The Magdalena Fjord

With razor sharp wit, Kjartan Fløgstad reveals how language covers up reality. This is brilliant fiction writing based on historical material ... a boundary-breaking style, revealing and subversive prose, and a clear-eyed critical method which again is put on display with THE MAGDALENA FJORD, and which quite simply turns out to be a new high point in Fløgstad's writing.

Fløgstad in fine shape ... Actual history and fiction are seamlessly woven together in a rich and varied plot

Fiction and truth in perfect union ... Through wild and humorous prose, Kjartan Fløgstad reveals the ties between international politics and the European intellectual elite ... Using a sort of critical strategy of exposure that plays with and transgresses the norms of realism, the novel reveals connections and ties we normally do not think about. The text offers resistance and demands slow reading. But my, oh my - there is a lot to be found here.

Kjartan Fløgstad is still occasionally being named as a Norwegian candidate for the Nobel prize for literature. His candidacy will by no means be weakened by THE MAGDALENA FJORD ... There is a rare power to THE MAGDALENA FJORD as a story ... equals the best works of Fløgstad's career.

They are all complex, ambiguous stories, messy cupboards and cornucopias, but if one should dare to compare them, there are connections between the books. The first one was about the survival of Nazism below the surface after WW2, the second one was about how today's nonsense and entertainment society is moving towards the totalitarian. In THE MAGDALENA FJORD, we meet Spanish fascism, German occupation of Norway and international capital, represented by the shipping industry. Fløgstad doesn't pretend that it's surprising to find dirty secrets under the polished surface. The books are instead about how this came to be, and what it entails.