Does this book start with a typographical error?

No, there is no missing letter in the sentence “I'm looking for a place to die”.

Because the “I” in Tomas Espedal's final volume of his “autobiographical project”, as the publisher calls it, is treated like a “he”, i.e. like a figure from which the narrating voice distances itself.

The following sentence already says: “He falls down, gets up, brushes dirt off his clothes.” It cannot be made clearer that the “I” is just an invention, a malleable material.

Play mass.

Jan Wiele

Editor in the features section.

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In any case, Espedal has played through all possible forms in the previous volumes, that of the journal in “Against the Nature”, that of the essay in “Bergeners”, that of the prose poem in “Das Jahr”. Now he is practicing dissolving boundaries: “I remembered a beautiful woman and a difficult mother.” As a reader you are lying on the couch: Yes, Espedal's project is a long, lifelong psychoanalysis. She can suddenly jump into the middle of childhood, then again she is close to death, very close. Again and again it is about death, preferably the "good death", which is not so easy to find.

But then who owns the voice that speaks about the first-person figure? Let's just say it comes from outside, watch it. She knows a little more than she does, but not everything either. That is not too difficult to understand, it has been seen many times in literature. The Norwegian auto fictionalists didn't have to come first, or whatever you want to call them, to write like that. But of course, if it helps to sell more books, you can claim that this is something new, “radically authentic”, or something like that.

This book now bears the simple title “Lieben”, and if this sounds familiar, you may remember that Karl Ove Knausgård's second volume of his mammoth writing project with the precarious title “Mein Kampf” was also called that.

Knausgård, however, was a student of Tomas Espedal at the “Skrivekunstakademiet” in Bergen at the end of the eighties, and perhaps he would like to show the world literary star Knausgård, who has advanced to become a literary world star, a little defiantly that he has known love a little longer than he - or even invented.

Love against emptiness

Above all, Espedal has one thing ahead of Knausgård: brevity. This book, too, is barely more than a hundred pages. However, they have a lot of pain in them. Again and again the pain of a whole life is weighed against the beautiful moments. Love against emptiness, intoxication against a hangover or - to put it more drastically, because Espedal writes drastically - drinking a good red wine to prevent vomiting of the same over bed and table, over books and notes.

With echoes of Hofmannsthal's “Jedermann” and Kafka's “Process”, Espedal explores the swaying of the first person between feelings of guilt and the impression of being guilty of being convicted in short, hard sentences. Once again a new falling in love breaks into this painful existence, which could change everything, but the first-person figure, still waiting for a judgment in a trial actually conducted against it, cannot wait for its end and speaks the judgment about itself The external view of this ego enables the bitterest end, which is nevertheless only hinted at. It's not easy to read at times, but it's worth it.