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

“The person you love is 72.8 percent water and there’s been no rain for weeks.” So begins Buzz Aldrin, What Happened to You in All the Confusion?, the impressive debut novel by Norwegian author Johan Harstad and translated into English by Deborah Dawkin. After losing his girlfriend and his job, first-person narrator Mattias leaves his home in Stavanger, Norway to travel with a friend’s rock band to a concert on the remote Faroe Islands, located halfway between Scotland and Iceland. Following a series of events he can’t remember and carrying an inexplicable pocketful of cash, Mattias ends up living in a kind of commune for people existing somewhere between a mental institution and normal society. Their limited interaction with show more the world matches Mattias’s own desire to disappear:

“I’d decided I didn’t need to be the best, the most popular, or even liked, I just wanted to find myself a vacant space and stay there, do my thing, maybe I was just frightened of disrupting something, of knocking the world out of its delicate balance by being in the way, in the wrong place, if I was too visible, tied people to me.”

Buzz Aldrin is a long, blowsy, meandering novel crammed full of digressions and unnecessary scenes. Mattias’s extreme passivity and self-destructive tendencies have the potential to annoy readers, and, near the novel’s end, Harstad introduces some plot elements (including a journey and some secret psychiatry files) that seem overly contrived. Nevertheless, these narrative flaws are more than made up for by this novel’s abundant charms. From the very beginning of Mattias’s story, I was hooked by his voice, a compelling mix of humility, melancholy, earnestness, and humor:

“It is a Tuesday. There can be no doubt about that. I see it in the light, the traffic outside the windows will continue to stream all day, slowly, disinterestedly, people driving back and forth out of habit rather than necessity. Tuesday. The week’s most superfluous day. A day that almost nobody notices among all the other days. I read somewhere, I don’t remember where, that statistics showed there were 34 percent fewer appointments made on an average Tuesday than on any other day. On a worldwide basis. That’s how it is. On the other hand a much greater number of funerals are held on Tuesdays than during the rest of the week. They sort of bunch up, you never get on top of it.”

Buzz Aldrin is filled with an emotional exuberance that’s rare and a joy to experience. Deborah Dawkin’s translation preserves that exuberance along with the brisk pace of Mattias’s narration. Over the course of almost 500 pages, I became thoroughly immersed in Mattias’s world, and even though I finished reading Buzz Aldrin more than a week ago, I still wonder how he’s doing. My strong emotional connection to this story proves what Mattias eventually realizes: “[E]ven an invisible person will be seen in the end, as a white aura flickering through nature, and there are no places to hide.”

This review also appears on my blog Literary License. show less

“Some people just want to be a part of a whole. Useful, if inconsequential. Not everybody needs the whole world. I just want to be in peace.”

Johan Harstad’s novel Buzz Aldrin, What Happened to You in All the Confusion (an unfortunate title) is the story of Mattias, an anti-hero, or perhaps a non-hero, a second best, the one who does not take the spotlight but nevertheless whose life is just as filled with longing, angst and the need for fulfillment. Perhaps he is the Buzz Aldrin of Norway, the one who came second, the set-up man and, more important, was quite satisfied in that role.

After a series of personal and professional reversals, Mattias wakes up lying on a rain-soaked road alone in the middle of the Faroe Islands, with show more 15,000 kroner in his pocket and no memory of how he had come to be there. He is picked up by Havstein, a psychiatrist and taken to the Factory where the story and his life begin again.

Harstad writes a steady, high-speed, stream-of-conscience narrative that is impossible to put down. There is nothing visible at the center of his hero Mattias but he churns up the landscape and events around him — makes them pulse with meaning and beauty — so that as the book progresses external events become a part of his inner landscape.

There is an angelic saintliness to Mattias’ persona but it is crooked and uneven — the good he does is tempered by the thoughtless and perhaps cruel — you want to scream and shake him for his persistent lack of drive. He is surrounded by a cast of well written characters that carry the story to it’s ultimate fate. show less

"The person you love is 72.8 percent water and there's been no rain for weeks."

With that opening sentence to set the tone, Johan Harstad moves us gently into the world of Mattias, age 29, a gardener, a resident of Stavanger, Norway, a man who wants nothing out of life than to be unnoticed and unnoticeable.

