Spring 2024 - Recrudescence

Thanks to the Acid Rain novel ever released by Gyldendal Norsk Forlag. The number of copies it sold can be counted on one hand. Apart from the twenty five free copies given to the author, the one in the archives, and the thirty-two distributed to reviewers and booksellers, the remaining print run of 1,600 books was destroyed. This is not very hard to understand. The book is, in short, absolutely unreadable. Normally, I can appreciate books that push back against the reader, the ones that demand real effort, as long as they’re well written. And at times, Conglomeratic Breath seems to fit that bill, as it showcases the author’s exceptional linguistic perceptiveness, his virtuoso ability to navigate between multiple registers in a way that is very likely unparalleled in Norwegian literature. Nevertheless, the novel remains, for this reader, perfectly unreadable. Impenetrable, to an extent that frustration isn’t even the right word. Next to this novel, Gaddis’s The Recognitions and Joyce’s Finnegans Wake (both of which Brandeggen read several times) look reader-friendly. It begins straightforwardly enough: the protagonist, with the trendy, alienating name of Imper Akselbladkvist, arrives at what he calls his house. He stands on the front steps, fishes for his keys, and enters once he finds them. This takes one hundred fifty pages. From there, it’s full-on disintegration, until our level of disorientation becomes monumental and absolute. There are no paragraphs, no chapters, not even so much as a comma or period; at any given time, the identity of the speaker, when and where we are, what is happening and why, are all anyone’s guess. For instance, Brandeggen devotes large parts of the book to exploring what he calls “the potential Heidegger-plagiarist level of the self,” a notion every bit as perplexing as it sounds, which is made no more comprehensible by the fact that the starting point for these investigations is an old bedspread given to the protagonist by his grandmother. That is, two threads within the bedspread are the starting point, and the distance between them opens up entirely new vistas and a fresh round of investigations that themselves necessitate their own exploration for Akselbladkvist. As the text zooms further and further in, it deliberately and expressly assumes the structure of the Mandelbrot set, a fractal whose edge shows an infinite number of satellites, i.e., small copies of the original Mandelbrot set. To put it

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