The latest addition to my website is Axel Jensen‘s Ikaros – ung mann i Sahara (Icarus – A Young Man in Sahara). Our unnamed narrator, a young Norwegian, heads for Algeria but finds Algiers too noisy so goes off to the remote town of Tamanrasset, where the sensible doctor tells him everything is going to hell. No one will survive the next war. He learns of a Frenchman, Nerval, who had been in a concentration camp in the war and now is now out in the desert, sitting on a rock and living off goats’ milk. Our hero sets out on a temperamental donkey to join him and finds him playing with a horned snake and with a Tuareg family living nearby. It is Nerval who tells him it is just as though I were the only normal person in the whole world, only the lunatic can be quite normal in our time. Our hero is looking for himself and for meaning in this troubled world but it does not work out.