Rebel Without a Cause

BY CATHRINE SANDNES

Abo Rasul
Macht und Rebel
Cappelen. NO

The anally fixated works of Abo Rasul positively stink. People are either cramming cucumbers up their backsides, taking ten-year-old girls from behind or making porn movies. Most of the action produces some pretty acrid odours, ghastly mélanges of human effluvia and a level of amorality that borders on parody.
Abo Rasul is a pseudonym – obviously for Matias Faldbakken, son of the successful author Knut. He studies visual arts in Paris and is in all manner of ways part of the white, middle class establishment on which he alternately pours scorn or ironises.

Awful writing
When Faldbakken’s first novel The Cocka Hola Company was released in 2001, he was invited to appear on Fredrik Skavlan’s prime-time chat show – Skavlan at the time being the country’s most popular television talk show host. He declined. The reviews were appallingly good – the book had stunned the Norwegian critical community despite (or possibly because of) the fact that it doesn’t cohere, the writing is awful, the narrative is one dimensional and whatever thinking went into it is undeveloped. They chanted ecstatically about this injection of ”new blood”, an author who wrote completely amorally and irresponsibly about his mates and their porn-film creating revolution against a well-meaning, leftish middle class. Hence the title and the ”bawdy” pseudonym which plays words like cock, hole and arsehole.
Most reviewers imposed greater self-control on reading the free-standing sequel Macht und Rebel, and it has to be said that some of us felt it to be more coherent than its predecessor, more thought through and better planned. Another thing is that Faldbakken this time deals with a relatively limited area of society, and that may have caused some caution among reviewers. Because we all recognise a member of the cultured classes, and if you read fiction there’s a good chance you are probably one yourself. Far fewer, however, know Adbusters or other anti-globalisation actionists – who are the target of this round of not always apt, accurate or well-articulated reviews.

Subversive
The leading characters in Macht und Rebel are named – you get it – Macht and Rebel. While the title alludes to Nacht und Nebel, the dust jacket recalls Mein Kampf. The pages are adorned with a variety of adbusts, i.e. ironic takes on well-known adverts. This is, in other words, an artistic project in which text, illustration, presentation, pseudonym and, for that matter, authorial image make up an integrated concept.
Macht is a well-heeled wonder kid with a job at an information bureau selling subversive trends to the big companies. Rebel is searching for a revolutionary cause while he alternately nurtures his petulant, nauseous and aggressive view of the world in general and his own disgusting normality in particular: ”What fucking difference does it make in Scandinavia, where everything works and everybody – every student, loser, junkie, worker, where every state person and every … MUSICIAN – all think alike, are just as subversive and just as creative, just as on the edge, which is to say, just as FUCKING BORING,” he asks, concluding that ”whatever I do won’t make any FUCKING DIFFERENCE AT ALL”.

Swastika
And because it makes no difference whatever he does, he leaves his job at an anti-corporative business – which trades in copies of well-known brands – and decides to become a Nazi for, in opposition to Mercedes, NIKE and Puma, the swastika is the only symbol not to have been tampered with, which is unsellable, and has a pure meaning. The chances of it turning into a brand product liked by parents, not to speak of his braindead, conventional contemporaries with whom he would never dream of comparing himself, are minute. Rebel finds the exclusive brand which sets him apart from the herd. The comedy is complete when it is adopted without a second thought by and tattooed onto one of Rebel’s Pakistani immigrant mates.
Following the publication of Macht und Rebel the socialist daily Klassekampen held a debate called ‘Is radicalism possible? ’. ‘Yes’, retorted the radicals, predictably, as people in the marketing business just as predictably rallied round Faldbakken – whether they had read the book or not.

Dystopias
It was then that Faldbakken decided to take a breather from his self-imposed media exile and agreed to a public interview at a café called Blue. On the night the place was overflowing with people. The week after Klassekampen arranged a new debate on the same question at a place called Mono. It burst at the seams too. And in contrast to normal literary séances, most of the audience had been born in the eighties. ‘The most important novel to be written for years’, claimed the author’s publisher when the debate died down. But one of the points of being a publisher is to say that type of thing. As we speak, more and more copies of Abo Rasul’s dystopias, or ”Scandinavian misanthropies” as he calls them, are being bought.
Because however ‘hopeless’ the book may be by ordinary literary standards, and although it manages without fail to avoid anything remotely reminiscent of responsibility – political, moral aesthetic – it is a book unlike any other in our cosy, intimate, Norwegian contemporary literary scene. Faldbakken’s decision to ditch plots about human relationships replacing them with society and zeitgeist clearly engages a type of curiosity and, even, commitment.

Fresh
Faldbakken paints a caricatured picture of society, and the creatures he populates it with are made of papier-mâché. Within the framework of this universe, he creates a sort of neo-political anti-literature – lacking the naïve optimism and sense of belonging to some sort of commune familiar to his parents’ generation or the linguistically centred and eloquent soundings into one’s private world churned out by other authors of his own age. By taking this nihilistic route he is obviously making it easy for himself, giving the finger to market forces and to radicalism and taking the mickey out of the Nazi as much as the lefty activist.
But it has to be said that, peculiarly enough, it is quite refreshing to read such a completely rotten and poorly written book. The Scandinavian misanthropist is not one for polite words or elegant transitions, and Matias Faldbakken’s forte is probably that he writes like a savage – while thinking like a white, middle-class kid in the middle of a delayed revolt against society, free choice, and himself. He is the closest we get to a rebel in contemporary Norwegian literature. The issue is whether he has a case to make.

Cathrine Sandnes is a literary critic

Translated by Chris Saunders