Max, Mischa and the Tet Offensive

Johan Harstad is another Norwegian author who has, in recent years, established himself on the global publishing market. Born in 1979 and now living in Oslo, the writer debuted with two short story collections warmly received by critics, but it was his first novel that brought him real readership success: Buzz Aldrin, hvor ble det av deg i alt mylderet? (2005; Polish translation by Karolina Drozdowska: Buzz Aldrin, What Happened to You in All the Confusion?). The novel became so popular that it was soon adapted into a television miniseries.

Mattias, the narrator of the novel, was born on the same day as Buzz Aldrin, the astronaut who was the second man in history to walk on the Moon. Mattias’s life unfolds in a similar fashion—he gives up on being “the first.” Gifted with an exceptional voice and musical talent, he chooses instead a modest existence as a gardener. When a friend invites him to join his band and travel with them to the Faroe Islands, Mattias agrees, but takes a job as a sound technician rather than a musician.

The fictional biography of Mattias is a counterpoint to the culture of narcissism and success promoted by live television shows in which the most beautiful, the most enterprising, and the best at self-promotion emerge victorious. Harstad’s protagonist seeks anonymity, the margins and the periphery—represented here by the remote and isolated Faroe Islands. In the work of the Norwegian literary classic Knut Hamsun we already find similar figures of eccentrics, recluses, and social outsiders; this tradition was later continued by writers such as Tarjei Vesaas and Erlend Loe.

Harstad’s next novel, Hässelby (titled after a district of Stockholm), was published in 2007 and revolves around the fate of the hero of Gunilla Bergström’s children’s books about Alfie Atkins, which are also popular in Poland.

The book draws on the literary trend of extending the lives of well-known fictional characters or rewriting canonical stories from the perspective of secondary figures (in recent years, for example, several such reimaginings of the Swedish classic Hjalmar Söderberg have appeared). As in Harstad’s other works, references to cinema are important here: the protagonist gradually discovers that someone has been following him for the past 20 years, the plot thickens with mysterious events, and the novel turns into a pastiche of David Lynch films.

The crime pastiche Ferskenen (2018) is an advanced literary experiment in the style of Nabokov. Here, a German literary scholar invents a Norwegian author of “micro-crime” stories and comments on his—nonexistent, of course—works in a heavily footnoted text.

The most recent novel by the Norwegian author appeared in 2024. Its peculiar title, Under brosteinen, stranden! (Beneath the Cobblestones—the Beach!), was borrowed from one of the slogans of the student revolt in Paris in 1968. Once again, we are dealing with a work of more than a thousand pages. The novel opens with an academic conference held at the Hilton Hotel in Warsaw, under the banner LET’S TALK TRASH, devoted to nuclear waste from atomic power plants. During a break in the proceedings, Ingmar, a Norwegian expert on radioactive waste disposal, is approached by an American stranger. The man seems to know an astonishing number of details about his life; shortly afterward, Ingmar receives a phone call from a friend he has not seen in two decades. These odd coincidences trigger a series of memories about the group of teenagers Ingmar once belonged to.

Specialist knowledge of nuclear energy—its promises and dangers—and meticulously cited scientific facts are here interwoven with a tension-filled plot. Central to the story is a black radioactive stone, resembling a cobblestone, which, when touched, is said to reveal one’s entire life in a few minutes of retrospective vision.

Harstad describes himself as a compulsive writer, someone who began working with literature at the age of fourteen and has practically never stopped writing since. He works across many genres: he has published a science-fiction novel and a non-fiction book, Motorpsycho: Blissard, a biography of the Norwegian alternative psychedelic band Motorpsycho, full of anecdotes, digressions, and curiosities—the title referencing the group’s most important album, Blissard. His plays have also brought him considerable renown; in 2008 he was awarded the status of artist-in-residence at the Norwegian National Theatre in Oslo and is a laureate of the prestigious Henrik Ibsen Award.

Max, Mischa & Tetoffensiven (Max, Mischa and the Tet Offensive), published in Norway in 2015, brought the author his greatest international success to date.

