Carl Frode Tiller - Selected Title Author

What is your book about?

It is about Trond, a middle-aged man who finds himself in some kind of crisis. He is divorced, has lost his job, drinks too much and doesn’t get along with the people around him, and the book starts with how he neither recognises himself nor understands how and why things went the way they did. This is something he needs to find out, so he starts talking about himself. About growing up in a working-class home with very little money in the small coastal town of Prærien, with a father who is an atheist communist and a mother who grew up in a strict Christian environment. About education and social mobility and eventually about an upper middle-class life with a wife and two children and a nice, interesting job at the Directorate of Immigration in Trondheim, and about how the middle-class values and norms he acquires conflict with the values and norms of the working-class culture he comes from. It is about how he is torn between where he came from and what he is now a part of, and the affect this has on his relationship with the people close to him, in both the working and middle classes. This all simultaneously becomes a story about the key developments that have occurred in Norway over the last fifty years, about the change in social status the entire country has undertaken, about market liberalism and rising individualism and, not least, about the crisis of social democracy. I am not sure how well Trond sees it himself, I think he perhaps only senses it; how the changes he has gone through and the crisis he now finds himself in, are closely linked to these forces on a macro level.

What inspired you to write this book?

I never know what to write about when I start a novel, I don’t have an idea or make any plan. As a rule, I just start playing and improvising with form and language, and if I find something that lights a spark in me, I follow it up, and then see what kind of content the form points me towards. In other words, the content of my books is determined by form and language as a rule. This time, however, it was a bit different. I just started describing places I’ve lived – mostly for fun. Rooms. Houses. Surroundings. One of these rooms was in the basement of my grandparent’s house, where my parents and I lived for the first years of my life. My descriptions of it were as realistic and true as I could make them, and when I read what I had written – not just about the physical spaces, but about the people in them, and things that happened – it became immediately clear that this was going to be a book about class. About class consciousness. Social mobility.

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