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

Buzz Aldrin, What Happened to You in All the Confusion? opens with the line: "The person you love is 72.8% water, and it hasn't rained for weeks." From there, Brage Awardwinning author and playwright Johan Harstad's debutpreviously published to great success in eleven countries and now making its first English-language appearancetells the story of Mattias, a thirty-something gardener living in Stavanger, Norway, whose idol is Buzz Aldrin, second man on the moon: the man who was willing to stand in Neil Armstrong's shadow in order to work, diligently and humbly, for the success of the Apollo 11 mission. Following a series of personal and professional disasters, Mattias finds himself lying on a rain-soaked road in the desolate, treeless Faroe Islands, population only a few thousand, a wad of bills in his pocket and no memory of how he had come to be therethat's when a truck approaches him, driven by a troubled, fantastic man with an offer that will shortly change Mattias's life. And so, surrounded by a vivid and memorable cast of charactersaspiring pop musicians, Caribbean-obsessed psychologists, death-haunted photographers, girls who dream of anonymous men falling in love with them on bus trips, and even Buzz Aldrin himselflaunches Buzz Aldrin, What Happened To You In All The Confusion?, the epic story of Mattias's pop-saturated odyssey through the world of unconventional psychiatry, souvenir sheep-making, the Cardigans, and space: the space between himself and other people, a journey maybe as remote and personally dangerous as the trip to the moon itself.

JOHAN HARSTAD, winner of the 2008 Brage Award (previously won by Per Petterson), is a Norwegian author, playwright, graphic designer, drummer, and international sensation, with books published in eleven countries. His first novel, Buzz Aldrin, What Happened To You In All The Confusion?, was in 2009 made into a TV series starring The Wire’s Chad Coleman. Harstad lives in Oslo. DEBORAH DAWKIN is a literary translator based in London.

1 First Band on the Moon, 2 Life, 3 Gran Turismo, 4 Long Gone Before Daylight