What’s the most granular level a story can be reduced to? Félix Fénéon’s superb Novels in Three Lines offers one memorable example, and the “Six-Word Memoirs” concept that debuted in Smith Magazine in 2006 displays another path. And then there are the adventures contained in Johan Harstad’s The Red Handler, translated by David M. Smith. Here, too, are the adventures of a detective with a talent for catching people in the act of committing crimes.
The adventures of the titular detective are just the first layer of Harstad’s novel, which works as a formally inventive trip into the psyches of fictional author Frode Brandeggen and his friend and annotator Bruno Aigner, a memorable send-up of crime fiction clichés, and an unexpectedly moving examination of both men’s deep loneliness.
In adventures like The Red Handler and the Musical Bandit, The Red Handler Hot on the Trail, and The Red Handler Comes Too Late, Harstad follows the detective through a series of cases. But he also hints at the frustration of the fictional author behind the scenes, as when — in The Red Handler and the Difficult Sabbath — Brandeggen appears to be experiencing a crisis of faith. I spoke with Harstad and Smith to learn more about the project’s genesis, the challenges of translating this into English, and its place in Norwegian literature.
Where did the idea of writing a novel in the form of a bunch of very short other novels with extensive annotations come from? Was that a concept that arrived fully formed, or did it evolve as you wrote it?
Johan Harstad: It sort of evolved. I had just finished this really long novel, an 1,100-page novel the year before. And I was trying to get ahead with a new project and realized that it was too soon. I couldn’t dive into another big project. I had to do something completely different or I’d go absolutely crazy. By coincidence, I was taking a walk with this friend of mine. He’s a Norwegian movie director. And he complained that he wanted to, at some point, write a novel. He had this stupid idea, he said, of this investigator who’s going to be present at the scene of the crime at the moment when the thing happens.
We talked a little bit about it. I remember that day we started writing to each other, just texting each other very short snippets of potential stories. And to make a long story a little bit shorter, I ended up being allowed to just run with it and develop it. because he realized he was never going to do this anyway.
The initial idea was just to publish a very short collection of these almost inane stories. The whole annotation thing came into play a little bit later. I realized that it’s not really enough to just have these very ridiculous stories. I need to do something more with it. And what it actually became was — I’m not going to say therapeutic — but there was definitely something cathartic about it because I was able to write, sort of trying to write as bad as I possibly could, and then have these annotations to defend it to the best of my abilities.
Your fictional author is also someone who had previously written a very long book. So were you riffing on your own life when writing this?
Harstad: Not as much. I mean, there’s a little bit that’s tongue-in-cheek, obviously, due to the length of my previous novel, but my novel and the rest of my work has never been that kind of avant-garde stuff that this fictional writer does. So it was more to play with that kind of writer, those really super highbrow avant-garde literary figures who just can’t seem to get any readers. I just wanted to make him really, really sad. And I thought that if he’s going to be an enormously misunderstood genius, that would be fun to work with.
I tried to create the idea that he had written this utterly impenetrable novel that sold one or two copies or something. But other than that, well, we’re from the same city in Norway, but that’s it.
At what point in the process of this did it become clear that the annotator was also going to emerge as a fairly significant character in the way that the novel actually reads to a reader?
Harstad: Oh, that happened instantaneously. Once I decided that this needed to be annotated, I thought this would be a great opportunity to sort of shed some light on the whole process of annotations. As all of us who have read books that are annotated — and I remember this from my university days — you had all these Norton annotated editions of different works. And for the longest time, I’ve been super-interested in who these people are who write all these annotations. Some of them seem to do it for a living.
So I just wanted Bruno Aigner to not only declare Frode Brandegen as a gigantic genius, but I wanted him to almost invade the annotations by his own presence. I thought that would be an interesting thing to do if he emerged from anonymity and started talking about himself a little bit.
There’s a point about two-thirds of the way through where Aigner just starts sharing his entire life story in an annotation.
Harstad: Yeah. And it’s sort of just him rambling on. He also refers to himself as a rambling man, both in a physical way and then as the sense of how he speaks.
Which fits with him discussing the hobo code as well.
