Karl Ove Knausgaard - My Struggle Book 6: The End

The extraordinary final volume of Karl Ove Knausgaards monumental My Struggle series, perhaps the most significant literary enterprise of our times (Guardian)

The End is the sixth and final book in the monumental My Struggle cycle. Here, Karl Ove Knausgaard examines life, death, love and literature with unsparing rigour and begins to count the cost of his project.

This last volume reflects on the fallout from the earlier books, with Knausgaard facing the pressures of literary acclaim and its often shattering repercussions. The End is at once a meditation on writing and its relationship with reality, and an account of a writers relationship with himself his ambitions, his doubts and frailties.

My Struggle depicts life in all its shades, from moments of great drama to seemingly trivial everyday details. It is a project freighted with risk, where the bounds between private and public worlds are tested, not without penalty for the author himself and those around him. The End is the capstone on an unparalleled achievement.

Karl Ove Knausgaards 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 Prize. The My Struggle cycle has been heralded as a masterpiece all over the world.

Also by Karl Ove Knausgaard

A Time for Everything

A Death in the Family: My Struggle Book 1

A Man in Love: My Struggle Book 2

Boyhood Island: My Struggle Book 3

Dancing in the Dark: My Struggle Book 4

Some Rain Must Fall: My Struggle Book 5

Home and Away: Writing the Beautiful Game (with Fredrik Ekelund)

Autumn (with illustrations by Vanessa Baird)

Winter (with illustrations by Lars Lerin)

Spring (with illustrations by Anna Bjerger)

Summer (with illustrations by Anselm Kiefer)

To Linda, Vanja, Heidi and John.

I love you.

MY STRUGGLE: BOOK 6

THE END

IN MID-SEPTEMBER 2009 I went up to Thomas and Maries little retreat between Hganes and Mlle, he was going to take some photos of me for the forthcoming books. I had hired a car, a black Audi, and headed north along the four-lane motorway in late morning with an intense feeling of happiness in my chest. The sky was clear blue, the sun shone like it was still summer. To my left the resund lay glittering, to my right yellow fields of stubble and meadows stretched inland, separated by stone walls, streams lined by leafy trees, sudden woodland. I was struck by a feeling that such a day wasnt supposed to happen, and yet there it was, an oasis of summer in the midst of autumns paling landscape, and the fact that it wasnt meant to be like that, that the sun wasnt meant to shine so brightly, the sky wasnt supposed to be so saturated with light, tinged my joy with a sense of unease, so I tried not to think about it in the hope that it would pass of its own accord, sang along to the chorus of Cat People as it came through the speakers at the same moment, and took pleasure at the sight of the town appearing on my left, the harbour cranes, factory chimneys, warehouses. These were the outskirts of Landskrona, gliding by as Barsebck had glided by only a few minutes earlier, the nuclear power stations characteristic and ever-ominous silhouette rising in the distance. Next up was Helsingborg, and from there it was another twenty kilometres or so to Thomas and Maries place.

I was running late. First I had sat for a long time in the multi-storey car park, in the roomy Audis temperate interior, wondering how to start the ignition, unable to bring myself to go back to the rental office and ask in case they took the vehicle away from me once I had revealed such towering ignorance, and so I sat and pored through the handbook, flicking backwards and forwards through the pages, finding nothing at all about how to start the engine. I studied the dashboard, then the key, which wasnt a key at all but a card made of black plastic. I had unlocked the doors by pressing on it and wondered now if the ignition worked by some similar system. I searched the steering column in vain for a diagram. But there, wasnt that a slot of some sort? Maybe that was it?

I inserted the card and the engine purred. The next half-hour I spent driving around the centre of Malm looking for the right road out of the city. By the time I eventually drove down the slip road and onto the motorway I was nearly an hour behind schedule.

As Landskrona disappeared behind the low fold of the glacial ridge I fumbled for my mobile on the seat next to me, found it and pressed Geir As number. It was Geir who had originally introduced me to Thomas, they had met in a boxing club where Thomas had been working on a photo book about the sport, while Geir had been writing a dissertation on the same subject. They made an odd couple, to put it cautiously, but held each other in the highest regard.

Hello, mate, said Geir.

Hi, I said. Can you do me a favour?

Sure.

Could you give Thomas a ring and tell him Ill be an hour late?

Will do. Are you on the road?

Yes.

Sounds good.

Its fantastic, for a change. But listen, Ive got to overtake a lorry now.

And?

I cant talk on the phone at the same time.

Someone ought to investigate your multitasking capacity sometime. Catch you later, then.

I hung up, changed gear and passed the long white articulated lorry, which swayed gently in the turbulent air. Earlier in the summer I had driven the whole family up to Koster and nearly had two accidents on the way, one due to aquaplaning at high speed, which could have ended very badly indeed, the other not quite as drastic, but frightening nonetheless; I had changed lanes in a tailback outside Gothenburg without seeing a car coming from behind, and we only avoided a crash because the other guy was so quick on the brakes. The angry blast of his horn cut straight into my soul. After that I went right off driving and felt a little fear every time I thought about it, which was probably a good thing, but still, even overtaking a lorry had become an ordeal, I had to force myself to do it, and any long drive filled me with anxiety for days afterwards, like a hangover. The fact that I had passed my test and was actually allowed to drive a car was something my soul cared little about, it lagged behind and was still living in the days when it had been a great recurring nightmare of mine that I got behind the wheel of a car and drove off without knowing how. Ridden with angst, negotiating the bends of Norways roads with the overhanging threat of the police catching up with me at any minute, I would be sound asleep in a bed somewhere with the pillow and the upper half of the duvet soaked in sweat.

I left the motorway and joined the narrower main road to Hganes. The warmth outside was visible in the air, something about the substance of light and sky, they seemed veiled in a way, and the glitter the sunshine sprinkled over everything. The world was wide open, that was the feeling of it, and everything shimmered.