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RED HANDLER HOT ON THE TRAIL
Chapter 1
The streets soaked in rain. One of the city's wrongdoers rushed past like a leaf blowing in the wind.1 In the old Opel with Haugesund City plates sat the private detective Red Handler. He took a sip off of a hipflask bearing the inscription To my dear husband.2 For a short second he pictured his ex-wife’s face before the liquor washed the painful memory into the sewers of oblivion.3 He turned on the car stereo. From of the speakers flowed music from Glenn Gould's recording of The Goldberg Variations.4 The late recording of them. The one he did in the early eighties.
Red Handler closed his eyes and let the eminent piano sound play with his ears.
1 When Frode Brandeggen showed up unannounced at my office in Dresden one afternoon in 2013 with what turned out to be the manuscripts to the Red Handler books, my first thought, in all its prosaic terseness, was as follows: This is not particularly good. My subsequent thought, I would imagine, was a corruption of the first, and went something like this: This is really, really not good. Dutifully, because I am nothing if not dutiful, I thumbed through the heap of papers while he waited impatiently by the window, as I wondered why he’d come all the way here to meet me, of all people, and how he’d managed to find me. He told me he’d already had one novel published, after which he’d worked as a garbageman and library attendant while attempting a return to writing with something he called “a new form.” Eventually, I asked him to step out for a walk and come back toward the end of the day. Then I began reading. As I mentioned, out of a sense of duty more than anything. I’m not an editor, I’ve never been tasked with deciding what and what not to publish, my mandate has always been confined to illuminating what has already been accepted, what others have deemed important, canonical, consequential. No one has ever asked me: What do you think about this? My sense of duty was therefore challenged by the humility I felt before this author, who told me he knew my work as an annotator from a long line of editions that had gained classic status here in Germany, and appreciated what he termed “my ability to read clearly.” So that’s what I did, in the hours he spent wandering Dresden. I read, I read again, and eventually, I was transformed. Since then, night has fallen, and everything has taken on significance. As afternoon gave way to evening, what stood out to me, above all, was Brandeggen’s rage, his literary obstinance that has kept me returning to these texts, again and again, and the uncompromising tone that that manifests itself in spite of what seems, at first glance, to be the reductive language of crime, the comic strip sense of narrativity. It has also—now that I, supposedly because Brandeggen specifically requested it in his posthumous papers, have agreed to write endnotes to this first edition of his crime novels—shown me why I must treat Brandeggen’s project with the utmost seriousness, even if I thereby become his Sancho Panza. And it has been liberating, enormously liberating for my work on this book, now that I, after so long, dare to step out of my accustomed shadows and myself dictate the relevance of these endnotes to the text, striking my own course, entering exactly what I deem necessary. Let me also add that the conversation between me and Brandeggen that evening was the start of a conversation that would last three years. I don’t believe he had many others to talk to than myself. But talk we did, by telephone, by letter, in my visits to him in Stavanger or, more often, in my welcoming him to Dresden, where he made do with the tiny guest room I fit out in my apartment. And to think I’d
never had any guests, before him. If I may say so, I don’t believe anyone knew Frode Brandeggen in the last days quite like I did. I say this, not to lay claim to any role in his success, should these books move readers as much as they have moved me. I say this, rather, because it foreshadows this man’s terrible lonesomeness. The anger I find in these books is real, as is the despair that precipitates his dramatic swerve away from his avant-garde roots. May be that that anger can only be grasped within the context of the distance between his first book and the Red Handler. But the anger, nonetheless, is not the whole picture, because Brandeggen also cares all too much about his protagonist. His absorption in the Red Handler only goes to show a genuine concern, a real sympathy for this character, in such a way that the author’s emotional stake becomes palpable and full of significance. And thus, the texts never manage to hide that they are, at bottom, about Brandeggen himself, about a man who obviously is deeply troubled, and who, more than opposing crime literature an sich or the book industry’s thirst for profit, is desperately trying to draw up a world with some semblance of meaning and predictability, with clear structures and sincerity.
