Culture

Linda Boström Knausgård’s Post-“Struggle” IKEA Trip


The Swedish poet and novelist Linda Boström Knausgård held up a finger. “Do you hear that buzz?” she asked. “That is the sound of IKEA. We are in Hell and we will never leave.” Boström Knausgård was in New York on a book tour; her second novel, “Welcome to America,” was recently translated into English. The book, despite its title, is set not in the United States but, rather, within the confines of a Stockholm apartment, similar to the one in which Boström Knausgård grew up. While in town, she visited the Red Hook IKEA—a notional Sweden from whose windows one could see, rising sedately in the rain, the Statue of Liberty.

“Every couple that comes in here starts to fight!” she said, shaking her head. “It’s all the picking out. And in the Marketplace area downstairs, where you find everything yourself—that’s where the real fighting is.” She joined a line of shoppers wending their way through the maze of settees and shower cubbies and office chairs. “Maybe too modern,” she said, sizing up a stainless-steel kitchen. She reached down to touch a coffee table. “The surface is very clean. That is Swedish.”

Boström Knausgård, who is forty-seven, was wearing a black blouse tucked into a long black skirt, with black tights and bright-white sneakers. Her hair is dark and short. Her voice—low, melodious—was at odds with her body language: skittish, almost ill at ease. Three years ago, after Boström Knausgård separated from the novelist Karl Ove Knausgård, she moved to Ystad, in the south of Sweden. This past August, her mother, Ingrid, died, and, the week of the funeral, she moved again, this time into a three-bedroom apartment in a Stockholm suburb. (She still hasn’t finished unpacking.)

“Welcome to America” commemorates Ingrid, but it’s complicated. The semi-autobiographical book follows a young girl, Ellen, who stops speaking. Ellen’s mother is a charismatic actress. Ingrid—also an actress—had mixed feelings about the book. “After the thing with Karl Ove, she was just exhausted with being written about,” the author said. (Karl Ove’s “My Struggle” series described his life—including his marriage to Boström Knausgård, who has bipolar disorder—in long-winded, unsparing detail.) “But my book is different,” she said. “I changed so much. The part where the brother pees in bottles so that he doesn’t have to leave his room? I made that up.” She paused. “Actually, I talked to my brother later, and he once had a job where he had to walk down so many stairs to get to the bathroom that he did pee in bottles. He asked me, ‘How did you know?’ ”

She stood in a bedroom display—a stage strewn with the articles of intimacy. The careful details, she said, reminded her of her mother. She lingered by an olive-green cabinet. “I want to paint my study this color,” she said. “I don’t think it makes you write better, having your walls be one color or some other color, but the green is calming.”

Later, in the cafeteria, she ordered meatballs with lingonberry sauce. “I feel at home when I eat this,” she said. As a kid, she liked to accompany her mother to rehearsals. Ingrid encouraged her: at nine, Boström Knausgård played one of the von Trapp children in a production of “The Sound of Music,” and she continued to act into her late teens. “During my first year onstage, everything was so easy,” she said. “The second year, I started to look at myself: ‘What am I doing here? Now I have to sing, now I have to say this.’ With this self-critic thing starting, I think it was my first depression.”

She ruminated on her love life. “My Struggle” is six volumes and more than a million words. In that light, “Welcome to America,” with its valorization of silence, its poetic compression, and its slightness—the book is a hundred and sixty pages long—feels pointed. “Things would have been different, I think, if Karl hadn’t gone away into his books,” Boström Knausgård said. “He is really caring about his children, but he was bored being a full-time parent. He thought that he would like it, but he really didn’t. He would act like he was dying when I got home from work. The idea that he could not physically bear to spend time with his baby, that his writing was the only important thing—it hurt me.”

In January, Boström Knausgård will relocate to London, where her four children live with Karl Ove. Her boyfriend of two years will remain in Sweden, she said, “so this is not easy. We will have to Skype and phone.” The boyfriend is a Chilean songwriter and guitarist. “He comes up to here”—she indicated her shoulder—“and when we first started dating his mother told him, ‘Is she longer than you? She cannot be longer than you!’ ” (Karl Ove is six-three.) Trying to describe her boyfriend, Boström Knausgård began, “He’s . . .” She stopped. Then she exclaimed, “He’s nice!” Smiling shyly, she added, “He is considerate. When I am too quiet, he goes, ‘You have to tell me what you’re thinking. I want to know!’ ” ♦



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