My Struggle: Book One Read Online Free PDF

fishing boat, and my heart was pounding in my chest. But the report they showed was different: instead of pictures of calm sea a local police officer was being interviewed on a quay, followed by a woman with a small child in her arms, then the reporter himself spoke against a background of billowing waves.
    After the item was over there was the sound of my father’s voice, and laughter. The shame that suffused my body was so strong that I was unable to think. My innards seemed to blanch. The force of the sudden shame was the sole feeling from my childhood that could measure in intensity against that of terror, next to sudden fury, of course, and common to all three was the sense that I myself was being erased. All that mattered was precisely that feeling. So as I turned and went back to my room, I noticed nothing. I know that the window in the stairwell must have been so dark that the hall was reflected in it, I know that the door to Yngve’s bedroom must have been closed, the same as the one to my parents’ bedroom and to the bathroom. I know that Mom’s bunch of keys must have been splayed out on the telephone table, like some mythical beast at rest, with its head of leather and myriad metal legs, I know that the knee-high ceramic vase of dried flowers and strawmust have been on the floor next to it, unreconciled, as it were, with the synthetic material of the wall-to-wall carpet. But I saw nothing, heard nothing, thought nothing. I went into my room, lay down on my bed, and switched off the light, and when the darkness closed itself around me, I took such a deep breath that it quivered, while the muscles in my stomach tightened and forced out whimpering noises that were so loud I had to direct them into the soft, and soon very wet, pillow. It helped, in much the same way that vomiting helps when you are nauseous. Long after the tears had stopped coming I lay sobbing. That had a soothing effect. When it too had worn itself out I lay on my stomach, rested my head against my arm, and closed my eyes to sleep.

    As I sit here writing this, I recognize that more than thirty years have passed. In the window before me I can vaguely make out the reflection of my face. Apart from one eye, which is glistening, and the area immediately beneath, which dimly reflects a little light, the whole of the left side is in shadow. Two deep furrows divide my forehead, one deep furrow intersects each cheek, all of them as if filled with darkness, and with the eyes staring and serious, and the corners of the mouth drooping, it is impossible not to consider this face gloomy.
    What has engraved itself in my face?
    Today is the twenty-seventh of February. The time is 11:43 p.m. I, Karl Ove Knausgaard, was born in December 1968, and at the time of writing I am thirty-nine years old. I have three children – Vanja, Heidi, and John – and am in my second marriage, to Linda Boström Knausgaard. All four are asleep in the rooms around me, in an apartment in Malmö where we have lived for a year and a half. Apart from some parents of the children at Vanja and Heidi’s nursery we do not know anyone here. This is not a loss, at any rate not for me, I don’t get anything out of socializing anyway. I never say what I really think, what I really mean, but always more or less agree with whomever I am talking to at the time, pretend that what they say is of interest to me, except whenI am drinking, in which case more often than not I go too far the other way, and wake up to the fear of having overstepped the mark. This has become more pronounced over the years and can now last for weeks. When I drink I also have blackouts and completely lose control of my actions, which are generally desperate and stupid, but also on occasion desperate and dangerous. That is why I no longer drink. I do not want anyone to get close to me, I do not want anyone to see me, and this is the way things have developed: no one gets close and no one sees