Red Handler: Collected Works - Softcover

Harstad, Johan

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1948830809 ISBN 13: 9781948830805

Verlag: Open Letter, 2024

Inhaltsangabe

A riotous metafictional dissection of a "famous" Norwegian detective writer

Frode Brandeggen (1970–2014), an unknown voice to most readers, made his debut in 1992 with the experimental 2,000+ page novel Conglomerate Breath. It was never reviewed and soon forgotten. After that, he created a new genre, writing fifteen micro-novels about "Red Handler," a protest-oriented crime fiction project aimed at confronting the genre’s weakness—and often unnecessary length. 

As his weapon, he developed a private investigator who is already at the scene or in the immediate vicinity when foul play takes place, so that the perp can be caught red handed and the case quickly solved, thus offering crime fiction to people who don’t have the time to read long books, or who simply hate to read, but love crime. 

This book brings together all fifteen micro-novels Brandeggen wrote about Red Handler for the first time, and is also equipped with a comprehensive amount of enthusiastic, explanatory, complementary, and sometimes strangely digressive endnotes, written in the pen of Brandeggen’s closest literary confidant in the final years, German professional annotator Bruno Aigner (1934–). 

This novel about the fiction Red Handler, Frode Brandeggen, and Bruno Aigner is Johan Harstad’s wildest, most hysterical project to date.

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorinnen und Autoren

Johan Harstad is a Norwegian author, graphic designer, playwright, drummer, and international sensation. He is the winner of the 2008 Brage Award (Brageprisen), previously won by Per Petterson, and his books have been published in over eleven countries. In 2009, he was named the first ever in-house playwright at the National Theatre in Oslo. His first novel Buzz Aldrin, What Happened To You In All The Confusion, originally published in Norway by Gyldendal in 2005, was made into a TV series in 2009 starring The Wire’s Chad Coleman. Harstad lives in Oslo.

David Smith grew up outside of Atlanta and studied English and philosophy at the University of Georgia. He then earned a Master’s Degree in the Humanities from the University of Chicago. After Chicago, a lifelong interest in his family’s Nordic heritage brought him to Norway. He took language classes at the University of Oslo, before settling in Bergen and starting to work as a commercial translator. In 2014, he earned a National Translator Accreditation from the Norwegian Ministry of Education and Research. He is a PhD student at the University of Wisconsin, Madison

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RED HANDLER HOT ON THE TRAIL

 

Chapter 1

 

The streets soaked in rain. One of the city's wrongdoers rushed past like a leaf blowing in the wind.¹ In the old Opel with Haugesund City plates sat the private detective Red Handler. He took a sip off of a hipflask bearing the inscription To my dear husband.² For a short second he pictured his ex-wife’s face before the liquor washed the painful memory into the sewers of oblivion.³ He turned on the car stereo. From of the speakers flowed music from Glenn Gould's recording of The Goldberg Variations.⁴ The late recording of them. The one he did in the early eighties.

Red Handler closed his eyes and let the eminent piano sound play with his ears.

 

 

1 When Frode Brandeggen showed up unannounced at my office in Dresden one afternoon in 2013 with what turned out to be the manuscripts to the Red Handler books, my first thought, in all its prosaic terseness, was as follows: This is not particularly good. My subsequent thought, I would imagine, was a corruption of the first, and went something like this: This is really, really not good. Dutifully, because I am nothing if not dutiful, I thumbed through the heap of papers while he waited impatiently by the window, as I wondered why he’d come all the way here to meet me, of all people, and how he’d managed to find me. He told me he’d already had one novel published, after which he’d worked as a garbageman and library attendant while attempting a return to writing with something he called “a new form.” Eventually, I asked him to step out for a walk and come back toward the end of the day. Then I began reading. As I mentioned, out of a sense of duty more than anything. I’m not an editor, I’ve never been tasked with deciding what and what not to publish, my mandate has always been confined to illuminating what has already been accepted, what others have deemed important, canonical, consequential. No one has ever asked me: What do you think about this? My sense of duty was therefore challenged by the humility I felt before this author, who told me he knew my work as an annotator from a long line of editions that had gained classic status here in Germany, and appreciated what he termed “my ability to read clearly.” So that’s what I did, in the hours he spent wandering Dresden. I read, I read again, and eventually, I was transformed. Since then, night has fallen, and everything has taken on significance. As afternoon gave way to evening, what stood out to me, above all, was Brandeggen’s rage, his literary obstinance that has kept me returning to these texts, again and again, and the uncompromising tone that that manifests itself in spite of what seems, at first glance, to be the reductive language of crime, the comic strip sense of narrativity. It has also—now that I, supposedly because Brandeggen specifically requested it in his posthumous papers, have agreed to write endnotes to this first edition of his crime novels—shown me why I must treat Brandeggen’s project with the utmost seriousness, even if I thereby become his Sancho Panza. And it has been liberating, enormously liberating for my work on this book, now that I, after so long, dare to step out of my accustomed shadows and myself dictate the relevance of these endnotes to the text, striking my own course, entering exactly what I deem necessary. Let me also add that the conversation between me and Brandeggen that evening was the start of a conversation that would last three years. I don’t believe he had many others to talk to than myself. But talk we did, by telephone, by letter, in my visits to him in Stavanger or, more often, in my welcoming him to Dresden, where he made do with the tiny guest room I fit out in my apartment. And to think I’d

