Spring 2024 - Recrudescence

Itxaro Borda another way, soon enough, the reader is so deep into the details and the details of the details’ details that not even the slightest glimmer of textual daylight remains. But then, somewhere around page 700, the text suddenly arrives at a light in the forest, a clearing. The reader’s relief is enormous, almost indescribable, as Brandeggen gives us an unpretentious, affecting account of life on a street in Stavanger in the mid-70s. ** This section becomes a small novel in itself, and a rather conventional one at that. A novel in which love and terror are forever living under the same roof, but the former always wins out in the end. Thematically and linguistically, it recalls the modern Scandinavian tradition of (rather more successful) coming-of- age novels, like Torbjörn Flygt’s Underdog, Beate Grimsrud’s Tiptoeing Past an Axe, Tore Renberg’s The Orheim Company, and Lars Saabye Christensen’s Beatles, even though only the last of these had come out in time to have influenced Brandeggen. It is not hard to imagine his editor pleading with him in vain to publish these 300 pages and scrap everything else. Nor is it hard to understand why the editor had had enough after this book. On page 1,009 the new story abruptly ends and the forest becomes thicker and more impassable than ever. The stitchwork of the text becomes tighter and tighter as Brandeggen weaves in more and more intricacies, setting a new standard for textual resistance and arousing an almost physical reluctance to read any further. As I strain myself to the utmost in order to drag my way through the unreadable, it becomes clear to me that the “novel” inside the novel, with all its rays of light and hope, resembles nothing so much as a nightmare, and that its only purpose is to underscore the impossibility of arriving and remaining in such a place in real life. Reality, Brandeggen seems to be suggesting, is the inexorable other from which we can never escape, where nothing is certain, and where every utterance opens into a chasm of doubt and new questions, which themselves open up even more doubt and even more questions that lead us smack into the Mandelbrot set once more. I gave up on page 1,700, more than six hundred pages away from the finish line, and never have I been more relieved to put down a novel.

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