Author: Johan Harstad
Title: Buzz Aldrin, What Happened to You in All the Confusion
Publication Info: New York : Seven Stories Press, c2011.
ISBN: 9781609801359
Summary/Review: This book from Norway, recently translated into English by Deborah Dawkin, is the latest book I’ve received free from the Library Thing Early Reviewers program and a book for my Around the World for a Good Book project. The narrator/protagonist is a young man named Mattias who seems to be content with not standing out or being noticed for anything. Hence his fascination with Buzz Aldrin, the second man on the moon.
After a long-time girlfriend leaves him, Mattias goes to the Faroes Islands with his friend’s band and suffers a mental breakdown. He’s picked up by a psychiatrist who runs a sort of halfway house for people with mental and emotional problems trying to ease back into society. Mattias moves in and over the next couple of years details his new life on the Faroes. Plot is secondary as the narrative is mainly an internal dialogue of a man coming to terms with his loneliness and depression.
Mattias is not always a sympathetic character but I relate to him a lot. I like what Harstad is trying to do exploring the interior anguish of Mattias, but I have to admit that the book is overlong. Still I recommend reading it, I find it reminiscent of the work of Haruki Murakami.
Favorite Passages:
“Friday.
One should beware of Fridays.
They promise so much.
Like movie trailers.
Only rarely do they live up to expectations.
Most Fridays are lousy sequels.
Back to the Future Part III.” – p. 43“The brain is a strange contraption. A library with a messy librarian. And in the floors below, in the cellar, there are vaults, filled to the ceiling with books and journals, dissertations and papers that are scarcely ever asked for.” – p. 181
Recommended Books: The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle by Haruki Murakami, The Shipping News by E. Annie Proulx, and The Museum Guard by Howard Norman.
Rating:
Panorama of the Mountains 