Buzz Aldrin, What Happened to You in All the Confusion? is a book about nothing much. Just about a life slowly unfolding and a talent unused. Just about a life spinning out of control as fast and as quietly as a rocket orbiting the moon. It’s a book about the distance we have to travel in order to make relationships work. It’s a book about the footprints we leave behind and the untamed territory ahead; like the first step on the moon.

Twenty-nine-year-old Mattias had been content, no, he has worked, to be an anonymous cog in life. He wants to be useful, but like a superhero he wants any rescues to be incognito. He wants nothing to change and for things to be fixed for all eternity – just like the moon footprints of Buzz Aldrin, the person Mattias admires most in the world. Mattias thinks that, like Buzz, it’s always best to be in second place, to not be noticed and fussed over. But it turns out that Mattias is wrong about Buzz. He didn’t fade away. Being in second place didn’t protect Buzz from life’s hardships, and it doesn’t protect Mattias either.

Told from an intimate first-person rambling perspective, with run-on sentences to rival Faulkner, Norwegian author Johan Harstad has created an intensely sensitive character in Mattias. As he stumbles through his young life the reader is drawn into his world of doubts and fears at the same time that we are cheering him through his successes. By focusing on his quotidian movements we become attached to Mattias as if he were sharing our space, and when he responds with humor and truth we burst with pride.

The harsh landscape of the Faroe Islands provides the perfect setting for Mattias as he and a crew of other sensitive souls heal their wounds and find their rightful places in life. When Mattias suddenly inspires the group to set themselves adrift, we realize that this journey might as well be a moon walk, and it just might be the step that changes a life forever.

Harstad won the 2008 Braga award – previously won by Per Petterson. This, his first novel and his first book to be translated into English, was published in 2005 in Norway and has already been made into a Norwegian television series.

Laura J.