Harstad: It was one of the truly great, fun things of writing this book. You have to understand, I had spent seven years prior to this on a very long novel, trying to write as best as I possibly could and being extremely focused on it. And the joy of just being able to let go and allowing myself to be as far out as I wanted. But at the same time, I’m trying to write it with a sense of honesty, I think, or trying to take these people seriously. And that was an interesting mix. Both these short crime fiction stories and the annotations are on one level, very, very stupid, very bad stuff. But at the same time, I was also trying to make it something which has value or sadness to it. That I think, was where I found the the real engine for this book.
David, what were some of the challenges you encountered as far as the translation of both the short novels and the annotations?
David M. Smith: It was an interesting translational challenge, because on the one hand, there’s this tension in the novel between the really simple and stupidly obvious on the one hand, and then the tendency to over-explain and overanalyze and oversell things.
Sometimes that even exists within the same story. I’m thinking of The Red Handler and the Unsolvable Mystery of the Burmese Cat, where you have this guy give this little mini-lecture on quantum physics right in the middle of the story. And then you have the rabbi and the difficult Sabbath story, who goes off on this long tangent about Jewish religious rules. That was a challenge — to strike the right balance between the simplicity of the Red Handler stories overall, and then also this mock-academic style in the annotations themselves.
In the annotations as well, it comes across as very personal at times, too, because the annotator, Bruno Aigner, is different from the typical annotator in that we find out that he knew Frode Brandegen personally, had a lot of interactions with him, and came to even admire and have a sort of love and respect for him. So there’s a lot of comedy in the way that Aigner comes about his annotations, like a whole long thing about Brandegen’s extensive notes about different types of flooring, which ends up with just like two words, a dirty floor, basically.
There’s this humorousness in the way that he takes this so seriously. But on the other hand, there’s a seriousness that comes across, and a kind of respect and awe that Bruno has for Frode, which is a challenge, too. It’s the comic and the serious coexisting in the same space, and finding that right balance was a challenge.
There were parts of the book where I laughed out loud, but I was also struck by how both of these men have this profound sadness that runs throughout the book as well. That was very deeply felt despite the unorthodox structure of the narrative.
Harstad: I think that is really correct. And I think what it really is is that these are two seriously lonely people. The friendship is their desperate way to reach out to each other, because they seem to be the only ones who have this mutual respect. And again, that was something that happened almost by coincidence or by accident. The more fun I try to poke at these people, the more stupidity I try to put into the book, the more this seriousness or this sadness or this loneliness just kept fighting back.
There are a couple of literary references throughout the book, both in terms of other Norwegian crime fiction, but also discussion of critically acclaimed authors from the region, both past and present. Where do you see this book kind of fitting into that canon?
Harstad: When I was very young, like 10 to 13 or 14, I was an avid crime fiction reader. I really tried to read as much as I could and I came to this point where — it’s not that I have no respect for crime fiction. I mean, I have respect for whatever people want to write because writing is hard no matter what kind of books you write. But I came to this point where I felt that there was no longer anything in it for me. I didn’t feel like I should have said that I developed as an individual or anything by reading crime fiction. It was just a matter of finding out, you know, who did it. But obviously when trying to write a book, I had to go back to all this kind of crime fiction, both Norwegian crime fiction and the usual American suspects.
Let me answer in another way. The book as a whole, both the crime stories and also the annotations, is on some level trying to riff off Nabokov’s Pale Fire. It’s sort of Nabokov’s drunk uncle trying to write a book.
I enjoyed the periodic references that would come up in the annotations to these different obscure literary movements. What was the process like of coming up with some of those?
Harstad: That was some of the most fun things I could ever do: the Banalist movement and also these really obscure movies, an Esperanto movie in there, some Balkan music and also this actor called Cliff Eastwood, who’s not related to Clint Eastwood. It’s always great doing these things, creating these works of art that could have been, but will never be. I really love doing that, and this felt like a perfect place to throw in a few.
Within the annotations, readers will find some book covers and a movie poster, all of which involve a couple of different languages. What was the process like for creating fictional designs and fictional artwork for fictional books and movies?
