Spring 2024 - Recrudescence

Thanks to the Acid Rain

Endnotes 1 My very first thought, when Frode Brandeggen showed up unannounced at my office in Dresden one afternoon in 2013 with the Red Handler manuscripts, was, in all its prosaic terseness, as follows: This is not particularly good. My subsequent thought, I imagine, was a corruption of the first, and went something like this: This is really, really not good. Dutifully—for I am nothing if not dutiful—I leafed through the heap of papers while he waited impatiently by the window, as I wondered why he’d come all this way to meet me, of all people. How had he even managed to find me? He told me about the one novel he’d had published, his subsequent jobs as a trash collector and library attendant, and the literary comeback he was preparing with what he called “a new form.” I eventually asked him to step out for a while and come back toward dusk. Then I began reading. As I mentioned, this was more out of duty than anything else. I’m not an editor, I don’t decide what and what not to publish, I only explain and add context to what others have accepted, what others deem important, canonical, consequential. No one ever asks me: What do you think about this? My sense of duty, therefore, was challenged by the humility I felt before this author, who said he knew my work as an annotator from a long line of scholarly editions now considered classic in Germany. He told me he appreciated what he termed my “ability to read clearly.” So read I did, in the hours he spent wandering Dresden. I read, I read again, and little by little, I was transformed. Since then, night has fallen, and everything has taken on significance. As afternoon turned to evening, above all it was Brandeggen’s fury that stood out to me, the literary obstinance that would keep me returning to these texts time and again, the uncompromising tenor that emerges in spite of what seems, at first glance, to be the reductive language of crime fiction, the comic-strip sense of narrativity. This too is why—now that I’ve agreed to write endnotes to this first edition of Brandeggen’s crime novels, ostensibly because he asked for it, in the papers he left to me—I have to treat Brandeggen’s project with the utmost seriousness, even if that makes me his Sancho Panza. And it has been liberating, so very liberating for my work on this book, to dare, after so long, to step out of my

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