You just have to surrender. Although several times along the way I thought that, no, this is going to be too much. For 970 pages and just over 1.2 kilos, the book demands a lot from the reader, both physically and mentally. “Under the cobblestones, the beach!” is an enormous achievement by a man with a solid storytelling talent and a flair for both horror films, spy thrillers and cowboy classics. This novel contains all this and more. Big thoughts How can we know that what we experience is real? Is it possible to live multiple lives? What if we’re just a dream in someone else’s mind? Such questions are posed by Johan Harstad, at the same time that he also thematizes the concept of time. And I see it: If you want to write a novel about time first, you have to spend time. Sweep out scenes, venture into detours. It must be tempting to jump freely in both chronology and geography. And link many small lives together – just as a nuclear reactor needs tiny components that interact with each other – to create a new and flaming energy. The digressions become a necessity. The content gives the form. MAN AND TECHNOLOGY: Through several of his books, Johan Harstad has taken an interest in the borderland between fiction and reality. Photo: Håkon Mosvold Larsen / NTB Youthful rebellion The very finest thing in this gigantic work is the depictions of growing up from the Forus and Stavanger of the 1990s, a heartfelt and yet rambling tale of friendship, love and youthful restlessness waiting for something wonderful to happen. Here Harstad writes himself into the landscape of a Saabye Christensen or a Tore Renberg, writers who both remember what it was like to be young and intensely alive. The ups and downs of nuclear power We are in Rogaland, Norway, at the end of the 1990s. There the three friends Ingmar, Jonatan and Peter wander around, eventually Ebba also joins in, and somewhat traditionally, in an otherwise non-traditional novel, all three are bewitched by her. Her father works on the ill-fated Kubikel reactor, a reactor which, with a little more research, should be able to make oil drilling redundant. But is the reactor a threat to the environment? The friends come across scary radiation in a different way. They find a hidden cobblestone-like object in a nearby vacated house. The discovery has serious consequences, and it will also turn out that it has caused trouble before, on the remote island of Tristan de Cunha about 30 years earlier. On the present day, in 2018, when the young people have grown up and separated to all winds, both American and Russian intelligence are on the trail of the mysterious artifact, which with its properties can upset the global balance. Or is it just imagination? Any association with the Ring, which Tolkien’s drabants were looking for, is of course intentional. Activism and psychiatry But Johan Harstad does not lose himself in the magic. He writes about the Zapatistas’ liberation struggle in Mexico, about container shipping on the world’s oceans, about activist conservationists in Iceland and the storage of nuclear waste in Finland. He writes about sad work in gray offices, about loneliness that makes crying radio amateurs talk together across the globe, long after more modern technological tools could do the trick. There is, on the whole, such a wealth of knowledge in the novel, which is both real and fictional, that a poor reader both rejoices and needs a breather. The dream of a better future The person gallery is extensive, and Harstad mostly manages to give all the figures their personal and memorable character traits. The title itself derives from a parole from the youth uprising in Paris in 1968. The idealistic demonstrators found sand under the cobblestones which they broke up from the streets to barricade themselves. Thousands of tiny grains revealed themselves. The line to the atoms Harstad stuffs this novel with is obvious. It is also the rebellion, the desire for change, the hope for the wonderful. Yes, I’m excited. Touched. And not least impressed. But also tired. AWARDED: In 2019, Johan Harstad walked away with the Aschehoug prize, which was of course awarded at Aschehoug’s garden party. Photo: Berit Roald / NTB Autumn’s most ambitious novel Could the book be as good if it were 750 pages? When the novel goes so thoroughly into various figures, including intelligence agents with more identities than we can keep track of, do we also have to enter their dreams? At the same time, it becomes a bit like asking: Would the world be better without the blue road? The thistle, the mosquito, the giraffe? I’m arguing against myself, I can tell, because in his overwhelming, overwrought and convincing way, the driven narrator makes it all come together. Too long or not, “Under the cobblestones, the beach!” is an ambitious work; despairingly compact at times, then opening up in the most beautiful interpersonal depictions. The novel is furious in its fight against decay, mournful in its description of everything that is being lost, touchingly nostalgic, fascinatingly fabled in its exploration of reality. And the future, what do we know about it? In any case, one thing is certain: No one who has read this book will come away from it unscathed. news reviews Photo: Gyldendal Title: “Under the cobble stone, the beach!” Author: Johan Harstad Genre: Novel Published: 23 August 2024 Number of pages: 970 Publisher: Gyldendal Published 22.08.2024, at 12.40 p.m
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“Under the cobblestones, the beach!” by Johan Harstad – news Culture and entertainment
