Tomas Espedal – “Lust”: Expüxen, go away, travel

“I was born on a Sunday, on Sunday, November twelve, nineteen hundred and sixty, in the Haukeland hospital in Bergen.” So it is exactly the same. The information is right. Is “Lust” Tomas Espedal’s autobiography? The generic name is Roman.

With this balance, the Norwegian writer Tomas Espedal experiments to write down the borders of the novel and autobiography. What is true? What is invented? What is the invention of the truth more clearly? What truth appears as unlikely as an invention? “Say it what it is!”, He swore before his first novel, it says in “Lust”. And: “He couldn’t see before he taught himself to write.”

Espedal is considered a master of the autobiographical novel, he is a sensitive language virtuoso and a brother in the spirit of his friend Karl Ove Knausgård. The publisher Matthes & Seitz Espedal’s books have been translated into German since 2011; They are something like continuation novels. His “autobiographical narrative project” was created on ten volumes, in 2021 the last volume appeared in German: “Love”, a novel about dying. There was Espedal 60.

Would ESPEDAL be silent from then on and would disappear? He seemed to have come to an end. But a writer continues. So here, in his eighth book (in German translation), the connection of “autobiography and educational novel to a journey through forty years of his own letter”. This is how the publisher wrote it on the spine.

“You have a high degree of memory and past, and that’s how it has to be,” writes Espedal in the first third, “you create the past you need to explain who you have become and why.” To possibly prove yourself, despite all the wrong way, crashes, defeats. “He didn’t want that,” it says. What is meant by the home and happiness alone, family life plus weekend house and car: all the things you have to work regulated in a society that is exhausted in yourself – so not! What then? Freedom, the search for a free life. Heavy enough and endangers, crash and failure. But in no case do the lives of most. So büxen, go away, travel. On the run from the dominant, the attacking mother, on the run from and out of Bergen, his hometown, this “bastion of bourgeoisie”.

He orders his existence in key experiences. Music as an awakening; The city of Venice, the cinema; Marcel Proust, twelve volumes; military service; Arthur Rimbaud, later Baudelaire; France, Paris, hiking and sleeping in nature; Alcohol that opens it to creativity: “Writing and drinking, of course that worked”. And then Baudelaire, which was “softer as Rimbaud”, but also “strict, rhythmic, lyrical, a poetic prose”, that was what he was striving for.

“We die several times in the course of a life,” you can read here. Already “at the moment of birth itself, death occurs in our lives,” it says right from the start, and the reader thinks that Imre Kertész greets. The impermanence of writings, “put everything on this one thing and do it well”. Espedal describes this struggle in detail and conjures up a mystical, ghostly encounter with the dancer Rudolf Nurejew, who appears from another, “mythological world”. In Venice, calculated; There is Espedal 19. He feels encouraged to stay true to his way, even though he has nothing to show yet. And he finds his way, after many detours, crashes, errors. “He wanted to write,” he triumphs. “Lust for living differently than was expected by him, he wanted to be free.”

Espedal’s language (again in sensitive transmission from Hinrich Schmidt-Henkel’s Norwegian) is bewitching. The sound pulls along, is fabulous, the figure exemplary. “What is life,” he asks, “How should we live it?” Trust art, creativity, dream of your own dreams. Tomas Espedal gives courage to overcome his own doubts and not to overestimate failure.

Tomas Espedal: Lust. Fruits of a work. Reading fruits. A. d. Norw. v. Hinrich Schmidt-Henkel. Matthes & Seitz, 320 pages, born, 26 €.