Friday, 16 March 2012

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



Well, the story, for it is a story and not a biography of the astronaut Buzz Aldrin (that's clear because it says so, on the cover no less - "a novel"), follows the Norwegian Mattias. He has a job and a girlfriend but then he loses both in quick succession, goes into meltdown and ends up in the Faroe Islands. There he is taken into a sort of psychiatric hostel. He then grows to love his adopted country because it mirrors the way he is, a person that doesn't like the limelight (hence the title referring to one of his heroes, Buzz Aldrin - the second and not the first man on the moon). And all done with a lot of rain in-between.

This is a rather wordy tome of a book. However as the book is narrated by Mattias, a character that does a lot of thinking and speculating, this style fits. I did find it a bit odd though that for key moments in the book the conversations would be long, long speeches made by these otherwise quite private individuals suddenly revealing their long-held secrets and whatnot. Also there are a lot of Norwegian and Faroese references to place names in the text but you can get by without having heard of them before although if you do know them it'll help you better imagine the journeys etc. the characters were taking.

As a whole I enjoyed the book very much right from its artistic front cover of a boat out at sea being dwarfed by the Faroe Isle it has just left through all the pages organised in their "The Cardigans"-album named chapters and on to the positive ending.


(I got this book through Amazon Vine. It is listed on Amazon here.)

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