First Three Pages
Becca and I spent yesterday in Munich—one of those long, unhurried summer days without a particular plan. We took the U-Bahn out to her new school first, walked around the building, looked the place over. Nobody asked us to leave. Then back into the city: lunch at Pizza Hut, a detour through the Gravis store to stare at the new MacBooks, and a stop at Starbucks where I ordered something involving raspberry tea and ice that turned out to be aggressively sweet. I’d wanted lemon and mango. They were out.
Saturn after that, moving through the notebook section with some seriousness because Becca is thinking about getting a laptop, then drifting toward the CDs and DVDs the way you always do. By the time we stepped back outside, everything had changed. Within a few minutes the sky over Munich had gone from clear dark blue to an angry, pressing grey. An unnatural wind was cutting down the shopping street. The first drops arrived, and we ducked into Hugendubel to wait it out—where I found, sitting on a shelf, what turned out to be the best possible reason to be caught in a bookshop: Macht und Rebel by Norwegian newcomer Matias Faldbakken.
On the surface the setup sounds almost manageable: two men moving through a disintegrating society defined by the relentless fight over youth, symbols, logos, bodies, sex, and the logic of multinational corporations. One is a driven, power-obsessed management consultant. The other, named Rebel, is a cynical, everything-hating wreck who reserves particular contempt for himself. Together they’re supposedly in search of some form of individual freedom in the twenty-first century, which eventually leads to a showdown involving two teenage girls and extended passages from Mein Kampf. I’m not there yet.
The German edition came out in two versions—one black cover, one white, both deliberately punk—but the original Norwegian release used a Fraktur typeface that reads closer to Third Reich typography than anything published recently has the nerve to. That choice is the point. Everything about Faldbakken seems to be a dare. My honest recommendation: pick it up, read the first three pages, and if you aren’t thoroughly disgusted by what you find there, you’ll probably finish the whole thing.
We made it home relatively dry. At Munich Hauptbahnhof the storm had fully arrived—nothing but black visible through the windows, thunder moving through the building, lightning tearing across the tracks above. Standing there with Becca, waiting for the train, I noticed that a station lit from outside by lightning looks exactly like a city taking fire. Then the train came, and we left.