The story unfolds in the 1980s, a decade of extraordinary economic prosperity throughout Scandinavia, particularly in oil-rich Norway. As a young teenager, Max Hansen and his friends from Stavanger secretly watch Coppola’s Apocalypse Now and pretend to take part in the Vietnam War. A sudden change then occurs in his life: his family leaves Scandinavia and emigrates to the United States.

Max loses touch with Norway, its language, and its culture, while at the same time meeting a number of people—most of them older—who introduce him to American life. Among them is Mischa, a painter whose appearance recalls Shelley Duvall from Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining (Harstad himself designed the book cover using a photograph of the American actress).

This novel, stretching over 1,200 pages and written over seven years, is not only a narrative about the fate of a Norwegian emigrant but also a sweeping account of the transformations the world has undergone in recent decades: from climate change to the cultural shock of the September 11 attacks, the gentrification of major cities, real estate speculation, and the transformations of contemporary theatrical practice.

The novel poses fundamental questions about identity and cultural belonging in a globalized world: Max’s life trajectory leads him toward the theater but also into cultural alienation—after a quarter century in the United States, there is no longer any return to the Scandinavian idyll for him.

In this way, Harstad invokes one of the great themes of Scandinavian literature: migration to the United States. It was taken up by writers who knew the emigrant’s fate from personal experience, such as Knut Hamsun, Ole Edvart Rølvaag, or Vilhelm Moberg, whose epic cycle of novels about Swedish emigrants—later adapted for film by Jan Troell—today belongs to the classics of migration literature.

Despite their thematic diversity, Harstad’s novels also share many common features. In one interview, the writer remarked that for him, the novel is like a suitcase into which one can pack anything one wishes, until the time comes to close the lid (he sometimes transfers nearly complete plays into his novels, for instance).

The most striking characteristic is their sheer length. This results from a consciously chosen literary strategy, formulated somewhat against the spirit of the times: the author wishes to restore to the reading experience such qualities as focus, patience, and slowness. At the same time, he is convinced that the era of huge, densely populated, multi-threaded novels is irreversibly passing, and that within a decade publishing houses willing to take the risk of releasing books of such size will disappear.

In his novels, the author continually refers to texts of contemporary culture: arthouse films, pop music (such as The Cardigans or Radiohead), 1960s jazz, or the paintings of Mark Rothko. At the same time, he makes extensive use of genre conventions from popular culture, such as road movies or adventure novels.

Another motif well known from Knausgård’s books appears here as well: the critique of the Scandinavian welfare state. Harstad not only describes Norway’s oil-based wealth—despite the country being one of the poorest in Europe as recently as the nineteenth century—but also the side effects of economic ascent, such as consumerism, thinly veiled by lofty yet empty progressive rhetoric.

In his writing practice, Harstad takes on the role of a researcher. Before beginning work on a new text, he delves into nonfiction related to the era he intends to write about—its culture, everyday details, and political context. He recalls in one interview that before writing a few sentences about laying asphalt, he read a massive monograph on the subject; to compose a single paragraph about a shipwreck, he studied a detailed manual for sailors entitled How to Abandon a Sinking Ship.

One more exceedingly important source of inspiration for Harstad must be mentioned: the great American postmodern novel—Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow, Don DeLillo’s Underworld, or David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest. The latter is cited by the Norwegian prose writer as one of his formative readings, books that shaped his vision of the art of the novel. Max, Mischa & the Tet Offensive resembles it not only in terms of sheer length but also in its encyclopedic abundance of themes and narrative threads.

Jan Balbierz – scholar of Scandinavian studies, writer, and translator

Cinema as the Language of Life

Max Hansen grows up in Stavanger, Norway – not exactly the provinces, since this industrial city is, by local standards, a sizeable urban center, but still one located somewhere on the margins of the Western world. At the age of thirteen, he emigrates with his family to that supposed promised land, the mythologized United States. Yet America is not, for him, a real place; it is a reality from the screen, an album of clichés, a gallery of images known from the movies that had already filled his childhood. That is why almost everything he later sees, experiences, and undergoes he filters through art, through the dialogues, gestures, and frames that had familiarized him with reality before he ever touched it. He himself will go on to become a playwright.

