Sedang Membaca Karl Ove Knausgaard


Twenty five minutes later I was in my office. I hung my coat and scarf on the hook, put my shoes on the mat. made a cup of coffee, connected my computer and sat drinking coffee and looking at the title page until the screen saver kicked in and filled the screen with a myriad of bright dots.

The American of the Soul. That was the title. And virtually everything in the room pointed to it, or to what it aroused in me. The reproduction of William Blake's famous underwater-like Newton picture hanging on the wall behind me, the two framed drawings from Churchill's eighteen-century expedition next to it, purchased in London at some time, one of a dead whale, the other of a dissected beetle, both drawings showing several stages. A night mood by Peder Balke on the end wall, the green and the black in it. The Greenaway poster. The map of Mars I had found in an old National Geographic magazine. Besides it the two black and white photographs taken by Thomas Wangstrom: one of a child's gleaming dress, the other of a black lake beneath the surface of which you discern the eyes of an otter. The little green metal dolphin and the little green metal helmet I had once bought on Crete and which now stood on the desk. And the books: Paracelsus, Basileios, Lucretius, Thomas Browne, Olof Rudbeck, Augustin, Thomas Aquinas, Albertus Seba, Werner Heisenberg, Raymond Russell and the Bible, of course, and works about national romanticism and about curiosity cabinets, Atlantis, Albrecht Durer and Max Ernst, the baroque and Gothic periods, nuclear physics and weapons of mass destruction, about forests and science in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. This wasn't about knowledge, but about the aura knowledge exuded, the places it came from, which were almost all outside the world we lived in now, yet were still within the ambivalent space where all historical objects and ideas reside.

Memasukkan sebanyak mungkin benda yang dilihat? Barangkali ya. Novel Karl Ove Knausgaard A Death in the Family menyediakan senarai untuk kita ingat hampir di setiap halaman. Ada kemungkinan kita tidak akan ingat pun. Tetapi itulah memori: kita tidak pernah ingat apa yang disimpan. Barangkali dengan menulis kita akan lebih ingat; namun ia adalah sebaliknya: semakin kita menulis, semakin kita akan lupa benda yang ditulis dan benda yang ditulis untuk disimpan.

Bukan selalu sebuah novel yang mengujakan akan berada di atas meja saya. Terutama sekali sebuah novel kontemporari. Ada penulis percaya (dan ia semakin jelas dan kritikal setiap hari) yang tidak akan lahir lagi sebuah novel agung. Betul ke? saya terfikir dengan sedikit tersenyum. Jadi bagaimana dengan siri novel Karl Ove Knausgaard My Struggle? (Ada enam novel kesemuanya dan saya sedang membaca novel yang pertama.) Novel ini seperti ingin mengingatkan kita yang realisme belum bersedia untuk mengalah. Dia masih ingin bertahan ke pusingan seterusnya. Mungkin kita pun patut sama-sama bertahan dan menunggu.

(Selain daripada novel ini, saya juga sedang membaca buku Saat Omar Jalak Lenteng dan Chuchu Datok Merah, novel Milan Kundera Life is Elsewhere, buku Ridhwan Saidi Noorzine, buku Afrizal Malna, dan novel Thomas Bernhard Concrete.)     

Hanya filem yang belum ditonton. (Menunggu filem yang bagus di panggung.) Atau saya patut ulang tonton siri kartun The  Justice League? Kalau sastera sudah menjadi suatu pembacaan nostalgia, kenapa tidak komik dan kartun TV?

    

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