"I was the kid in your class in elementary school, in high school, in college, whose name you can't remember when you take out the class photo ten years later...the one you didn't miss when I left your class and started at another school, or when I didn't come to your party...the one you thought didn't have a life....I was practically invisible, wasn't I? And I was perhaps the happiest person you could have known."

Mattias lives with show more his girlfriend Helle and works at a nursery. He idolizes Buzz Aldrin, the second man on the moon, because he was second. One fine day, he loses both job and girlfriend and decides to accompany his friends' band to a gig in the Faroe Islands as their sound tech. But something happens....and the next thing both we and Mattias know, he's in a residential psychiatric facility in Torshavn.

Mattias spends the next year navigating his new surroundings and coming to terms with his illness. During that time, he integrates himself into a community, making a human connection, with his psychiatrist Havstein, with the other residents, for perhaps the first time.

Havstein runs the facility with a loose rein and dreams of moving to the Caribbean. Ennen listens to The Cardigans and rides buses obsessively and believes she isn't real.

"Ennen gets it into her head that she is, in fact, that person, that person from nowhere, the person who looks at you that way, on a bus, on a train, or catching a plane, the woman you never see again, she's convinced that anyone who mentions such an experience has in fact seen her, which is why she doesn't exist."

Palli, a welder and sailor, barely speaks. Anna is the mother hen, the domestic goddess, the quiet center who keeps the household running. Together with Mattias, a family of sorts forms...or, more accurately, Mattias is adopted into the family already formed, each member with a weakness, a fragile hold on reality, each strengthened and perfected by the solidarity of the group.

Mattias's thoughts tell the story, streaming in clear, spare prose and paragraphs punctuated almost solely by commas. This run-on running train-of-thought style provoked the occasional "Oh, come on, give me a period already!" response, but for the most part was unobtrusive and served the story well. The bleak far northern European locale -- unfamiliar enough to this untraveled American that I had to find it on a map -- is so fundamental to the psyche and behavior of Mattias and the others that it can be considered a character of the novel itself. And the story is bleak, gray, cold, like its locale, locked in a perpetual winter, but in the end, spring comes round again, and there's warmth and sweetness and just the merest hint of sunshine for Mattias. show less

http://iwriteinbooks.wordpress.com/2011/08/10/buzz-aldrin-what-happened-to-you-i...

When I first came across Harstad’s book, I, like many probably, thought that it would actually be about Buzz Aldrin or perhaps, maybe about, you know, space. What it turned out to be, instead, was a really intense study of socio-emotional interactions between self and others.

The now famous downward spiral of the second man on the moon is merely a catalyst for our protagonist, Mattias, as he explores his own life crisis. A successful gardener and self-proclaimed nobody, Mattias is perfectly content to be but a cog in the works, claiming no attention for himself. This means no pesky fanfare but also no personal relationships to speak of.

When he finds show more himself shipwrecked on the Faroe Islands, taken in by a psychologist and his merry band of misfits, his life begins to unravel quickly. Of course, like with most deconstruction, there is a period of rebuilding that follows. Through humor and tragedy, darkness and light, Mattias is able to navigate the rough waters of interpersonal relationships, sometimes floating, sometimes sinking.

This is a big, thick, complex book that is emotionally heavy but also, at most moments, just a seriously good story. Schizophrenia and other serious conditions are well worked through in the story but there’s more to it than simple science. Even those who do not fall into the category of mentally ill are run along in a journey of personal discovery that knocks all previously constructed assumptions about human interaction. It’s a beautiful look into the way we correspond and live with each other, or really, without each other.

As a side note: I found it pretty helpful to have my phone or computer around while flipping through the story, not as a neccessity but more as an interest tool for researching mentioned people and places. show less

This is the story of how Mattias, from Stavanger, Norway, navigates his life through some very rough years of severe mental anguish.

"I was the kid in your class in elementary school, in high school, at college, whose name you can't remember when you take out the class photo ten years later, to show your boyfriend or girlfriend how you looked back then. I was the boy that sat almost a the center of the class, one desk from the wall, the guy who never forgot his gym clothes, who was always ready for the test, who was never rowdy in class, but answered when he was asked, who never insisted on performing long skits in the school show, who never put himself forward as Student or Class Rep. I was the one you'd been in class with for almost show more six month before you knew his name. I was the one you didn't miss when I left your class and started at another school...."