2 When Frode Brandeggen chose to accept the fate of his 2,322-page debut novel, Conglomeratic Breath (Konglomeratisk pust),⁂ thenceforth giving up the avant-garde in favor of chiseled-down, commercial crime fiction, he still held out hope for a future that held room for a more expansive, probing literature. As early as the first book of the Red Handler series, Brandeggen wrote a separate novel that served both as a warm-up to the Red Handler universe and a novel that he hoped would hold up as a work in its own right one day. From what I have been able to glean, he never mentioned this work to anyone. The unpublished novel, All of These Loves (Alle disse kjærlighetene, 433 pages in
manuscript) takes up the marriage with Gerd and their life together in Haugesund, where the Red Handler—who here seems to have a proper first and last name, though both are crossed out throughout the entire manuscript—works part time as an electric meter reader. The novel is a passionate account of an intense love and an often exemplary marriage that slowly, but surely becomes counterproductive, to put it mildly, culminating in a magnificent scene in which the Red Handler persona is born and the protagonist leaves Haugesund for good. There are intimations towards the end of the manuscript that the wife leaves the Red Handler for his future nemesis, the Cheap Trick. There is no evidence Brandeggen ever had a serious relationship himself.
⁂ From the back cover of Conglomeratic Breath: “Imper Akselbladkvist is turning his house upside down in search of something he has lost. But is it really his house? And has he really lost anything? And if so, then what? Himself? Or everyone else? Distended and distracted by existential angst, he ambushes the component parts of his life (is it really his life?) through an intense, ruthless, and often heartrendingly intricate exploration of the potential Heidegger-plagiarist level of the self, represented by the distance between two threads of an almost fully disintegrated bedspread that his grandmother (if she is even his grandmother—and for that matter, how do we know she was really all that grand?) bequeathed him. Through more than two thousand pages—free from even the slightest scintilla of what Imper Akselbladkvist calls abominable deformities like punctuation and paragraph, chapters and other readerly aids—the author delves further and further into the bedspread, into the threads, into the yearning for his own constitutive fibers, and ultimately, his own text. That is—if we can even call it a text? And is it really a novel? And if it is, how can we know that the novel is his?”
3 Curiosity also led me to read Brandeggen’s debut, Conglomeratic Breath, prior to working on the footnotes for this edition of the Red Handler novels. Or, I should say, I tried. The publisher, Gyldendal, released his first book all the way back in 1992, but when I asked around, no one could tell me anything about it. There were no reviews, no record of any readings or participation in book festivals. The editor in chief of Gyldendal, Kari Marstein, took me down to the archives, and sure enough, we found a well-preserved copy of the book, along with information about Tord Gusthjem, Brandeggen’s editor. A quick check among different papers revealed that Gusthjem was hired in the late summer of 1990 and that the only book he worked on through to publication, before leaving the job more than two years later, was none other than Conglomeratic Breath. I called him one day to ask him what working with Brandeggen was like, but as soon as I mentioned the title of the book, I was met with silence on the other end, before he said, “I don’t want to talk about it. I broke my back on that book, okay? I’m no longer in publishing.” It was an uncommonly brief conversation. Brief, on the other hand, is the last word you’d use to describe the novel. At a ridiculous 2,322 pages, Conglomeratic Breath has the distinction of being, without question, the longest single-volume novel ever released by Gyldendal Norsk Forlag. The archives showed that the number of copies sold could be counted on one hand, and apart from the 25 free copies given to the author, the one in the archives, and the 32 distributed to reviewers and booksellers, the entire printing of 1,600 books was destroyed. This is not hard to understand. The book is, in short, absolutely unreadable. Normally, I can appreciate books that push back against the reader, the ones that demand real effort, as long as they’re well written. Conglomeratic Breath would seem to fit into that category; in some places, it exhibits an exceptional linguistic perceptiveness, and Brandeggen’s ability to