Free Dancing in the Dark: My Struggle Book 4 by Karl Ove Knausgaard Page A

shrugged.
    ‘Maybe. Is it on Friday or Saturday?’
    ‘Friday, I think,’ I said.
    ‘Maybe not such a bad idea,’ he said.
    The bell rang.
    ‘We can talk about it later,’ he said and stood up.
    ‘OK,’ I said, put my cup down on the worktop, fetched my books from my workstation, went to the classroom, sat on the teacher’s desk and waited for the pupils to arrive.
    When I walked down to my flat after school, my removal boxes were waiting in the porch. They contained everything I owned, which wasn’t much: a box of records, another with an old stereo in, one full of kitchen utensils and one with the odds and ends that had accumulated in my old room, plus some of mum’s books. It still felt as though I had been given a huge present as I carried them into the sitting room. I assembled the stereo, stacked the records against the wall, flicked through them, selected
My Life in the Bush of Ghosts
by Brian Eno and David Byrne, one of my all-time favourites, and with it resounding through the room I started to organise the other items. Everything I had brought with me from home when we moved – pans, plates, cups and glasses – I’d had around me ever since I was small and we lived in Tybakken. Brown plates, green glasses, a large pot with only one handle, blackened underneath and some way up the sides. I’d had the picture of John Lennon in my room all the time I was at
gymnas
and proceeded to hang it on the wall behind the typewriter. I’d had the enormous poster of Liverpool FC, the 1979/80 season, since I was eleven, and it was now given a position on the wall behind the sofa. It was perhaps their best team ever: Kenny Dalglish, Ray Clemence, Alan Hansen, Emlyn Hughes, Graeme Souness and John Toshack. I had grown tired of the Paul McCartney poster, so I put it in the bedroom cupboard, rolled up. When everything was tidy, I flicked through the records again imagining I was someone else, someone who had never seen them before, and wondered what they would have made of the collection, or rather of the person who owned this collection, in other words me. There were more than 150 LPs, most from the last two years, when I had been reviewing records for the local paper and spent almost all the money I had on new ones, often the complete back catalogue of bands I liked. Every single one of these records embraced an entire little world of its own. All of them expressed quite definite attitudes, sentiments and moods. But none of the records was an island, there were connections between them which spread outwards: Brian Eno, for example, started in Roxy Music, released solo records, produced U2 and worked with Jon Hassell, David Byrne, David Bowie and Robert Fripp; Robert Fripp played on Bowie’s
Scary Monsters
; Bowie produced Lou Reed, who came from Velvet Underground, and Iggy Pop, who came from the Stooges, while David Byrne was in Talking Heads, who on their best record,
Remain in Light
, used the guitarist Adrian Belew, who in turn played on several of Bowie’s records and was his favourite live guitarist for years. But the ramifications and connections didn’t only exist between the records, they extended right into my own life. The music was linked with almost everything I had done, none of the records came without a memory. Everything that had happened in the last five years rose like steam from a cup when I played a record, not in the form of thoughts or reasoning, but as moods, openings, space. Some general, others specific. If my memories were stacked in a heap on the back of my life’s trailer, music was the rope that held them together and kept it, my life, in position.
    But this wasn’t its most important aspect, which was the music itself. When, for example, I played
Remain in Light
, which I had done regularly since the eighth class and never tired of, and the third track started, ‘The Great Curve’, with its fantastic rolling, multilayered accompaniment, brimful of energy, and the horns joined in,