Spring 2024 - Recrudescence

Itxaro Borda accustomed shadows, to decide for my- self the relevance of these endnotes to the text, to strike my own course and enter nothing but what I deem necessary. I should also add that the conversation that began that evening between me and Brandeggen would last three years. I don’t believe he had many other people to talk to. But talk we did, by telephone, by letter, during my visits to him in Stavanger or, more often, in my welcoming him to Dresden, where he made do with the tiny guest room I’d fitted out in my apartment. Before him, I’d never had any guests. But if I may say so, I don’t believe anyone knew Frode Brandeggen in his last days quite like I did. I say this not to lay claim to any role in his success, should these books move readers as much as they have moved me. I say this, rather, because of the way it foreshadows this man’s terrible loneliness. The anger I find in these books is real, as is the despair that precipitated his dramatic swerve away from his avant-garde beginnings. It may be that that anger can only be grasped within the context of the gulf between his first book and the Red Handler. But the anger, nonetheless, doesn’t give us the whole picture, be- cause Brandeggen also cares all too much about his protagonist. His interest in the Red Handler, his level of concern and sympathy for his character, is genuine. As the author, his emotional stake is palpable, essential. The texts can never fully hide that they are fundamentally about Brandeggen himself, about a man who obviously is deeply troubled, and who, more than opposing crime literature an sich or the book industry’s thirst for profit, is desperately trying to create a world with some semblance of meaning and predictability, where the structures are clear and there is such a thing as sincerity. 2 When, eventually, Frode Brandeggen learned to accept the fate of his 2,322-page debut novel, Conglomeratic Breath (Konglom- eratisk pust), **from then on forgoing the avant-garde in favor of chiseled down, commercial crime fiction, he still held out some hope that the world might one day accommodate a more expansive, exploratory mode of literature. In the very first stages of the Red Handler project, Brandeggen wrote a separate novel as both a warm-up to the Red Handler universe and (he hoped) a standalone work in its own right.

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