navigate between myriads of dissimilar pitches and registers is very likely unparalleled in Norwegian literature. Nevertheless, the novel is, for me, perfectly unreadable. Impenetrable, in a way that frustration isn’t even the right word. Next to this novel, Gaddis’s The Recognitions and Joyce’s Finnegans Wake (both of which Brandeggen read several times) look reader-friendly by comparison. It begins straightforwardly enough: the protagonist, with the fashionable, alienating name of Imper Akselbladkvist, arrives at what he calls his house. He stands on the front steps, fishes for his keys, and enters once he finds them. This takes 150 pages. From there, it’s full-on disintegration, the disorientation just as monumental as it is absolute. There are no paragraphs, no chapters, not even so much as a comma or period; at any given time, the identity of the speaker, when and where we are, what is happening and why, is anyone’s guess. For instance, Brandeggen devotes large parts of the book to exploring what he calls “the potential Heidegger-plagiarist level of the self,” a notion every bit as perplexing as it sounds, which is made no more comprehensible by the fact that the starting point for these investigations is an old bedspread given to the protagonist by his grandmother. That is, two threads inside the bedspread are the starting point, and the distance between them opens up entirely new areas and a fresh round of investigations that themselves necessitate their own exploration for Akselbladkvist. As the text zooms further and further in, it consciously and expressly assumes the structure of the Mandelbrot set, a fractal whose edge shows an infinite number of satellites, i.e. small copies of the original Mandelbrot set. To put it another way, soon enough, the reader is so deep into the details of the details’ details that not even the slightest glimmer of textual daylight remains. But then, somewhere around page 700, the text suddenly arrives at a light in the forest, a clearing. The reader’s relief is enormous, almost indescribable, as Brandeggen gives us an unpretentious, affecting account of life on a street in Stavanger in the mid-70s. ⁂ This section becomes a small novel in itself, of quite a conventional sort. A novel in which love and terror are always living under the same roof, but the former wins out in the end. Thematically and linguistically, it recalls a number of more conventional (and more successful) coming-of-age novels in the modern Scandinavian tradition, like Torbjörn Flygt’s Underdog, Beate Grimsrud’s Tiptoeing
Past an Axe, Tore Renberg’s The Orheim Company, or Lars Saabye Christensen’s Beatles, even though only the last of these had come out in time to have influenced Brandeggen. It is not hard to imagine his editor pleading with him in vain to publish these 300 pages and scrap everything else. Nor is it hard to understand why the editor had had enough after this book. On page 1,009 the new story abruptly ends and once again the forest becomes impassable. More than ever. The text’s stitchwork becomes tighter and tighter and more and more intricate, as Brandeggen sets a new standard for textual resistance and arouses an almost physical reluctance toward reading any further. As I stretch myself to my furthest abilities to drag my way through the unreadable, it becomes clear to me that “the novel” inside the novel resembles nothing so much as a nightmare, with all its rays of light and hope, and that its only purpose is to underscore the impossibility of arriving and remaining in such a place in real life. For reality, Brandeggen seems to be suggesting, is this other where we remain inexorably stuck and from which we can never escape, where nothing is certain, and where every utterance is an opening into a chasm of doubt and new questions, which themselves open up even more doubt and even more questions that lead us smack into the Mandelbrot set once more. I gave up on page 1,700, more than 600 pages away from the finish line, and never have I been more relieved to put down a novel.
⁂ Astraveien in Tjensvoll. A twisting street with both detached houses and low-rise apartments.
4 The only musical reference made in the Red Handler books (with one exception) is to Glnn Gould’s two recordings of The Goldberg Variations. This was possibly a conscious step from Brandeggen's side to emphasize the problem duration and length vs. quality, further complicated by the fact that Gould's recording from 1955 has a playing time of 38 minutes, while the recording from 1981 plays for more than over 51 minutes. In other words an opposite movement to the one Brandeggen conducted with his Red Handler project.
