Until I moved to Stockhold I had felt there was a continuity to my life, as if it stretched unbroken from childhood up to the present, held together … - Karl Ove Knausgård

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 was it that Rilke wrote? That music raised him out of himself, and never returned him to where it had found him, but to a deeper place, somewhere in the unfinished.

That is what life is like, is it not? When we’re young we think there’s more to come, that this is only the beginning, whereas in fact it’s all there is, and what we have now, and barely even think about, will soon be the only thing we ever had.