Dancing in the Dark by Karl Ove Knausgård

Author:Karl Ove Knausgård [Knausgård, Karl Ove]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Literature
ISBN: 9781846557248
Amazon: B00P8K044E
Publisher: Harvill Secker, Penguin Random House
Published: 2010-01-02T05:00:00+00:00

* * *

I spent the last weeks of the summer in Arendal. Rune, the programme director at the radio station, ran a kind of agency, he sold cassettes to local petrol stations, and when one evening I complained that I didn’t have a summer job he suggested I sold his cassettes on the street. I bought them from him for a fixed sum, he wasn’t bothered about only making a small profit, and so I could sell them at whatever price I liked. The towns in Sørland were full of tourists in the summer, purse strings were loose, if you were selling music from the charts you were bound to be in with a chance.

‘Good idea,’ I said. ‘My brother’s living in Arendal this summer. Perhaps I can set up there?’

‘Perfect!’

And so one morning I loaded a bag of clothes, a camping chair, a camping table, a ghetto blaster and a box of cassettes into mum’s car, which Yngve had at his disposal all summer, sat in the passenger seat, put on my new Ray-Bans and leaned back as Yngve engaged first gear and set off down the hill.

The sun was shining, which it had done all July, there was very little traffic on this side of the river, I rolled down the window, stuck out my elbow and sang along with Bowie as we raced through the spruce forest, the gleaming river appearing and disappearing between the trees, occasionally alongside sandbanks where children were swimming and screaming and shouting.

We chatted about grandma and grandad, whom we had visited the previous day, about how time seemed to stand still there compared with the house in Søbørvåg, where in the last two years it seemed to have accelerated and caused everything to go into decline.

We drove through the tiny centre of Birkeland to Lillesand and from there onto the E18, the stretch I knew inside out after all the journeys back and forth in my childhood.

I put on a cassette by the Psychedelic Furs, their most commercial LP, which I loved.

‘Have I told you about the girl who came up to me in London?’ Yngve said.

‘No,’ I said.

‘“You’re the spitting image of the lead singer in Psychedelic Furs,” she said, and then she wanted someone to take a photo of us together.’

He looked at me and laughed.

‘I thought it was Audun Automat from Tramteatret you looked like?’ I said.

‘Yes, but that’s not quite as flattering,’ he said.

We drove past Knut Hamsun’s Nørholm property, I leaned forward to look past Yngve and into the grounds, I had been there once, on a class trip when I was in the ninth, we were shown round by Hamsun’s son and saw the cottage where he wrote and a few pieces of furniture he had made.

Now it was empty and looked overgrown.

‘Do you remember dad saying he had seen Hamsun on the bus to Grimstad once?’

‘No,’ Yngve said. ‘Did he say that?’

‘Yes, an old man with a stick and a white beard.’

Yngve shook his head. ‘Imagine all the lies he’s told us over the years.

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