Spring 2024 - Recrudescence
Thanks to the Acid Rain From what I have gleaned, he never mentioned this work to anyone. The unpublished novel, All of These Loves (Alle disse kjærlighetene, 433 pages in manuscript) deals with the Red Handler’s relationship with his wife Gerd in Haugesund, where the Red Handler—who here seems to have a proper first and last name, though both are crossed out throughout the entire manuscript—works part-time as an electric meter reader. The novel is a passionate account of their intense love and often exemplary marriage that slowly but surely becomes counterproductive, to put it mildly, culminating in a magnificent scene in which the Red Handler persona is born and the protagonist leaves Haugesund for good. There are hints toward the end of the manuscript that the wife leaves the Red Handler for his future nemesis, the Glimmer Man. There is no evidence Brandeggen was ever in a serious relationship himself. ** From the back cover of Conglomeratic Breath: “Imper Akselbladkvist is turning his house upside down in search of something he has lost. But is it really his house? And has he really lost anything? And if so, then what? Himself? Or everyone else? Distended and distracted by existential angst, he ambushes the constituent parts of his life (is it really his life?) through an intense, ruthless, and often heartrendingly intricate exploration of the potential Heidegger-plagiarist level of the self, represented by the distance between two threads of an almost fully disintegrated bedspread that his grandmother (if she is even his grandmother— and for that matter, how do we know she was really all that grand?) bequeathed him. Through more than two thousand pages— free from even the slightest scintilla of what Imper Akselbladkvist calls deformative abominations like punctuation and paragraph, chapters, and other readerly crutches—the author delves further and further into the bedspread, into the threads, into the yearning for his own constitutive fibers, and ultimately, his own text. That is—if we can even call it a text? And is it really a novel? And if it is, how can we know that the novel is his?”
3 Prior to my work on these endnotes, I read out of curiosity
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