Buzz Aldrin, What Happened to You in All the Confusion?

Johan Harstad

Johan Harstad's debut novel tells the story of Mattias, a thirty-something gardener living in Norway, whose idol is Buzz Aldrin, the second man on the moon. Using the lunar-like landscape of the Faroe Islands as a backdrop, the novel deals with the characters’ attempts at finding a balance between being second best (and anonymous) without going into total isolation.

While obsessing about Aldrin, Mattias encounters a series of disasters, climaxing with him waking up on a rain-soaked road in the desolate Faroe Islands. Surrounded by a vivid and memorable cast of characters - aspiring pop musicians, Caribbean-obsessed psychologists, death-haunted photographers, girls who dream of anonymous men falling in love with them on buses, and even Buzz Aldrin himself, Buzz Aldrin, What Happened To You In All The Confusion? is an epic story of Mattias’s pop-saturated odyssey.

Praise for Buzz Aldrin, What Happened to You in All the Confusion?:

Buzz Aldrin, What Happened to You in All the Confusion? resembles Voltaire’s Candide: it is a faux-epic parody of the coming-of-age Bildungsroman or the Odyssey-like adventure.

DUNCAN DRIVER, CANBERRA TIMES

 

We should all thank our lucky stars that Johan Harstad’s exceptional debut novel, Buzz Aldrin, What Happened to You in All the Confusion? has finally made it into English.

TERRY OBERG, THE WEST AUSTRALIAN