Drinking also gets him into several situations where he makes a total fool of himself. In an effort to ease his nerves socially, he begins to drink heavily, which helps him to remain calm while courting the women in this new town he finds himself dislocated in. He is absolutely obsessed with losing his virginity, and extremely insecure about his pattern of ejaculating before the act has even begun. He’s using this experience to save money, and isolate himself so that he can focus on writing more exclusively. He wants to step a toe outside of his comfort zone. He’s grossly under qualified for the position, knows it, but wants to be alienated from the familiar.
Karl Ove is still terrified of him, and doesn’t understand how to reconcile this new person that has replaced his father, with the father that raised him.Īt eighteen Karl Ove leaves home for the first time and takes a job as a school teacher in a small fishing community in northern Norway rural in a different way than he’s familiar with. Also, it’s appearing that he was always a very emotional person, like Karl Ove has always been, crying often, and begging forgiveness of his sons now that they’re grown. He’s starting to see that his father was never happy, and needed something different from life than what he was getting. His emotionally, verbally, and physically abusive father has left his mother, started drinking, and seems to be a completely different person than he was when Karl Ove was a boy. The main story in this volume involves Karl Ove as a young man who is lost, and his struggle to find the kind of world he fits into. I started counting when I noticed the pattern, and eventually lost track at fifteen or so times around the middle of the book. He writes himself as the antagonist in his own life story. He lays out every dirty detail, and is extremely hard on himself. Usually when we tell stories about ourselves, we’re the hero, or at the very least we present ourselves and the situations we get into in the best possible light painting others as the bully, or the one who deserved what they got, etc. Karl Ove as a literary character, is a one of the most unusual protagonists I’ve come across, because he isn’t a protagonist at all. I have to mention that I’m a sucker for these sections where he reminds the reader of his present tense writing of the novel. It stays mostly focused on his life from age sixteen to eighteen, with an occasional leap forward to 2009 Karl Ove in his early forties writing the book you’re reading his wife and children asleep in the next room.
Like book 3, book 4 doesn’t jump around as much as 1 and 2. You might think I’m joking, but I think the moral of this story is that people should masturbate more often, and especially in their early teenage years. Eighteen year old Karl Ove spends most of the book whining about his inability to lose his virginity, and attempting to write short fiction (telling tales). Karl Ove isn’t talking about himself in this quote, but he might as well be.
He would have to learn he would get nowhere by whining or telling tales.”
“.he would have to work out the social game for himself.