Fitzcarraldo Editions

It’s perfectly simple,’ he explained ‘almost every morning I wake up feeling shit and think about packing in my drinking, my eating and my smoking. But then I remember my grandfather, who was in the Wehrmacht and died at Stalingrad, and I contemplate the terrible suffering and deprivation he must have experienced for months before finally being killed. Surely, I admonish myself, it’s up to you to experience all the pleasures he was denied? And then I reach for my cigarettes.’

A lot of times when someone says something they don’t really mean anything by it, probably, he says
Probably almost never, he says
They just say something, just to say something, that’s true, Signe says
That’s what it’s like, yes, Asle says
They have to say something, Signe says
They have to, Asle says
That’s how it is, he says
and she sees him stand there and sort of not entirely know what to do with himself and then he raises one hand and lowers it again

he can be so unsure of himself, not knowing what he should say or do, but there’s not any resentment of her in him, she’s certainly never noticed any, she thinks, but then why would he want to be out on the fjord all the time? in that little boat he got himself, a little wooden boat, a rowboat, she thinks and she sees, lying there on the bench, herself standing there in the middle of the floor in the room and then she sees herself go over to the window and stand there and look out and now there is a little light outside, she thinks, standing there in front of the window, now it has got as light as it can probably get at this time of year, it’s brightened up so much that you can see the sky in its grey and black