– Some must maneuver Putin!
A psychopath who walks Donald Trump a long way, with some of the same scary narcissistic personality traits, says Espen Haavardsholm.
Which books have really meant something to Norwegian authors? Bok365 has tried to take a deep dive into that. And let it be said at once: This addition to the column flora is heavily inspired by an excellent similar column in The Guardian. This week we have asked author Espen Haavardsholm who last weekend came out with his new novel Downhillabout being a young and in love teenager in Oslo in the 1960s, and about something traumatic that happens in connection with the radio news about Marilyn Monroe’s death and the Cuba crisis in 1962,
The book I’m reading now?
– The new novel by Helle Helle, Bob, about a young boy who has moved to Copenhagen and whose roommate is trying to understand life. I think I have read most of Helle’s books, ever since she first came to Norwegian with the ferry novel Rødby-Puttgarten. There is something toned down and curious about her spelling which I am very weak for.
The book that changed my life?
– There were several authors who strongly changed my life in my younger years. First of all, it was as a teenager that the sober showed in the short stories of Ernest Hemingway, then the sparkling prose in Hamsun’s Hungerand in a slightly more adult age Brechts 100 poems in Norwegian retelling by Georg Johannesen and Brecht’s moral fables in the plays, for example about the relationship between wanting the good and surviving in a dark world in The good man from Sezuan. It is quite a lot in the astute and cynical survivor Bert Brecht that it is possible to ponder over now, in a time which at the moment may seem to have returned to the worst periods of the Cold War, where it is even rattled with the threat of using nuclear weapons. The one that Putin must see someone in the Kremlin get outmaneuvered. He’s a psychopath who goes after Donald Trump a lot, but who seems to have some of the same scary narcissistic personality traits.
The book I wish I had written?
– In broad format, I think I will mention Virginia Woolf’s fabulous novel Orlando, where she lets the main character live for several centuries and even decides to let him / her change gender along the way. In the very tight and short format, I would say Kjell Askildsen’s most densely packed short stories, for example in Thomas F´s latest notes to the public.
The book that has influenced my writing and my writing the most?
– As a teenager, Albert was Camus´ The stranger and Pär Lagerkvists The dwarf among my groundbreaking reading experiences, along with Fyodor Dostoevsky’s The Karamasov brothers. I thought a lot about the relationship between good and evil in those years. In preparation, I read about Spinoza and his theory that evil was a “deficiency disease,” not a force of its own. It also made an impression. Some of this I have added to Nils Hå and his teenage years in my new novel Downhillabout four young people in the time of the terrorist balance in the early 1960s.
The book I think is most underrated?
The husbandman’s son and poet Tor Jonsson died far too young. There are probably some who still know his poetry, but also his approaching epistles in Neslar I think for my part deserve to be rediscovered.
The last book that made me cry?
– James Baldwin’s far-sighted and temperamental essay The fire next gangas I recently got it in my head that I wanted to re-read in connection with a new Baldwin biography that I found at Deichman Bjørvika this winter.
The last book that made me laugh?
– Nobel Prize winner Abdulrazak Gurnah’s novel The island of silencenot least where he writes about what it can be like for a young black African to arrive in the old imperial capital of London and eventually get a white English in-laws.
The book I’m ashamed not to have read?
– One of my old sins of omission is that I just read the first half and the end of James Joyces Ulysses. I basically have a great sense of the great innovations of European novel art in the 1920s, but right there I must admit that I skipped some pages in the middle. The end of Ulysses is in return a firework.
Book about my life – title?
– I have no idea what I would think of calling such a book. But at least ever since I was a boy I have been weak for the simple but life-affirming morale in Alf Pøysen’s show about to have a day in mårra.