It seems that, years later, he knows his childhood home better through peeking at it on Google Maps than from his own memories. Perhaps this is characteristic of an entire generation – mine as well as Max’s: the place of origin becomes something as conventional as a movie set, a foundation on which identity is built. Cinema becomes a universal yet hermetic language, both archive and atlas.

Of particular importance for young Max are films about the Vietnam War – Coppola’s Apocalypse Now, Oliver Stone’s Platoon, Michael Cimino’s The Deer Hunter, and Stanley Kubrick’s Full Metal Jacket. For the teenagers in his circle, these screenings become rites of passage, initiations into adulthood, and at the same time communal, almost ritual experiences. For America, these films once served as a kind of national therapy, an attempt to grasp what had actually happened. Max, as an outsider, enters this discourse with both fascination and distance; but it is precisely through film that he learns how to think about the world.

War as Myth, War as Desire

The titular Tet Offensive is not only a striking historical reference. On the metaphorical level it encapsulates Max’s life strategy: rapid assaults followed by equally swift retreats. He will only partly come to realize this after meeting Owen, his estranged uncle, who translated youthful ideals into a series of personal disasters. For Max, war is a formative myth; for his uncle, a life-defining catastrophe.

Harstad shows, moreover, that war – this war in particular – fascinates Max on an almost erotic level: it is an extreme experience, and at the same time a safe one, because it is imagined. Cinema allows him to substitute reality with slides that merely imitate it. This ambivalence is one of the most intriguing issues raised by the author: if art has the power to heal traumas, it also has the power to fetishize them. Can authentic suffering be turned into an attractive spectacle?

Max and Mischa – Love on Celluloid

Against this cultural tangle unfolds Max’s relationship with Mischa. His bond with the older artist hovers between fervent passion and intimacy on the one hand, and a profound sense of alienation and solitude on the other. Mischa is independent, radical, socially engaged; Max is a memory-absorbed introvert, more often looking backward than forward. For him, Mischa becomes not only a projection but also the embodiment of imagined fantasies. In his eyes, she is practically a double of Shelley Duvall, the actress who entered film history with her frenzied, magnetic performance in Kubrick’s The Shining, though here she is more often evoked through her memorable role in Robert Altman’s Brewster McCloud. Duvall, with her unconventional beauty and aura of a Hollywood outsider, symbolizes what Harstad condenses into the figure of Mischa – of course, as seen through Max’s eyes. That is why the actress’s face adorns almost every edition of the novel.

Their love is doomed to lose the uneven battle against their constant travels, demanding work, and perpetual motion. Yet it remains in Max’s memory as a decisive experience, fused with the images he has preserved. Just as earlier cinema, Mischa becomes a filter through which he looks at reality, through which he interprets the world around him.

Uncle Owen

Another crucial element of Max’s story is Owen, his uncle, who as a young man left for the U.S. with dreams of a musical career, but exchanged notes for bullets. Sent to the Vietnam front, he returned broken mentally and devastated physically. His life became an obstacle course, where, battered by recurring flashbacks, he tried to cope with post-traumatic stress.

It is indirectly thanks to Owen that Max begins to realize that no life is suspended in a vacuum, that everyone is caught in the rushing current of history. For the older man, the memory of war is an unbearable burden; for Max, yet another image, another slide that structures his world – and perhaps also proof that reality wounds more than film.

The relationship between Max and Owen is decisive for the book. It is in these passages that Harstad’s writing most clearly conveys the conviction that individual experience is inextricably bound with the curse of history unfolding before our eyes; one can only be carried along by its current.

A Star Map

Harstad admits that the novel’s original title was Rothko Days. He wanted readers to immerse themselves in it as if in a painting – in its color, texture, and material. This is why the book sprawls over more than a thousand pages, filled with digressions, side stories, and references to works of painting, music, and film. The author has said that part of his soul remained in this novel and can never be reclaimed. That declaration seems to explain much.

Max, Mischa & the Tet Offensive is not a classic narrative novel but rather an experience meant to engulf the reader both sensually and intellectually. Hence the phantom presence of Duvall, hence the obsession with Coppola’s film, whose mythical, extended, fuller version becomes a kind of celluloid Holy Grail – as if culture, rather than life itself, were dictating the rhythm and direction of existence.

