Knausgaard, Karl Ove (b. 1968)

My Struggle, Book One

2009, trans. 2012

"'Unraveling' was our family euphemism for senility."

"Unraveling" was our family euphemism for senility. Grandad's brother, Leif, his brain "unraveled" when, on several occasions, he wandered from the old people's home to his childhood home, where he hadn't lived for sixty years, and stood shouting and banging on the door all through the night. His second brother, Alf, his mind had started unraveling in recent years; it was most obvious in his merging of the present and the past. And Grandad's mind also started unraveling at the end of his life when he sat up at night fiddling with an enormous collection of keys, no one knew he had them, let alone why. It was in the family; their mother's mind unraveled eventually, if we were to believe what my father had said. Apparently the last thing she did was climb into the loft instead of going down into the cellar when she had heard a siren; according to my father, she fell down the steep loft staircase in her house and died. Whether that was true or not, I don't know, my father could serve up all manner of lies. My intuition told me it wasn't, but there was no way of finding out.
(p. 427)

Uncategorized::Unraveling

Reading

Karl Ove Knausgaard, My Struggle, Book One, trans. Don Bartlett (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2012 [2009]).

01/08/2016