Harstad: I’ve been working quite a lot with graphic design for close to 25 years. And it started when my first book was published in Norway; I was really unhappy with how it looked. And by coincidence, in the time between my first and my second book, I got a computer and got a hold of a copy of Photoshop and just started dabbling around. In Norway, it’s unheard of that the writer does his own cover, as I guess it is in the U.S.. But by some sheer luck, I was able to make them accept the design I did for my second book.
Since that time, it’s just been a silent agreement with my publisher that I don’t take a designer’s fee, but I’m allowed to do whatever I want to do. I think it’s like being a very young movie director and having a final cut. So, the process which has really developed over the years is that as I’m writing, I’m also doing graphic design work that corresponds to whatever project I’m working on. It’s another way of being able to visualize what I’m writing about and also making it a little bit more real. I find there’s a great trade-off with the visual and cerebral way of thinking.
For this project, it wasn’t so that I sat down and said, “I need a poster here.” It just happened as I went along. I had to take the odd day off to do these different visuals.
You mentioned Pale Fire before, and in the annotations, there are a couple of references to Dennis Potter’s The Singing Detective. Was that something you had been aware of when you started work on the project? Or did you end up looking for other postmodern takes on detective fiction as you further immersed yourself in the project?
Harstad: Not very consciously, because this project started more or less as — I’m hesitant to say a joke, but okay, let’s say it started as a joke. And it started also just as a way of procrastination with me, because it was in the middle of the summer and I had just had my second child. And so, if you weren’t into sitting around with the baby crying, you had to stay out in the garden. So, I was sitting outside with my iPhone and so all the crime fiction stories were written directly into the Notes app on the iPhone.
I also made it a point to myself after a couple of the first stories that I wasn’t going to allow myself to edit this. So, it’s all done in one take, which explains some of the stranger stuff in the stories. But to answer the question, due to this, I only briefly researched crime fiction. I leafed through a couple of them to more or less brush up on how the language was. All these hidden or not very hidden links to different literary things, was just a spur of the moment thing.
You began working on this as a way to change things up dramatically from your previous project. What has the impact been on the writing you’ve done since finishing The Red Handler? Have you noticed a difference?
Harstad: Only in the sense that with this book, I was able to really clean the slate and start afresh with another project. So, it did for me exactly what I wanted it to do. It became a vacation from being too anxious all the time of not writing well enough or not thinking hard and long enough about each and every sentence. It just was exactly what I needed at the time.
When the book was finished, I was very amazed that my Norwegian publisher was going to put it out. And I had no idea that it would end up being published in a number of other countries. When I started my new project, which is a novel coming out in May next year, I felt completely rid of the long book project and everything behind me. I was able to write another very, very long book instead.
Were there any challenges in translating, in the sort of translation process of getting this into English?
Smith: One question I wanted to kind of go back to a little bit ago was how the book fits into Norwegian literature. What’s really interesting to me is how, in the annotations, you get these references to authors like Dag Solstad, who came out with this actually real novel that is basically just his family history. It’s a famous and notorious novel in Norwegian literature. And so, there’s this interesting way in which Frode Brandeggen is trying to relate himself to Norwegian literature and all of these real Norwegian literary figures.
But on the other hand, there’s also this kind of internationalism to his writing because of that made-up French school of Banalism that you brought up a little while ago. It reminds me a lot of the real-life French movement of the Oulipo, in a way, where they have these rules that all the members have to abide by and you’re devising all of these weird literary games, like writing a whole novel without the letter E and so on.
Translation is itself this kind of tension between the local on the one hand and the international and the worldwide on the other. And this book, I find, is trying to straddle both of those at once in the way that Frode Brandeggen is trying to relate to his home culture in Norway on the one hand and fit in as a writer. On the other hand, his work is informed by and speaks to a sort of internationalism, which Bruno Aigner also takes up because he is the annotator of works by all these authors whose names start with B.
Johan, do you want to mention the notion of the translation of the title of the book itself, because it was actually you who came up with that. I cannot take credit for that title.
Harstad: It was difficult to find something that would fit. But again, it’s derived from being caught red-handed. And I just felt that it sounded really, really cool. In Norwegian, there’s not really a word for it, but we say, to be caught red handed is to be “tatt pÃ¥ fersken”. And the word “fersken” is also the same word we use for a peach. it just sounded really, really cool.