Yes, who are you, Tryvle? Here we see Kåre Tryvle. Not in miniature, but full-sized. And where is he? In Bergen. In Bergen, Sigrid’s town. In the same town where a girl of twenty-three is sitting in a room where the sharp January light comes in through the roof window, looking at a miniature portrait of Kåre Tryvle with the feeling that he represents hope in life, that very same man is standing, at nine o’clock in the morning, in front of an audience of about two hundred men and maybe thirty women, all dressed in suits, at the Hotel Norge. They’re at a business conference in Bergen, and Kåre has been asked to provide the morning’s entertainment. Kåre stands in front of his audience, dressed in dark, worn jeans and a hoodie, with a pair of new blue Adidas sneakers on his feet, and we can tell from his mouth that he’s talking, and it’s almost possible to see from the lines around his mouth that he’s saying something funny—et violà: the audience laughs. He holds up a book and says: it’s true, you can read it for yourselves, here. You have the perfect golf swing in you, you just need to find it. The audience laughs again. So there you have it, Golf Can’t Be This Simple, Kåre says. But, he continues, life is not always as simple as golf, unfortunately. And then he picks up a novel “that I have written myself,” as he says, and starts to read.
* * *
So, who are you, Kåre? If we look at him, knowing that he’s forty-three, and see that he’s wearing jeans and a hoodie and new Adidas sneakers, we might think that he’s trying desperately to seem younger than he actually is. Or we might think that he doesn’t care that he seems to be trying desperately to look younger than he is; he likes wearing hoodies. He doesn’t give a damn that this might make it look as though he’s having a midlife crisis. Hoodies reflect who he is and always has been. He doesn’t wear a shirt and suit. It would never cross his mind. If that means he has to go to a funeral in jeans and a hoodie, then so be it. It should be noted that the new Adidas sneakers are not quite in keeping with Kåre’s image; he prefers for everything to look used and worn. His hoodie is a little frayed, his jeans as well, dark and kind of rock ’n’ roll. He’s flung his big black down jacket on a chair behind him, the kind of down jacket with a fur-lined hood (only he’s taken the fur trim off, so it looks more like an anorak), and some headphones with a skull logo are sticking out of its pocket. They are quality headphones; Kåre wants only the best when he’s walking through town listening to music. They have to look cool too, which Skullcandy headphones most definitely do. If we were to turn on the iPod in his pocket, we’d hear what music he was listening to on his way to the Hotel Norge and discover that he’d had to stop PJ Harvey’s beautiful song “This Is Love” just as she sings: “I wanna chase you round the table, I wanna touch your head,” one of Kåre’s ten all-time favorite lines from pop songs, because of its simplicity and directness. That is to say, he’s shouted I wanna touch your head! many a time over a table in a bar late at night, even when he wasn’t coming on to anyone—though, to be completely honest, he’s shouted it when he was coming on to someone too, and it actually had a positive effect (after he’s touched the person he’s shouted at on the head)—but the main point for Kåre is the quality of the sentence, the simple straightforwardness of saying, I wanna touch your head. Kåre believes that every sentence should be like that, be it pop or literature, and that is the primary reason he shouts I wanna touch your head! over pub tables.
* * *
The truth is, if he weren’t so hopeless at singing, Kåre would have preferred to be a musician. He’s musical and knows intuitively that he would be a fucking fantastic front man in a band. He just can’t sing. That is to say, he can sing, but when he made his debut as the vocalist for his band, Jimmy and the Aunts, at the age of seventeen, he quickly discovered that his voice, about which he had been supremely confident in his bedroom and the bathroom, did indeed have its limitations, which had come as a bit of a shock to him. The fact was that he wasn’t the world’s best singer and rock star, the fact was that his voice actually couldn’t reach the high notes, that he had problems getting back in tune if he drifted, and so had sung a whole song off-key, to an audience of mute-faced youth clubbers.
* * *
The besuited Hotel Norge audience, on the other hand, is laughing. Kåre’s protagonist has just fallen on the stairs at IKEA in front of a couple of teenage girls. As he reads and looks out over his audience, Kåre is suddenly filled with a kind of disgust at the situation. It’s inauthentic, he thinks as he reads (it’s often astonished him that he’s able to think and observe as much as he does while he’s reading and apparently engaging in something else, what he’s reading, for example), this is inauthentic, he’s standing in front of an audience of suits, making them laugh, they’re laughing at his protagonist, just as he hoped they would, and suddenly he feels out of touch with the situation. Is that because his own life is such a mess, is that why he feels like this? Has the state of his life caught up with him as he stands here in front of an audience? The state of his life, which he thought he could escape by coming here to Bergen, but which is now running down his spine with the chill of bog water?
* * *
The state of his life: The fact that it’s been over with Wanda, his girlfriend of three years, for a week now. That he hasn’t tried to contact her, and she hasn’t tried to contact him. That there’s been total and utter silence. That he doesn’t know whether he misses her or not, and in that sense, it really is over. That he’s become cynical and cold again.
* * *
Yes, that is the state of his life, the real state of things, for Kåre Tryvle, this very moment as he stands in front of an audience in the Hotel Norge.