Interview with the writer and artist Matias Faldbakken

Five years ago, the artist and writer Matias Faldbakken was interviewed in a podcast by Kvartal’s Jörgen Huitfeldt about why art and literature nowadays rarely challenge taboos. Huitfeldt wanted to talk about Lars Vilks and showed pictures of Dan Park, the street artist who was sentenced to prison for incitement against a ethnic group.

You could almost hear Faldbakken squirming in the studio chair before he answered:

“I understand why you show me this, but I feel quite far from these artists, I operate in a different way.”

He was wide this time current with the novel “The Hills”, which takes place in a long-standing fictitious Oslo restaurant, where the regulars begin to behave increasingly unpredictably. The novel was read by many as a culturally critical allegory of a Europe in disintegration. But that was not why he was asked questions about Vilks and Park in Kvartalspodden. The main reason was the trilogy of novels, populated by Nazis, pedophiles, porn visionaries and all kinds of perpetrators of violence, which made Matias Faldbakken a writer with enfant terrible-aura in the early 2000s.

The trilogy is called “Scandinavian Misanthropy” and was published under the pseudonym Abo Rasul. Matias Faldbakken wanted to avoid the books being read based on the name; father Knut Faldbakken has been a central figure on the Norwegian literary scene since the mid-70s. He doesn’t quite remember why he chose an Arabic-sounding pseudonym.

– My first novels were based on an idea of ​​using negativity as a literary or artistic driving force, he says in a video call from his home in Oslo.

Your novels have often been perceived as dark and I have heard you say that yours default mode is that everything goes to hell. Where does the darkness come from?

– People say a lot of strange things in interviews. Today I would probably express myself a little more gently: I am a happy pessimist. For me, writing and making art is a way to make pessimism productive.

Since the author’s debut in 2001 he has become one of Norway’s most internationally recognized visual artists and has published five more novels. The latest is called “Stackare” and has recently been published in Swedish in a translation by Staffan Söderblom. Matias Faldbakken calls it, with an ambiguous smile, his attempt to write a love story.

The novel begins fabulously and almost archaically. In a built in a valley in the Norwegian hinterland, a boy finds a creature in the forest. It stinks, gets on all fours and has “kneecaps wider than both shins and thighs”. The boy, who is a foster child and some sort of farmhand, brings the creature—a girl, it turns out—home. On the farm, he takes care of her, bathes her, teaches her to eat, to speak and about tenderness. This is how the adventurous wild child myth turns into a romance.

– When my children were small, I read many adventure books to them and then became attached to the adventure approach that quickly establishes a transcending reality while everything is completely concrete. Of course, things that are difficult to understand happen in my novels, but they are just as much about the tangible, about the earth and the body. I am simply interested in the material world and how it lays a foundation for the spiritual world.

How would you describe the girl and boy in “Poor”?

– As a kind of ground zero people. The girl is first completely at zero, at the beginning of everything, the boy a small step up. They become each other’s first aid.

Eventually expanding the story in both time and space. The girl is growing at a furious pace. Time seems to pass faster in her body than in others. And soon the two protagonists end up – for scandalous reasons that shall not be revealed here – in the capital of the south. There, the girl unsullied by convention becomes an attraction in the urban intellectual cultural circles. It changes everything between them.

– I wanted to portray an encounter with the big city for someone who has never been to a big city. A bit like when people came to Paris from the countryside in the 19th century or from some cave to New York in the 20th century and were overwhelmed by all the impressions. But this is about Oslo, it’s not a deeply impressive city, but I thought it was fun to apply such a look to this non-metropolis.

Matias Faldbakken himself grew up outside Hamar, not so far from Lillehammer. He then studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Bergen and later in Frankfurt. That he started writing at all was a coincidence, he says. A complete misstep.

While he did pictures and sculptures at the academy, the ideas became progressively more verbal than visual. The drawing pad became a notebook with fragmentary sentences and sentences. He realized quite quickly that a narrative was needed to tie them together for anyone to read.

– When I started writing, I saw it as visual art that took on a literary form. But I had no ambitions to be a writer and it wasn’t about my father.

But have you sought his confirmation?

– In terms of literature? No, not at all. I would say that I wrote in spite of, not because of, his writing. Nowadays, it may happen that we talk about literature, but it was never: Look here father, now I have written a book, what do you think of it? Quite the contrary, I preferred that he not read my first, quite aggressive, books.

What do you see as the main difference between how the worlds of art and literature work?

– They have different kinds of crises. Literature is in crisis because people no longer read books. The art world’s crises, on the other hand, often run parallel to those of the financial industry. Within certain layers of art there is a lot of money and great opportunities, but it all depends on how the one percent’s stocks and finances go.

Recently he was invited and the artist Ida Ekblad – they are also a couple privately – into the Kunsthaus Zürich to select and interact with the museum’s collections in an exhibition. But in recent years he has generally traveled less with art and written more.

The tone and motifs have changed since the debut of the trilogy. A melancholy, a tenderness and a caring theme have found their way into the novels. It wasn’t something he aspired to or planned. Nor does he have any political agenda with the literature, even though many have read one. For Matias Faldbakken, writing is more about trusting one’s own inventiveness in the moment, than about making decisions and following a predetermined dramaturgy or ideology.

– If I knew exactly where I was going when I sat down to write, I would have just been bored. At the same time, I see that all my books are in some way about outsiders, about elements outside the normal. You could possibly say that I am doing a kind of gradation from the normal, the everyday, and all the way to the abnormal.

What are you not Interested in writing about?

– I have never been interested in writing a very realistic literature that recreates the Scandinavian everyday life we ​​are stuck in. In a way, you could probably say that writing for me is a kind of escapism.

Read more lyrics by Sandra Stiskalo and more about booksfor example:

That’s how the potato country Norway became the world’s best in literature