Our main character, Mattias, is a run-of-the-mill guy who is relatively happy being a gardener at a greenhouse/florist, making deliveries and coming home to his first and only love. He has few friends, seemingly few opinions about things, and has little to discuss with his parents on his regular visits home. Then, of course, his world is turned on its head when he is summarily rejected from the principal goings-on of his own life. And, as he tells us in the opening pages, his one friendship leads to following a band to the Faroe Islands to serve as their sound guy. And that's when things really get interesting.
Harstad definitely has potential as a good novelist. I suggest you reread the first few pages after finishing the novel, to see that he really had a handle on his craft after all, when I thought he might be filling space. I'm not entirely convinced he couldn't have had a stronger editing hand, but overall it works.
I am not familiar with Norwegian literature as a genre. In fact, at the risk of sounding ignorant and provincial, I don't often read non-English-language literature, mostly because I worry about what has been lost (or added) in translation. Harstad's novel made me worry about that a bit at the beginning. Luckily for me, there more 400 more pages for me to settle in, get used to the language choices, and hear what was really being said. The rambling, multi-comma, run-on sentences and paragraphs are not my preferred style. I wonder what it sounds like in Norwegian-- does it sound more natural than in English? Regardless, Mattias has this voice that keeps running right through conventional periods, long-winded, and I'm not sure that that's what he (the character) would want for himself. My other stumbling block in this novel, especially in the beginning, was the vast amount of proper-name-dropping that had me lost. Was I supposed to feel lost, as Mattias did in the Faroe Isles? Would an average Norwegian reader know where the places were in relation to each other, what the connotations are of dropping such a name or the symbolism of a band's name? Names matter in literature: if I write a novel with Gertrude Shmup as my main character rather than Emma Hightower, or Hubert Goober rather than Tyler Remington, a modern American audience will know what that means for the character. I miss out on that when reading literature in translation. While my ignorance is certainly not the fault of Johan Harstad, it does affect my reading and enjoyment of the book. Sometimes I wish for translators to have little footnotes or a crib sheet at the end of the book.
SPOILER??
Ironically, I finished reading this book the week that Neil Armstrong died. While Buzz Aldrin is not actually a character in the book, the symbolism of his life and choices (as Mattias understands them) is essentially a guiding principle for Mattias. Mattias is striving to make himself useful and invisible at the same time, which he believes is embodied in Buzz Aldrin. The one who comes in second and is forgotten. A cog in the great machinery without every being named. Ironic, as pointed out by both my astronomy friend and Mattias's friend Jorn toward the end of the book, because Buzz Aldrin is the one of the three Apollo 11 astronauts to actually capitalize on his fame. He wrote and cowrote books, lent his name to astronomy toys and Disney movies. I personally think Mattias should have chosen Michael Collins as his patron saint of cogs-in-the-machinery, people who do amazing tasks and whose names are nearly lost to history. But hey, I'm not a Norwegian novelist.