Boyhood Island: My Struggle Book 3 by Karl Ove Knausgaard

Author:Karl Ove Knausgaard
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Tags: Coming of Age, Biographical, General, Family Life, Fiction
ISBN: 9781448155842
Publisher: Random House
Published: 2014-03-20T00:00:00+00:00

The music lifted me at once, I beat the air with one hand and rocked my head backwards and forwards, happy to the core. Bettåh, bettåh, bettåh! I sang. Bettåh, bettåh, bettåh!

There was the school building, black, with all its many windows glinting, as we stormed off the bus. We were among the older pupils now and knew both how to behave and what to expect. While the new kids, hair combed and smartly dressed, stood with their parents listening to the head teacher’s welcome talk by the flagpole, we swaggered around and spat or leaned against the wall of the wet-weather shed talking about what we had done that summer. Three cows on a farm was no longer good enough, but even if our only holiday trip had been to Sørbøvåg, where I had stayed with Jon Olav and the others, alone for a week, I definitely had something to offer because there had been a girl there, my second cousin, whose name was Merete, she had blonde hair and lived outside Oslo. I went out with her, I said, and although that was not quite as impressive as Liseberg in Gothenburg, northern Europe’s biggest funfair, it was better than nothing.

Some of the girls unfurled their skipping elastic from what were to me hidden places and started jumping.

No, dancing.

We managed to persuade them to play the high jump instead, so that we could join in without losing face in front of the other boys. Two of the girls held the elastic between them, and then, one after the other, we ran towards it, launched both legs and brought our feet down on it to land on the other side.

It was a pleasure to watch the girls as they took off, legs first, in their elegant controlled fashion.

Whoosh, you heard, and then they were safely on the other side.

Then the height was raised until there was only one person left.

I hoped it would be me because Anne Lisbet had joined us now as well, but it was, as so often before, Marianne.

Tap, tap, tap, you heard as she ran forward, whoosh, you heard when she jumped, and then she was over.

She smiled shyly, swept her shoulder-length blonde hair to one side with a finger, and I wondered if she would be the one I fell in love with this year.

Probably not. She was in my class.

Perhaps it would be someone in the A class?

Or, hey, future of dreams, perhaps someone from another school?

After we had been given the timetable and some new books in the first lesson we had to tell the class what we had done over the summer, one after the other. In the second lesson we had to hold an election for the new school council. I had been the class rep with Siv in the previous year and I thought being re-elected would be a formality until Eivind put up his hand and said he would also like to stand as a candidate. There were six names to choose from.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.