Johan Harstad

Under brosteinen, stranden! (not translated into English) is a highlight of Johan Harstad’s unique authorship – a nearly thousand-page novel overflowing with serious and curious knowledge, humour, inquisitive thinking, an extensive array of experimental literary components, and impressive dramaturgical constructions. At the heart of the novel stands an extraordinary discovery: a cobblestone-shaped object which – when touched – is said to create the illusion of experiencing an entire lifetime in just seven minutes.

Despite the complex maze of events, time jumps, and shifting settings, Harstad skilfully and effortlessly guides both readers and his many characters through the novel’s expansive and multifaceted narrative in an unusually rewarding and engaging way.

 There seems to be both a sense of life experience and youthful curiosity embedded in Under brosteinen, stranden! At one point in the novel, the author presents the following sharp and reassuring observation: “A central part of young boys’ modus operandi in environments where nothing particular seems to be happening is precisely to find out what is actually happening, convinced as they are that something, hidden or not, must be happening. This usually involves a great deal of circling 360° around objects and buildings, with a faint feeling that what you’re doing is the result of societal conscience more than anything else. Because if something were to happen here, and they were later asked why they didn’t speak up or do something about it, it wouldn’t look good – not at all.”

 Under brosteinen, stranden! is, among many other things, also a political novel for our time. As such, it’s both despairing and furious, disillusioned yet wildly imaginative. It’s nostalgic and, at the same time, like a contemporary science fiction story – like a foreboding flash of lightning. And above all, it is deeply moving in its portrayal of human affairs, poignant in its unsentimental defiance – on behalf of both the novel and the world itself.

Johan Harstad, born in 1979, is one of the most distinctive and intriguing authors of his generation. His unique literary expression was already established with his debut in 2001, the short prose collection Herfra blir du bare eldre (not translated into English). Since then, Harstad has been a prolific and versatile writer, crafting works that weave together pop-cultural references and mythologies in increasingly impressive ways with a near-iconoclastic literary innovation.