THE ‘80s ACCORDING TO KNAUSGAARD.

The thoughts of 18-year old Karl Ove:

Playing records:  I put on Remain in Light and it was impossible not to move, impossible,it ignited every part of my body, me, the world’s least rhythmic eighteen-year-old, sitting there squirming like a snake, to and fro, and I had to have it louder. I turned it up full blast, and then I had to dance.

Girls: I loved everything about them, from the veins in the skin over their wrists to the curves of their ears, and if I saw a breast under a T-shirt or a naked thigh under a summer dress it was as though everything in my insides was let loose.

Definition of pleasure: Eighteen years old and on my way to a party.

Being in love: Everything hurts but nothing is as good…Life will inexorably dwindle and shrink until it is a manageable entity which doesn’t hurt so much, but nor is it as good. Only a forty-year-old man could have written that. I am forty now.

Older women: She was around fifty with a white shoe-shop bag on her lap. She was chewing gum, which was a mistake, chewing gum didn’t go with her glasses and hair.

What teenagers are good at: Sitting around in bedrooms. No one could beat us at that.  None of this led anywhere. Well, we probably weren’t very good at doing things that led somewhere…As far as girls were concerned, it was rare we came across one who wouldn’t object if we pulled up her jumper so that we could lower our heads and kiss her nipples. These were great moments.

What a guy from a small town wants: To find life where it was really lived, in the streets of cities, beneath skyscrapers, at glittering parties with beautiful people in unfamiliar apartments. To find the one great love and all the restlessness that involved, and then the acceptance, the relief, the ecstasy.

(#amreading  Dancing in the Dark)