to do with them. They were so kind! And on the following day they were going to bury their father and Ingrid’s ex-husband. Who was I to write about them in such a vulnerable situation?  The whole time we were sitting there the children kept wandering to and from the other room, where they were watching a film on a laptop. Heidi sat on my lap staring impishly at Mathias for long periods at a time; Vanja stayed with her grandmother and ignored Mathias, while John was devouring him with his eyes and only turned away for a second when Mathias lifted him in the air, then John burst into laughter as Mathias threw him up towards the ceiling.
            Mathias and Linda discussed the final preparations for the following day, we talked briefly about whether we should let Ingrid look after the children for an hour while we adjourned to a nearby café, however we decided to stay and, after mother and son had left, we tucked in the children and went to bed early ourselves. That is, I sat up reading as everyone around me slept, Carl-Johan Vallgren’s new novel Kunzelmann & Kunzelmann, a contemporary thriller I had bought the day before, on the basis of a review it had ...

About this edition

• Publisher: Knopf Canada
• Publication date: 2018
• ISBN 10: 034580998X
• ISBN 13: 9780345809988
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 1168