Johan Harstad: Buzz Aldrin, hvor ble det av deg i alt mylderet? (‘Buzz Aldrin, What Happened to You in All the Confusion?)

The latest addition to my website is Johan Harstad‘s Buzz Aldrin, hvor ble det av deg i alt mylderet? (‘Buzz Aldrin, What Happened to You in All the Confusion?) Our hero Matthias does not want to stand out in the crowd. He wants to be second best, which is why his hero is Buzz Aldrin, the second man on the moon, the one people forget. Matthias manages to get his life going. He works as a gardener for a nursery and has a live-in girlfriend, whom he met at school, though she will not agree to marry him. He is going to the Faroe Islands with his friends Jørn and Roar whose band is playing at a festival, with Matthias as the sound man. And then it suddenly all falls apart. For much of the book he is in a halfway house in a remote part of the Faroe Islands, where people with mental issues live and try to get their life back together. All of them (there are four plus the person in charge who has his own issues) struggle to get their lives back together, not helped when the government closes their facility down. Harstad goes deep into the souls of Matthias and the others and shows how, with a lot of effort, there is perhaps a way.

Leave a comment