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. On the way to the Islands, he collapses; after waking up disoriented in the street, he is admitted to an open psychiatric institution.

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.

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

Harstad napisał jak dotąd cztery zróżnicowane gatunkowo powieści. Znaczące sukcesy odnosi jako dramaturg; dość powiedzieć, że jako niespełna trzydziestolatek otrzymał stanowisko literackie afiliowane przy norweskim Teatrze Narodowym. Harstad działa też w innych dziedzinach sztuki – jest muzykiem i zajmuje się grafiką komputerową. W przypadku takiego utworu jak Max, Mischa i ofensywa Tet życiorys autora ma istotne znaczenie, nasuwając się jako klucz do interpretacji tekstu, w sensie gatunkowym bowiem książkę tę należałoby opisać jako powieść imigrancką, a mówiąc ściśle – amerykańską powieść imigrancką, zważywszy na miejsce akcji. Tego rodzaju literatura tworzona jest niejako z definicji przez osoby z określonym bagażem doświadczeń, tzn. imigrantów bądź ich potomków. Utwór Harstada pokazuje, że powieść imigrancka nie potrzebuje uwiarygodnienia w biografii autora czy autorki, żeby przemówić do wyobraźni czytelników i emocjonalnie ich poruszyć. Można powiedzieć, że Max, Mischa i ofensywa Tet to dowód siły konwencji literackich. Harstad dogłębnie rozumie ich mechanizmy i opierając się na nich – wykorzystując nieprzeciętny pisarski warsztat – po mistrzowsku kreuje swoiste światy przedstawione.

Harstad przypisał głównemu bohaterowi i narratorowi powieści pewne cechy własne, takie jak przynależność pokoleniowa, miejsce pochodzenia i zawodowe związki z teatrem, ale na tym oczywiste podobieństwa się kończą. Max Hansen, bo tak bohater się nazywa, wychowuje się w mieszczańskiej norweskiej rodzinie – jego matka i ojciec, w młodości polityczni radykałowie, puścili w niepamięć dawne idee, zamiast dążenia do zmiany świata wybierając materialną stabilizację. Ten sam priorytet przyświeca im, gdy podejmują decyzję o emigracji do Stanów Zjednoczonych; ojciec Maxa, pilot samolotów pasażerskich, będzie mógł tam znacznie więcej zarobić. Hansenowie osiedlają się w Garden City niedaleko Nowego Jorku. Max dotkliwie przeżywa wyobcowanie i dopiero przyjaźń ze szkolnym kolegą o imieniu Mordecai pomoże mu dostosować się do nowych warunków. Ta przyjaźń przetrwa długie lata, bowiem Maxa i Mordecaia połączy miłość do teatru i wynikające z niej wspólne projekty artystyczne – pierwszy zostanie reżyserem, a drugi aktorem. Za pośrednictwem Mordecaia szesnastoletni Max poznaje starszą o siedem lat Mischę Grey, kanadyjską malarkę o polskich korzeniach, kobietę o zjawiskowej urodzie Shelley Duvall w jej debiutanckiej roli w filmie Roberta Altmana Brewster McCloud (1970) – jej zdjęcie widnieje na okładce polskiego wydania. Mischa okaże się miłością życia Maxa. Równolegle do głównego wątku fabuły rozwija się wątek drugi, zogniskowany na postaci wuja bohatera, Owena Larsena, który wyemigrował do Ameryki o wiele wcześniej niż Hansenowie. Wziął on udział w wojnie w Wietnamie, służba wojskowa miała mu bowiem ułatwić uzyskanie obywatelstwa.

Dzieląc fabułę, Harstad zderza ze sobą dwie istotnie się różniące narracje imigranckie, przy tym pokazuje, jak na przestrzeni kilku dekad drugiej połowy XX wieku zmieniało się europejskie spojrzenie na Amerykę. Owen emigruje z Norwegii w 1966 roku; jako pianista bez formalnego wykształcenia, zakochany w jazzie, chce spełnić w Ameryce marzenie o karierze muzycznej. Wierzy, że taka szansa będzie mu dana, wierzy w mit Ameryki jako kraju ludzi sukcesu. Jak to się często zdarza w historiach imigrantów, rzeczywistość okazuje się dlań brutalna. Nowy Jork, do którego przyjeżdża, pod pewnymi względami niewiele się zmienił, odkąd na przełomie XIX i XX wieku zaczął się masowy napływ imigrantów europejskich. Społeczności narodowe tworzą w mieście swoje enklawy, pielęgnują stare zwyczaje, trzymają się ojczystego języka. Owen nie po to wyjechał z Norwegii, żeby zamieszkać w miejscu, które jest jej imitacją – ale tutaj ma pracę. Wyjście poza tę wspólnotę niesie ze sobą egzystencjalne ryzyko i Owen takowe podejmuje, motywowany głównie przez desperację, której miarą jest jego decyzja o zaciągnięciu się do armii amerykańskiej. Co jednak znamienne, Owen nigdy nie przeżywa takich dylematów tożsamościowych, jakich Max doświadcza blisko trzydzieści lat po