Read My Struggle: Book One for Free Online Page A

she is the mother of my three children. Now she is the woman with whom I share my life. The sole traces of my previous existence are the books and records I brought with me. Everything else I left behind. And while I spent a lot of time thinking about the past then, almost a morbid amount of time, I now realize, which meant that I not only read Marcel Proust’s novel À la recherche du temps perdu but virtually imbibed it, the past is now barely present in my thoughts.
    I believe the main reason for that is our children, since life with them in the here and now occupies all the space. They even squeeze out the most recent past: ask me what I did three days ago and I can’t remember. Ask me what Vanja was like two years ago, Heidi two months ago, John two weeks ago, and I can’t remember. A lot happens in our little everyday life, but it always happens within the same routine, and more than anything else it has changed my perspective of time. For, while previously I saw time as a stretch of terrain that had to be covered, with the future as a distant prospect, hopefully a bright one, and never boring at any rate, now it is interwoven with our life here and in a totally different way. Were I to portray this with a visual image it would have to be that of a boat in a lock: life is slowly and ineluctably raised by time seeping in from all sides. Apart from the details, everything is always the same. And with every passing day the desire grows for the moment when life will reach the top, for the moment when the sluice gates open and life finally moves on. At the same time I see that precisely this repetitiveness, this enclosedness, this unchangingness is necessary, it protects me. On the few occasions I have left it, all the old ills return. All of a sudden I am beset by every conceivable thought about what was said, what was seen, what was thought, hurled, as it were, into that uncontrollable, unproductive, often degrading, and ultimately destructive space where I lived for so many years. The yearning is as strong there as it is here, but the difference is that there the goal of my yearning is attainable, but not here. Here I have to find other goals and come to terms with them. The art of living is what I am talking about. On paper it is no problem, I can easily conjure up an image of Heidi, for example, clambering out of a bunk bed at five in the morning, the patter of little feet across the floor in the dark, her switching the light on and a second later standing in front of me – half asleep and squinting up at her – and then she says: “ Köket . Kitchen!” Her Swedish is still idiosyncratic; her words carry a different meaning from what is usual, and “kitchen” means muesli with curdled blueberry milk. In the same way, candles are called “Happy birthday!” Heidi has large eyes, a large mouth, a big appetite, and she is a ravenous child in all senses, but the robust, unadulterated happiness she experiencedin her first eighteen months has been overshadowed this year, since John’s birth, by other hitherto unknown emotions. In the first months she took almost every opportunity to try to harm him. Scratch marks on his face were the rule rather than the exception. When I arrived home after a four-day trip to Frankfurt in the autumn, John looked as if he had been through a war. It was difficult because we didn’t want to keep him away from her either, so we had to try to read her moods and regulate her access to him accordingly. But even when she was in high spirits her hand could shoot out in a flash and slap or claw him. Alongside this, she was beginning to have fits of rage, the ferocity of which I would never have considered her capable two months before. In addition, an equally hitherto unsuspected vulnerability surfaced: the slightest hint of severity in my voice or behavior and she would lower her head, shy away, and start to cry, as though wanting to show us her