Crown Princess Mette-Marit, underway on her own chartered "Book train" on the Trans-Polar Nordland Line from Bodø to Stjørdal to promote reading and literature, with a new theme on each station she is stopping at, reveals in an interview that she is a big fan of fellow
sørlending (South Coast Norwegian) author Karl Ove Knausgård, hyped and praised for his six-volume authobiographical novel series called
Min kamp (the Norwegian translation of
Mein Kampf), translated into English as "My Struggle".
She did not just grow up in Kristiansand and drop out of school like the author, they also share a common shame issue going all the way back to childhood: A father who was an alcoholic. The death of the embarrassing fathers, which they loved and cut off, was very problematic for both of them and coïncidentally they used the same undertaker, so Mette-Marit recognizes Knausgård's descriptions of the funeral bureau from her own father's funeral.
The most memorable scene from Knausgård's six-volume œuvre is his and his brother's return to their native Kristiansand upon learning of their father's death and finding him dead in a total mess of months loads of empty bottles and garbage in the villa where he lived with his mother, their grandmother, who now, demented in a piss-soaked night dress, welcomes her grandsons, who roll up their sleeves and clean the disgusting house which once was their childhood paradise from attic to basement, litterally adding their tears to the soap water, before they bury their father. It's a profound and masterly written katharsis!
The last sentences from Knausgård's volume one resonated with Mette-Marit and she repeats them often:
For mennesket er bare en form blant andre former, som verden uttrykker igjen og igjen, ikke bare i det som lever, men også i det som ikke lever, tegnet i sand, stein og vann. Og døden, som jeg alltid hadde betraktet som den viktigste størrelsen i livet, mørk, dragende, var ikke mer enn et rør som springer lekk, en gren som knekker i vinden, en jakke som glir av en kleshenger og faller ned på gulvet.=
For humans are merely one form among many, which the world produces over and over again, not only in everything that lives but also in everything that does not live, drawn in sand, stone, and water. And death, which I have always regarded as the greatest dimension of life, dark, compelling, was no more than a pipe that springs a leak, a branch that cracks in the wind, a jacket that slips off a clothes hanger and falls to the floor.
On a more cozy note it can be added that HRH's train was met by the South Sami book bus in Snåsa, one of the few places this very endangered language is spoken.
http://ru-royalty.livejournal.com/2004866.html
