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

His desire to vanish is all-consuming and destructive, making it difficult for him to form close personal connections, and leading to relationship breakdown and mental illness. Mattias is at the extreme end of the spectrum. It’s an interesting aspect of the human condition, the tension between wanting to avoid attention entirely, being happy to do good work unseen, and seeking recognition.

He wants to be useful but forgotten: ‘a smooth-running cog in the world’. But Mattias is desperately afraid of attention. He’s excellent at most things he does, and also happens to be an extraordinary, blow-you-away singer. Mattias, the protagonist and narrator, is a gardener at a local nursery, delivering flowers to the dying. But the Norwegian author’s novel has done well: it’s been made into a TV series and the rights have been sold in over ten different countries.

And so, surrounded by a vivid and memorable cast of characters - aspiring 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 himself - launches 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.‘What twenty-seven-year-old Johan Harstad has written is quite plainly a work of genius,’ claims a recommendation on the cover of Buzz Aldrin: What Happened To You in All the Confusion? The cynic in me was immediately suspicious of such effusive praise. 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 there - that's when a truck approaches him, driven by a troubled, fantastic man with an offer that will shortly change Mattias's life. 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 Award-winning author and playwright Johan Harstad's debut - previously published to great success in eleven countries and now making its first English-language appearance - tells 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.

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