posted 04-22-2011 06:14 AM              

Buzz Aldrin, What Happened to You in All the Confusion? opens with the line: "The person you love is 72.8% water, and it hasn't rained for weeks." From there, Brage Award-winning author and playwright Johan Harstad's debut — previously published to great success in eleven countries and now making its first English-language appearance — tells the story of Mattias, a thirtysomething gardener living in Norway, whose idol is Buzz Aldrin, second man on the moon: the man who was willing to stand in Neil Armstrong's shadow in order to work, diligently and humbly, for the success of the Apollo 11 mission.

Following a series of personal and professional disasters, Mattias finds himself lying on a rain-soaked road in the desolate, treeless Faroe Islands, population only a few thousand, a wad of bills in his pocket and no memory of how he had come to be there — when a truck approaches him, driven by a troubled, fantastic man with an offer that will shortly change Mattias's life.

And so, surrounded by a vivid and memorable cast of characters — aspiring pop musicians, Caribbean-obsessed psychologists, death-haunted photographers, girls who dream of anonymous men falling in love with them on bus trips, and even Buzz Aldrin himself — begins Buzz Aldrin, What Happened To You In All The Confusion?, the epic story of Mattias's pop-saturated odyssey through the world of unconventional psychiatry, souvenir sheep-making, the Cardigans, and space: the space between himself and other people, a journey maybe as remote and personally dangerous as the trip to the moon itself.