...and that was the way Mattias liked it. He didn't like attention, he just wanted to be left alone, in peace and quiet. He did want to be useful, to have a purpose, and so he envisioned himself as just one cog in a great machine, doing useful, meaningful work--but invisible.

Mattias idolizes Buzz Aldrin, and the idea of his being the second man on the moon. Aldrin performed all this vital research, then slipped back into anonymity. And Mattias just happened to be born on July 20, 1969, while most of the other people in the hospital were watching Neil Armstrong take those first steps on the moon.

With the comparatively obscure Buzz Aldrin as his prototype, Mattias tries to quietly pad his way through school until he develops a strong crush on Helle, a girl at school he tortures himself watching, until at their class Halloween party, Mattias works up the nerve to stand up in front of a band and--sing. Yep, he lifted up that visor on his astronaut costume, and sang very well. Ironically, Mattias has taken signing lessons, but neither of his friends know this, until this moment. The attention Mattias gets afterward is very irksome to him, but--he does get the girl, and that's important to the rest of the story.

It will be years before Mattias sings in public again. On the contrary, he becomes a gardener, since it's such a peaceful job and plants are so easy to talk to. And he's living with Helle, and for a while, he thinks things are going fine, for about thirteen years. Unfortunately, the nursery he's been working for is struggling so badly that the owner must close. While Mattias is processing this change, Helle confesses that she's in love with someone else, and she's leaving him. That's a bad week for anyone.

So, when Mattias's longtime, childhood pal and band member Jorn wants him to go on a trip to the Faroe Islands with him and a couple other bands, he doesn't say no. However, something happens to Mattias that first night that he will never be able to remember, but will result in his waking up all alone, outside in the freezing rain, with absolutely no idea where he is. As Mattias lies curled up on a bus stop bench, about to freeze to death, a car comes along.

I'm going to stop telling the story right there. In the days, weeks, and months that follow, Mattias becomes very attached to a few other people and plays an important part in the life they have together. It is the opposite of disappearing. And, as Mattias notes, no one can be invisible on The Faroes because there are so few regular inhabitants that every one of them will surely notice everyone else. The main characters populating Mattias's experience are wonderfully written and I liked all of them. Also, the description of The Faroe Islands is appealing and intriguing enough to make me want to go.

Johan Harstad has written so many good passages into this book that the pages seemed to melt away, and four hundred and seventy pages didn't seem long. And I really must go listen to The Cardigans, too....

Thank you, LibraryThing, for this Early Reviewer gem. show less

Mattias is a Norwegian gardener who spends his whole life not wanting to be noticed, not wanting to be anybody special. Mostly, he succeeds. Stuff happens to him: his girlfriend leaves him; he gets depressed; he travels to the tiny, windswept Faroe islands; he meets some people, he eats some hot dogs and plants some trees and listens to some CDs; he goes back to Norway; he comes back to the Faroes; he talks to people with slightly more interesting stories than him; he meets another girl, who gets no actual character development; he goes somewhere else... Through it all, he tries very hard to convince me that he's an extremely boring person and, unfortunately, he succeeds at that, too. And, man, for a guy who desperately wants not to be show more noticed, he's awfully zealous about telling me all the incredibly mundane details of his incredibly boring life. All right, I'll admit, he does eventually do some vaguely interesting things. He just mostly manages to make those boring as well. And there might actually be a poignant moment or two in here, maybe an insightful meditation somewhere, but they do kind of get buried under all the layers of I-don't-give-a-crap. I'm also not thrilled with the prose style, which alternates massive run-on sentences with choppy little fragments, but if it were used to do something more interesting, it could have worked okay. show less

E' uno bravo, questo qui. Ha scritto questo libro a 25 anni. Bravo.

Un mondo liquido alle Fær Øer, portato da questo Mattias di 10 anni piu' vecchio dell'autore - e gia' qui bisogna essere capaci per descrivere un mondo che vedrai tra un po'.

Ogni tanto una sopresa che lancia la trama sempre sopra l'ultimo punto toccato, come una sinusoide ubriaca.

Tanta arrendevolezza, tanta vigliaccheria, ma che trasfigura in una ripartenza consolante - nulla a che vedere con il lieto fine dei film di Capra, anzi.

Bella la figura di Sofus, e davvero intensa la sua caratterizzazione.

Per non parlare di punte davvero alte di scrittura, con salti timbrici e ritmi coinvolgenti.