Literature and Fiction · Hardback

Wild Thing

Magnus Aasdalen

There is something distinctly unreal about Magnus Aasdalen's upcoming novel, Wild Thing. Or, as Sirius still shines over the armory. If you find the title dizzying, it is merely a foretaste of the story it contains.

A first-person narrator lives alone on a farm in Gvarv, Telemark. He is eight years old, on sick leave, an alcoholic, and newly divorced. From this premise, we follow a couple of days in his life, which can be summarized as a dark odyssey by bicycle. Childhood fantasy and pitch-black reality coalesce into a higher unity in this novel. Here you will find trees that become dragons, parents whose whereabouts are unknown, carousels at the local pub Bull-in, high school flirtations, and bike rides under a dark, starry sky. Not least, and perhaps most importantly, there is a "you". For Wild Thing is also a love story, of the impossible kind, from which the narrator cannot escape. The past seeps into the present. And thus, amidst all this unreal, fantastic, but often very humorous matter, there is evoked a vulnerability and longing, that linger long after the book is closed.

Aasdalen's prose resembles nothing else. Told in a direct, yet poetic stream of consciousness, this is a highly original novel about addiction and loneliness, which no-one else could have written.