My Struggle: Book One by Karl Knausgaard

because of the friendship itself, but also, and not least, because his popularity might rub off on me as well. I was not conscious of this, but in retrospect, if nothing else, it is patently obvious; if you are on the outside you have to find someone who can let you in, at any rate when you are sixteen years old. In this case the exclusion was not metaphorical, but literal and real. I was surrounded by several hundred boys and girls of my age, but could not enter the milieu to which they all belonged. Every Monday I dreaded the questionthey would all ask, namely, “What did you do over the weekend?” You could say “Stayed at home watching TV” once, “Played records at a friend’s house” once as well, but after that you had to come up with something better if you didn’t want to be left out in the cold. This happened to some on day one, and that was how it stayed for the rest of their time at school, but I didn’t want to end up like them at any price, I wanted to be one of those at the center of things, I wanted to be invited to their parties, go out with them in town, to live their lives.
    The great test, the year’s biggest party, was New Year’s Eve. For the last few weeks people had been talking about nothing else. Bassen was going to be with someone he knew in Justvik, there was no chance of hanging onto his shirttails, so when school broke up for Christmas I had not been invited anywhere. After Christmas I sat down with Jan Vidar, who lived in Solsletta, about four kilometers down the hill from us, and that autumn had started to train as a pâtissier at the technical college, to discuss what possibilities were open to us. We wanted to go to a party and we wanted to get drunk. As far as the latter was concerned, that would not be much of a problem: I played soccer for the juniors, and the goalkeeper, Tom, was an all-round fixer and he wouldn’t mind buying beer for us. A party, on the other hand . . . There were some ninth-class semicriminal, dropout types who apparently were getting together in a house nearby, but that was of no interest whatsoever, I would rather have stayed home. There was another crowd we knew well, but we were not part of it, they were based in Hamresanden and included people with whom we had either gone to school or played soccer, but we had not been invited and although we could probably have gate-crashed somehow they didn’t have enough class in my eyes. They lived in Tveit, went to the technical college or had jobs, and those of them who had cars had fur-covered seats and Wunderbaum car fresheners dangling from the mirror. There were no alternatives. You had to be invited to New Year’s parties. On the other hand, at twelve o’clock people came out, assembled in the square and at the intersection to fire off rockets and let the new year in amid screams and shouts. No invitation needed to participate in that. Lots of people at schoolwere going to parties in the Søm area, I knew, so what about going there? It was then Jan Vidar remembered that the drummer in our group, whom we had accepted out of sheer desperation, an eighth-class kid from HÃ¥nes, had said he was going to Søm for New Year’s Eve.
    Two telephone calls later and everything had been arranged. Tom would buy beer for us and we would be with kids from the eighth and ninth classes, hang around in their cellar till midnight, then go to the intersection where everyone gathered, find some people I knew from school and hook up with them for the rest of the evening. It was a good plan. When I got home that afternoon, in a studied casual way, I told Mom and Dad I had been invited out on New Year’s Eve, there was a party in Søm with some of my class, was it all right if I went? We had guests coming, my father’s parents and brother, Gunnar, and his family, but neither Mom nor Dad had any objections to my going.
    â€œHow nice!” Mom