My Struggle

went into the bathroom, grabbed the glass on the sink and hurled it at the wall with all the strength I could muster. I waited to hear if there was any reaction. Then I took the biggest shard I could find and started cutting my face. I did it methodically, making the cuts as deep as I could, and covered my whole face. The chin, cheeks, forehead, no

A life is simple to understand, the elements that determine it are few. In mine there were two. My father and the fact that I had never belonged anywhere.

The adjacent fjord, bluish green and totally still, the mountains that towered up on the other side, the few farms, high on the slopes, with their white walls and reddish roofs, their green-and-yellow fields, all gleaming in the bright light from the sun that was sinking and would soon disappear in the sea far beyond. The bare mountains above the f

The new items she had bought were added to the rest and belonged to her, unlike Dad’s possessions, which were expendable. The priest who buried him mentioned this in his sermon, he said that you have to ground your gaze, ground yourself in the world, by which he meant that my father had not done this, and he was absolutely right. But it was several

One child was absolutely out of the question for me, two were too few and too close together, but three, I reckoned, were perfect. Then the children outnumbered the parents, there were lots of permutations possible, then we were a gang. I had nothing but contempt for precise plans to pinpoint the most suitable time, both as far as our own lives wer

I walked beside her, burning with shame because people were looking at us, burning with guilt because I had been drinking and burning with terror because, in her unbridled rage, she went straight for me and the person I was.

But with Linda it was as though I had been cast back to the time when my feelings swung from wild elation to wild fury, to the pits of despair and desperation, the time when I lived in a series of all-decisive moments, and the intensity was so great that sometimes life felt almost unlivable, and when nothing could give me any peace of mind except b

The situation was highly ironic. There he was defending theories about sticking together and solidarity, yet he was the one who had been ostracized and stood alone. He was the one who observed the world through idealistic, abstract eyes, who had a more refined soul than any of the others, he was the one who lifted and carried, hammered and pounded,

Everything was raised, higher and higher, the intensity increased, and within the tightly set framework, which in the end comprised only mother and son, a kind of boundlessness arose, something wild and reckless. Into it disappeared plot and space, what was left was emotion, and it was stark, you were looking straight into the essence of human exis