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

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. 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. 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.


Genre: General Fiction

"There's so much music, exhuberance, bewilderment, and sweet melancholy in Johan Harstad's Buzz Aldrin. It's roch 'n' roll, then heartbreaking, then rock 'n' roll again. I devoured every line." - Paolo Giordano