‘I’ll try that next time,’ I said and smiled into the darkness.
‘Yes, should an opportunity ever present itself,’ he said.
‘At Christmas, for example? All the young women from the district will be back then.’
‘Do you reckon they’ll be coming back here to get laid? I don’t think so. I think they’re getting it where they are now and they come back here for some R & R ready to go again in January.’
‘Yes, you’re probably right,’ I said, and came to a halt, we had reached the road to my flat. ‘If everything goes through with the house when do we move in?’
‘We have to give notice first and so on. After Christmas? If we shorten our holiday by two days we can do it then.’
‘Sounds good,’ I said. ‘See you!’
I raised my hand and waved, opened the door and went in. Ate eight slices of bread and drank half a litre of milk, lay down on the sofa and read the first pages of a new book I had bought: The Big Adventure by Jan Kjærstad. I had read Mirrors and Homo Falsus by him before and had just borrowed The Earth Turns Quietly from the library in Finnsnes. But this one was new, it had just been published, and the first thing I did when I held it in my hand was to smell the fresh paper. Then I flicked backwards and forwards. Every chapter started with a big O. Some of the chapters were set in several columns — one column looked like notes and popped up here and there alongside another, which was the main story. Some chapters were letters. Some were printed in bold type, some in italics, some in normal font. Something called Hazar and something called Enigma cropped up at regular intervals. And definitions of k — that had to stand for kjærlighet, love.
I started reading the first page.
She was very young. Neck as fresh as dew. They stood a metre apart, in their own worlds. He had felt the tension, even with his back to her, he turned and stole a glance. An enormous kick. Made a few feints with his leg. She noticed, smiled. Sparks between kohl and mascara. She thrust her right shoulder in his direction, twice, a different beat, bit her lower lip, lowered her gaze. The percussion and bass set off a funky groove in his sensory receptors. Contrary to nature to stand still. He took a few steps on the carpet, towards her, away from her, inviting, teasing. She mimicked his steps, same rhythm, tiger wrinkles by her nose. Black curly hair, neckerchief wound around her forehead, brazen make-up. What was she listening to? Cramps? Split Beavers? ViViVox? Kimono jacket with leaf pattern, baggy silk trousers, sandals with toe strap. Breath-taking. And around her: the covers’ flickering kaleidoscope of figures, forms and fancy calligraphy.
I read it over and over again. The style was so alien, and yet so cool with the short incomplete sentences, all the alliteration and the sprinkling of English words. And the foreign words. Kimono — that was Japanese. Tiger wrinkles — that was Indian and animalistic. Kohl — that sounded German, was it? Within the space of a few lines a whole world was opened up to me. And it was a different world, it had something futuristic about it, which attracted me. But I couldn’t write like that, even if I wanted to, it would be impossible. When I read Vinduet, which Kjærstad edited, I knew as good as none of the names and the featured titles and only a few of the terms used. About Burning The Aeneid, one article was called, for some reason it rumbled around in my head, cropping up here, there and everywhere, although I had no idea what the Aeneid was. All this was postmodernism, Kjærstad was the greatest Norwegian postmodernist writer, and although I liked it, or the whole world that I suspected lay behind what stood in the text, I didn’t know what it was or where it actually existed. Toe strap, tårem in Norwegian, was there some echo there with harem and the Orient? Kjærstad’s books were full of the Orient, a Thousand and One Nights atmosphere, narratives within narratives, and I imagined part of what he was doing was drawing that world into ours, along with a host of other worlds. What it meant, I had no idea, but intuitively I liked it, in the same way that intuitively I disliked Milan Kundera. Kundera was also a postmodernist writer, but he completely lacked this embracing of other worlds, with him the world was always the same, it was Prague and Czechoslovakia and the Soviets who had either invaded or were on the point of doing so, and that was fine, but he kept withdrawing his characters from the plot, intervening and going on about something or other while the characters stood still, waiting as it were, by the window or wherever it was they happened to be until he had finished his explanation and they could move forward. Then you saw that the plot was only ‘a plot’ and that the characters were only ‘characters’, something he had invented, you knew they didn’t exist, and so why should you read about them? Kundera’s polar opposite was Hamsun, no one went as far into his characters’ world as he did, and that was what I preferred, at least in a comparison of these two, the physicality and the realism of Hunger, for example. There the world had weight, there even the thoughts were captured, while with Kundera the thoughts elevated themselves above the world and did as they liked with it. Another difference I had noticed was that European novels often had only one plot, everything followed one track as it were, while South American novels had a multiplicity of tracks and sidetracks, indeed, compared with European novels, they almost exploded with plots. One of my favourites was A Hundred Years of Solitude by García Márquez, but I also loved Love in the Time of Cholera. Kjærstad had a little of the same, but in a European way, and there was also something of Kundera in him. That was my opinion anyway.
What about my own writing?
Writing in a postmodernist style like Kjærstad was way beyond my reach, I couldn’t do it even if I wanted to, I didn’t have it in me. I had only one world, so that was the one I had to write about. At least for the time being. But I tried to include the exuberance that García Márquez possessed. The multiplicity of stories too. And Hamsun’s being present in the moment.
I read on. I had seen in the reviews that in this novel Oslo was situated somewhere in the southern hemisphere. That was a fantastic idea, it meant Oslo became everything it wasn’t in reality. But the way this world was evoked was more important. There was something Márquezian about the exuberance and the density and the multiplicity in this passage.
I laid aside the book and went to the desk, sat down and started to flick through the little pile of texts I had written. It was so thin! So unbelievably thin! I only included the bare essentials — the forest, the road, the house — I let everything else go. But what if I let all the rest explode?
I took a fresh piece of paper and wound it into the typewriter, glanced at my reflection in the window as the typewriter carriage buzzed into position.
Where was there a subject with more breadth and depth and an abundance of detail?
I imagined the road outside the house in Tybakken.
I went onto the road. It was black and beside it the green spruce trees swayed in the wind. A car drove past. It was a BMW. On the pavement Erling and Harald stood by their bikes. Erling had an Apache, Harald a DBS. Behind them the hill was lined with houses. In the gardens there were chairs and tables, kennels, barbecues, tricycles, small plastic pools, hoses and an abandoned rake. In the sky above a plane flew past, so far up that only the white vapour trail was visible.