Maud and Aud. A Novel About Traffic
Bakke, Gunstein: Maud og Aud. Ein roman om trafikk
Nominated for the Brage Prize 2011
Nominated for the P2 Listeners' Prize 2011
Nominated for the Sørlandet Prize of Literature 2012
Aud and Maud sit in the backseat when the manager loses it, when the family is removed from their everyday lives and the road, and one among them, Ruth Bore and everything that was her, comes to an end from one second to the next. The rock made no difference, it sat where rocks sit and stopped the fast flesh, the furious flesh, stopped the movement of the daring flesh, and of what had been Ruth, basically only her face was intact, a quivering disk on top of a moving layer of slivers and splinters, mouth half open, as if she meant to present herself to something too unknown and steep. Too black to be. Too hard.
Nearly three decades later, the journey of some peaceful drivers is threatened by a black Mercedes. 18 year old Lovall, still too young to not have a knowledge of all things, decides to find out who, or what, is behind the wheel in the accident-ridden car.
In this heartfelt, essayistic, yet gothic novel, Gunstein Bakke breaks new ground in our understanding of both what traffic really is and does to us, and of what a novel can be. He shows us how we are hit by both traffic and love, and by language itself.
Praise for Maud and Aud. A Novel about Traffic:
“Maud and Aud. A Novel about Traffic is an original and unsual novel about the influence of car traffic on our lives. The car’s significance is analysed into great detail, starting with the way one family’s life is changed forever in the course of a single second … The novel contains precise essayistic parts about oil, about organ donation, about traffic surveillance, about the little movements that are part of the greater ones. Engineers construct a road, doctors construct a body, these are the consequences of car traffic. The many themes challenge the reader to think.”
- From the press release of the Brage Prize nomination committee
“one of the strangest Norwegian novels this year. But also one of the very best … its level of ambition and dizzying prose make most other Norwegian fiction look rather embarrassing … Maud and Aud has now been nominated for the Brage Prize as the best work of fiction this year. The nomination is a great victory – for the Brage Prize.”
(Dagbladet)
“Already the first pages contain paragraphs that should be quoted in full, peppered as they are by pregnant and estranging images … Maud and Aud is grounded in the real, and stil it is as if we are visiting a slightly different world. Bakke succeeds in the most difficult art of all: Reveal the strangeness of the things we thought we knew better than anything else … The perhaps greatest triumph of this peculiar novel is how the text manages to weave together completely down to earth conversation themes like gas, Mercedes models and road standard, with reflections and speculations of the greatest magnitude”
(Morgenbladet)
“Maud and Aud should be compulsory reading for anybody who plans on getting behind the wheel … Maud and Aud has its eerie elements, but it is no thriller. On the contrary, the book can be read as a literary attempt to understand traffic … The prose is carefully crafted, the book contains so many expressive images and melodically rich paragraphs that I have difficulties deciding which to point to. Bakke writes incredibly beautifully about the painful and grotesque.”
(Dagsavisen)
“an impure, rich text about road infrastructure, traffic accidents and physical desire, often with a poetic and sensual undertone, with a suspense novel-ish dramatic structure, related to a mysterious black Mercedes, and at the same time full of essayistic asides, twisted reasoning, bold leaps of thought and foreign words … you’re never in doubt about the ambitious, even unique, character of the writer’s prose and project”
(Stavanger Aftenblad)
“A well written and original story of the role and place of traffic in our society. After reading Gunstein Bakke’s new novel, you’re left with the feeling that way too few books are written about traffic … The writer stretches the novel form; in addition to the story of the family, there are essayistic parts … Maud and Aud is a different novel, it is playful and varied, it’s trains of thought are exciting to follow … there are striking images and accurate observations … an ambitious novel”
(Adresseavisen)
First published: 2011, Forlaget Oktober
Gunstein Bakke: Biography and bibliography