Generation Apocalypse

In the end, Max, Mischa & the Tet Offensive asks about the condition of an entire generation. How are we to live when our memories, experiences, and everyday lives are inseparably woven together with works of culture, when our identities are built out of quotations, images, and frames? Max lives in a world assembled from others’ scenes, yet this does not rob him of authenticity, because, Harstad seems to suggest, the key is to search within them for one’s own meaning, one’s personal interpretation. The power of the Norwegian author’s monumental novel lies in the fact that, by refusing easy answers and instead asking difficult questions, it draws us into a kind of trap: for if everything I have written above is true, then might we ourselves not be a montage, a compilation of someone else’s shots?

Bartosz Czartoryski – film critic, translator

So far, Harstad has written four novels of varied genres. He has achieved significant success as a playwright; suffice it to say that before turning thirty, he was awarded a literary position affiliated with Norway’s National Theatre. Harstad is also active in other artistic fields – he is a musician and works with computer graphics. In the case of a work like Max, Mischa & the Tet Offensive, the author’s biography becomes relevant, suggesting itself as a key to interpretation, since in terms of genre the book should be described as an immigrant novel – more precisely, an American immigrant novel, given its setting. This kind of literature is by definition usually created by people with a certain life experience – namely, immigrants or their descendants. Harstad’s novel shows that an immigrant novel does not need to be authenticated by the author’s biography in order to capture readers’ imagination and move them emotionally. One could say that Max, Mischa & the Tet Offensive demonstrates the power of literary conventions. Harstad understands their mechanisms profoundly and, relying on them and his exceptional craftsmanship, masterfully creates distinctive fictional worlds.

Harstad gave the main character and narrator of the novel certain traits of his own, such as his generational belonging, place of origin, and professional ties to theater – but the obvious similarities end there. Max Hansen, as the protagonist is called, grows up in a middle-class Norwegian family. His mother and father, political radicals in their youth, abandoned their former ideals in favor of material stability rather than striving to change the world. This same priority guided them when they decided to emigrate to the United States; Max’s father, an airline pilot, could earn significantly more there. The Hansens settled in Garden City, near New York. Max experienced painful alienation, and only his friendship with a schoolmate named Mordecai helped him adjust to the new environment. This friendship would last for many years, as Max and Mordecai were united by their love of theater and their artistic collaboration – Max would become a director, Mordecai an actor. Through Mordecai, sixteen-year-old Max met Mischa Grey, a Canadian painter of Polish descent, a woman with the striking looks of Shelley Duvall in her debut role in Robert Altman’s Brewster McCloud (1970) – her photo appears on the cover of the Polish edition. Mischa would become the love of Max’s life. Alongside the main plot, there runs a second thread focused on Max’s uncle, Owen Larsen, who had emigrated to America long before the Hansens. He served in the Vietnam War, since military service was meant to facilitate obtaining citizenship.

By dividing the narrative this way, Harstad juxtaposes two very different immigrant stories, showing how European views of America changed over the decades of the late 20th century. Owen emigrated from Norway in 1966; a pianist without formal training, in love with jazz, he wanted to fulfill in America his dream of a musical career. He believed such a chance awaited him, believed in the myth of America as the land of success. As so often happens in immigrant stories, reality turned out brutal. In many respects, the New York he arrived in had changed little since the great wave of European immigration at the turn of the 20th century. Ethnic communities formed enclaves, preserved old customs, and clung to their languages. Owen had not left Norway in order to live in a place that was merely a replica of it – but there was where he found work. Leaving this community entailed existential risks, which he accepted, motivated mainly by desperation, epitomized by his decision to enlist in the U.S. Army. Yet tellingly, Owen never wrestled with the kind of identity dilemmas that Max would face almost thirty years later. He knew he wanted to become an American. By contrast, Max, his sister, and parents experienced emigration deeply, but this change did not threaten their standard of living. They did not have to risk their dignity. Max’s father – since the emigration was his decision – was guided by pure pragmatism. For him, America was a predictable place, not a seductive dream. In a sense, Max’s identity dilemmas stemmed from the fact that he had the time – that is, he could afford – to contemplate his condition.

