Buzz Aldrin, What Happened to You in All the Confusion? by Johan Harstad

Surrounded by a vivid and memorable cast of characters - aspiring pop musicians, Caribbean-obsessed psychologists, death-haunted photographers, girls who dream of anonymous men falling in love with them on bus trips, and even Buzz Aldrin himself - 'Harstad combines formal play and linguistic ferocity with a searing emotional directness' (Dedi Felman, Words Without Borders) to bring Mattias to the realization that he cannot always blend into the background. the novel's finest moments wrap you up in communion with Mattias, as if you are spending a quiet afternoon with an old friend, chatting but mostly thinking' ( Three Percent). Through Harstad's 'delectably light but nonetheless impactful prose.

We should all thank our lucky stars that Johan Harstad’s exceptional debut novel, Buzz Aldrin, What Happened to You in All the Confusion? has finally made it into English.In Buzz Aldrin, What Happened to You in All the Confusion?, readers follow a man who wishes not to be followed, a man who, after a series of personal and professional disasters, finds himself lying on a rain-soaked road in the desolate, treeless Faroe Islands, population only a few thousand, a wad of bills in his pocket and no memory of how he had come to be there.įrom there, Brage Award-winning author and playwright Johan Harstad's debut novel - previously published to great success in eleven countries with its first English-language appearance in June 2011 - tells the story of Mattias, a thirty-something gardener living in Stavanger, Norway, whose idol is Buzz Aldrin, second man on the moon: the man who was willing to stand in Neil Armstrong's shadow in order to work, diligently and humbly, for the success of the Apollo 11 mission. Praise for Buzz Aldrin, What Happened to You in All the Confusion?:īuzz Aldrin, What Happened to You in All the Confusion? resembles Voltaire’s Candide: it is a faux-epic parody of the coming-of-age Bildungsroman or the Odyssey-like adventure. Surrounded by a vivid and memorable cast of characters - aspiring pop musicians, Caribbean-obsessed psychologists, death-haunted photographers, girls who dream of anonymous men falling in love with them on buses, and even Buzz Aldrin himself, Buzz Aldrin, What Happened To You In All The Confusion? is an epic story of Mattias’s pop-saturated odyssey. While obsessing about Aldrin, Mattias encounters a series of disasters, climaxing with him waking up on a rain-soaked road in the desolate Faroe Islands. His first novel Buzz Aldrin, What Happened To You In All The Confusion, originally published in Norway by Gyldendal in 2005, was made into a TV series in.

Using the lunar-like landscape of the Faroe Islands as a backdrop, the novel deals with the characters’ attempts at finding a balance between being second best (and anonymous) without going into total isolation. Johan Harstad's debut novel tells the story of Mattias, a thirty-something gardener living in Norway, whose idol is Buzz Aldrin, the second man on the moon.

Buzz Aldrin, What Happened to You in All the Confusion? by Johan Harstad