My sister called me today. “How are you?”, she asked.
I was sitting on the sofa, the window behind me wide open. It created a draft with the window in the corner of the kitchen. It was a hot New York day and every few minutes a gust would roll through the room and over my clammy skin.
I was reading a book by one of my namesakes. It was Karl Ove Knausgaard’s autobiographical novel and was the second book of the series. He leaves his wife, moves to Stockholm and meets a new woman name Linda. They have a child. He resents his life. All he wants to do is read and write but he has to care for his child and look after his irritable wife and her drunk mother. He is obsessed with national identities and laments the sterilization of modern life. I don’t think he’s a good person. But he would be the first to admit that. And that’s why I like him.
“I’m good, just sitting on my sofa reading,” I responded.
“You sound happy, what book is it?”
“Just one I got off the bookshelf in the apartment, actually there is a passage in here I underlined I think you would really like”
I flicked through to find the paragraph about how people crave the stiff rules of a bourgeois lifestyles because it takes away the pressure of choosing what to do with the infinite opportunities presented by life. Like a heroin addict that only thinks about finding the next dose. It’s a prison but a relief for those that fear the responsibility of thinking for themselves.
My sister and her partner were in a difficult period. Her boyfriend Jamie wanted to priotise earning enough to send their future kids to the ‘right’ school. Still in her twenties she thought it was too early to fall into the designated roles their parents expected of them. I thought this passage might spark some insight in her. That’s why I underlined it.
“You made a mark in someone else’s book?”. She hadn’t listened to any of what I read out.
“Well, yeah I always underline important passages. That’s how I read books?”
I couldn’t understand how I had done anything wrong.
“But it is not your book, you defamed a stranger’s book. I would be horrified if someone came to stay at my house and took a pencil to all my books.”
Defamed? I thought to myself. I had spent hours and days reading and then carefully underlined the passages that meant the most to me. How is that defamation? It is it the opposite. It is dutiful, respectful, thoughtful. At worst I thought it was neutral, at best I thought my landlord would be pleased someone had paid such close attention to a text that presumably had some importance to him.
I argued back. “But I am not just a house guest, I am renting the apartment and he consciously left all of them here. He lent them to me and expects me to read them?”.
Something was welling up inside me. The embarrassment had started as a small ball deep in my chest, but grew larger as the conversation continued. I grew clammier. How had this never crossed my mind? Yet it would “horrify” my sister? Someone who grew up in the exact same household as me. If I couldn’t tell the difference between defamation and care, what else had I got wrong?
Was it overly familiar when I hugged my friend’s Mum last weekend? I had only just met her and had hugged everyone else on the way out. It would be disrespectful not to hug her, but it felt a little awkward. She was an elderly Jewish lady? Does that matter? Surely not? Everyone hugs regardless of whether you think Jesus is the son of God. You can’t shake hands, that would be too formal. And a kiss definitely wouldn’t be right.
“You should go back through the book and rub out all of the underlines,” my sister recommended.
It didn’t matter what I thought. If she thought it was defamation, there was a chance he would think the same. But there was no way I was going to spend an hour of my day rubbing out wobbly pencil lines and the brackets around paragraphs I have already forgotten existed.
“Nah, I’m not doing that, I doubt he will ever read it anyway,” I responded.
Karl's life 