never had any guests, before him. If I may say so, I don’t believe anyone knew Frode Brandeggen in the last days quite like I did. I say this, not to lay claim to any role in his success, should these books move readers as much as they have moved me. I say this, rather, because it foreshadows this man’s terrible lonesomeness. The anger I find in these books is real, as is the despair that precipitates his dramatic swerve away from his avant-garde roots. May be that that anger can only be grasped within the context of the distance between his first book and the Red Handler. But the anger, nonetheless, is not the whole picture, because Brandeggen also cares all too much about his protagonist. His absorption in the Red Handler only goes to show a genuine concern, a real sympathy for this character, in such a way that the author’s emotional stake becomes palpable and full of significance. And thus, the texts never manage to hide that they are, at bottom, about Brandeggen himself, about a man who obviously is deeply troubled, and who, more than opposing crime literature an sich or the book industry’s thirst for profit, is desperately trying to draw up a world with some semblance of meaning and predictability, with clear structures and sincerity.

 

2 When Frode Brandeggen chose to accept the fate of his 2,322-page debut novel, Conglomeratic Breath (Konglomeratisk pust),⁂ thenceforth giving up the avant-garde in favor of chiseled-down, commercial crime fiction, he still held out hope for a future that held room for a more expansive, probing literature. As early as the first book of the Red Handler series, Brandeggen wrote a separate novel that served both as a warm-up to the Red Handler universe and a novel that he hoped would hold up as a work in its own right one day. From what I have been able to glean, he never mentioned this work to anyone. The unpublished novel, All of These Loves (Alle disse kjærlighetene, 433 pages in

manuscript) takes up the marriage with Gerd and their life together in Haugesund, where the Red Handler—who here seems to have a proper first and last name, though both are crossed out throughout the entire manuscript—works part time as an electric meter reader. The novel is a passionate account of an intense love and an often exemplary marriage that slowly, but surely becomes counterproductive, to put it mildly, culminating in a magnificent scene in which the Red Handler persona is born and the protagonist leaves Haugesund for good. There are intimations towards the end of the manuscript that the wife leaves the Red Handler for his future nemesis, the Cheap Trick. There is no evidence Brandeggen ever had a serious relationship himself.

 

⁂ From the back cover of Conglomeratic Breath: “Imper Akselbladkvist is turning his house upside down in search of something he has lost. But is it really his house? And has he really lost anything? And if so, then what? Himself? Or everyone else? Distended and distracted by existential angst, he ambushes the component parts of his life (is it really his life?) through an intense, ruthless, and often heartrendingly intricate exploration of the potential Heidegger-plagiarist level of the self, represented by the distance between two threads of an almost fully disintegrated bedspread that his grandmother (if she is even his grandmother—and for that matter, how do we know she was really all that grand?) bequeathed him. Through more than two thousand pages—free from even the slightest scintilla of what Imper Akselbladkvist calls abominable deformities like...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Open Letter
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2024
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 1948830809
• ISBN 13: 9781948830805
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 240
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Buchpark GmbH; gpsr@buchpark.de; ; Krügerweg 1; Trebbin; Brandenburg; 14959; Deutschland