Translated by Sarah Death, (Virago, £16.99)
This depiction of Anders Breivik’s July 2011 massacre draws on interviews with those caught up in it, the killer’s own accounts and reports from police and social services.
The trajectory of Breivik’s life is situated within a broad social and historical sweep and meticulously entwined with portraits of some of his 77 victims, such as Bano Rashid, whose Kurdish family had found asylum in Norway from Saddam Hussein’s Iraq. Breivik emerges as a damaged child, who psychologists warned might develop serious problems if not removed from his mother’s care. He was later rejected by his teenage peers and then by his father. As an adult he is defined by insecurity, narcissism and a lack of empathy. After failed attempts at a career in the anti-immigrant Progress Party and in business, he spent five years in front of a computer screen playing chivalric fantasy games and then reading reactionary online tracts about the Islamisation of Europe, before slaughtering the “cultural Marxists”—mostly teenagers—he held responsible for it.
Seierstad documents and dramatises the tragedy. She outlines Breivik’s psychological, sexual and political background in a fluid narrative that reads like a novel, her detached interpretation of events leaving the reader to decide on the relative weight that far-right ideology and individual psychosis played in shaping them. This is a powerful and profoundly unsettling book.
This depiction of Anders Breivik’s July 2011 massacre draws on interviews with those caught up in it, the killer’s own accounts and reports from police and social services.
The trajectory of Breivik’s life is situated within a broad social and historical sweep and meticulously entwined with portraits of some of his 77 victims, such as Bano Rashid, whose Kurdish family had found asylum in Norway from Saddam Hussein’s Iraq. Breivik emerges as a damaged child, who psychologists warned might develop serious problems if not removed from his mother’s care. He was later rejected by his teenage peers and then by his father. As an adult he is defined by insecurity, narcissism and a lack of empathy. After failed attempts at a career in the anti-immigrant Progress Party and in business, he spent five years in front of a computer screen playing chivalric fantasy games and then reading reactionary online tracts about the Islamisation of Europe, before slaughtering the “cultural Marxists”—mostly teenagers—he held responsible for it.
Seierstad documents and dramatises the tragedy. She outlines Breivik’s psychological, sexual and political background in a fluid narrative that reads like a novel, her detached interpretation of events leaving the reader to decide on the relative weight that far-right ideology and individual psychosis played in shaping them. This is a powerful and profoundly unsettling book.