Since most of the plot of Max, Mischa & the Tet Offensive unfolds in New York and its surroundings, Harstad’s novel becomes a kind of time-travel through that metropolis. The journey begins two decades after World War II, in a multiethnic city still guarded by firm lines of racial and ethnic division. Those boundaries persisted for decades, but would eventually begin to blur with the migration of wealthier residents to the suburbs. Then we see New York of the 1970s and 1980s, a city descending into violence and social chaos – memorably depicted in the TV series The Deuce (2017–2019). The September 11 attacks – also recalled in Harstad’s novel – revealed the city’s heroic face. Many collapsed inwardly, but many others summoned the strength to help. And finally we reach contemporary New York, ruled by money, a city of elites and outcasts alike. Harstad’s America is also fleshed out in episodes set in other symbolic places, such as Los Angeles with its “dream factory,” or rather its illusions and mirages. When Max reunites after many years with his father, who once abandoned the family and later settled in California with a new partner, he learns that the man has been through a second divorce and now lives in a trailer near LAX, close to his workplace.

A crucial American context in Harstad’s novel is the Vietnam War – both as a national trauma and as a product of popular culture. Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now (1979) appears to Max as a generational experience and is invoked so frequently in the novel that it becomes a metaphor, a reference point for various existential situations. The book also alludes to other classic Vietnam War films: Michael Cimino’s The Deer Hunter (1978), Oliver Stone’s Platoon (1986), Stanley Kubrick’s Full Metal Jacket (1987), and Stone’s Born on the Fourth of July (1989). According to Harstad, Norwegian boys growing up in the 1980s, when they played war, pretended not to be their own resistance fighters battling Nazi occupiers, but Americans and Vietnamese. For the characters in Max, Mischa & the Tet Offensive, lines from Apocalypse Now become a code through which they comment on the events of their lives. Harstad shows that the international reception of the Vietnam War was shaped by images of enormous power – not only the famous American films, but also iconic photographs, such as the image of a South Vietnamese officer executing a Viet Cong prisoner, or the picture of the young girl running, burned by napalm. The most frequently recalled event from the Vietnam War in Harstad’s novel is the Battle of Hue in 1968, the bloodiest battle of the war, claiming some ten thousand lives. At the start of that year, as the opening of the Tet Offensive, the Viet Cong seized Hue, the third-largest city of South Vietnam. American and South Vietnamese forces needed nearly a month to retake it. As Mark Bowden writes in his account of the battle, “When it was over, America’s debate over Vietnam was no longer about how to win, but how to get out.” For Harstad’s characters, Hue becomes a synonym of personal defeat.

Harstad weaves into the narrative the story of a Vietnam veteran, and such stories still resonate strongly in American culture. Owen goes to Vietnam in 1970, convinced the war will soon end. Media reports fostered this hope. But he remains in Asia for over a year, serving in an artillery unit. All the while, he teeters on the brink of psychological collapse. The impenetrable jungle surrounding the camp overwhelms him with fear. The constant bombardments, coupled with the knowledge that shells might land on American positions, prevent him from calming his thoughts. At night, the camp is overrun by rats, released in great numbers by the Viet Cong. In vividness and intensity, Harstad’s Vietnam passages rival canonical American books on the war, most of them based on authors’ personal experiences, such as works by Tim O’Brien, Philip Caputo, Michael Herr, or Larry Heinemann. The war episodes may be the best showcase of Harstad’s mastery of literary convention.

Harstad’s more than one-thousand-page novel is a work of grand ambition, addressing a broad spectrum of themes. His digressions can stretch over many pages, sometimes sounding like mini-essays, especially when they concern theater or painting. Yet never do we feel the narrative is descending into chaos. The immigrant story provides the framework for all the other important threads, determining the book’s genre and underlining its Americanness.

Bibliography
Mark Bowden, Hue 1968: A Turning Point of the American War in Vietnam, 2017.

 Marek Paryż – American Studies scholar