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

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

Award-winning Norwegian author and playwright Johan Harstad's debut, Buzz Aldrin, What Happened to You in All the Confusion? published to great acclaim in eleven languages, makes its way into English under the steerage of UWA Publishing (Perth) & Seven Stories Press (NYC).

It tells the story of Mattias, a thirty-something gardener living in Norway, whose idol is Buzz Aldrin, the second man on the moon. 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. (*The Faroe Islands are situated between Iceland and Great Britain).

With a wad of bills in his pocket and no memory of how he had come to be there, a truck approaches driven by a troubled man with an offer that will shortly change Mattias's life.

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. 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.

Johan Harstad, winner of the 2008 *Brage Award, is a Norwegian author, graphic designer, playwright, drummer. His first novel, Buzz Aldrin, What Happened to You in All the Confusion? has been made into a TV series starring The Wire's Chad Coleman. Harstad lives in Oslo.

Buzz Aldrin, What Happened to You in All the Confusion?
UWA Publishing
Author: Johan Harstad
ISBN: 9781742582634
Price: $34.95

Interview with Johan Harstad

Question: Did you travel to The Faroe Islands as research?

Johan Harstad: One of my closest friends who I have known since I was 7 is half-Faroe, so I grew up with hearing all these things about the place. In many ways I felt I knew the Faroe Islands quite well without having been to the country, but I did go there three or four times, by boat or by plane, while working on the novel, staying for a few weeks every time, in summer sun and monotonous rain for days and days, heavy fog and cold autumn evenings. And in the six years that have passed since the book first came out, I've been back once or twice every year, just because I feel very much at home there now and I've gotten to know some of the great people living there. For instance, the art scene in the capital is really vibrant and interesting.


Question: Is the character of Mattias based on anyone you know?

Johan Harstad: No, not on anyone I know. I try to protect friends from ending up in my books. But I tried to look back on people I had gone to school with, for instance, people whom I couldn't remember the name of, people I seemed to only remembered because they more or less stayed by themselves all the time, in the background. At least the inspiration for the character came from that, but I have to say that while writing I thought that my character, someone who doesn't want to be famous, or even seen by others as talented, was a one of a kind type of guy. I was surprised to learn that there are hordes of people like that out there, and to some degree we are perhaps all like that from time to time. Myself I seem to become a bit more withdrawn for every year that passes, caring more about what I do than what everyone thinks of it. Like deciding to stop googling my own name in 2005, one of my greatest decisions ever. I'm now living in the bliss of not having a clue what's out there.

Question: What originally inspired you to become a writer?

Johan Harstad: Most writers spend their whole life answering that question to themselves, and I'm still not even near a complete answer. Obviously, there were a lot of factors, some of them more important than others. Music, for instance, is definitely among the guilty parties and I very early developed an interest in lyrics. While the other kids were still listening to New Kids on The Block I was listening hard to bands like Depeche Mode, REM and The Doors (and Australia's own INXS!), trying to understand the lyrics. And then there's film, I saw A LOT of movies from a very early age and I guess that if you secretly watch "Apocalypse Now" at age eleven, you'll either become a mass murderer or start making stuff just to deal with it. And of course, literature. I accidentally discovered poetry when a relative gave me a collection of Norwegian contemporary poet Jan Erik Vold for my 13th birthday, which soon led me to reading the beat poets and then back again to Scandinavian poetry, on to more films and more music and more literature and the first attempts at writing, and then at one point when I was about fifteen I remember deciding to become a poor, miserable poet like Rimbaud, write my poems and then eventually split from the whole thing. But something happened along the way, the poetry morphed into prose and then novels, and I still haven't manage to disappear into the African no man's land.


Question: How was the process of writing a novel different to plays?

Johan Harstad: Basically, while working on a novel I'm usually in a good mood as opposed to writing plays which tend to make me kind of grumpy and moody. I'm not sure exactly why, but it could have something to do with the fact that while writing a novel I'm free to do whatever I want, I'm free to create absolutely anything without having to worry that it will be expensive, involve too many characters or be too difficult to produce. And of course, I'm able to describe what people are thinking, how landscapes look etc. Writing a play is more or less giving up the control of everything except for the words the characters will speak, even how they'll say it. So it makes you more nervous, or a different kind of nervous at least, than writing novels. Also, working on a novel is a one man job but a play is a collaboration, it's teamwork, really, involving a lot of others who will impress you, depress you, surprise you and despise you, outsmart and outrun you and outlast you and what have you, all of these things are what makes writing plays great fun, as well as the reason you every time decide that after this you'll only do novels.


Interview by Brooke Hunter