Johan Harstad

Under the Paving-Stones, the Beach!

Under the Paving-Stones, the Beach! is a novel about the discovery of a paving-stone shaped object which, when touched, allegedly creates the illusion of having lived an entire lifespan within seven minutes. Centered around a group of teens in late-nineties Stavanger, but containing numerous historical and geographical detours to places like The Soviet Union, Berlin, Warszawa, Akureyri, Shanghai and not least the island Tristan da Cunha in the sixties, and populated by everything from suburban youth on the hunt for the next industrial exhaust fan to warm up by in the evenings to Cold War spies with multiple sets of faltering loyalties, Zapatistas on a local level and pot wholesalers of dubious mental caliber, young people in love and amateur radio dads who are all widowers, old-school sailors and new-school sailors, Icelandic Eco-Terrorists, suicidal single moms and self-crossing clinical directors, some who are psychiatric patients and some who probably should’ve been, an adventurous meteorologist from Forus, Stavanger and an astrophysicist with an urgent need to explain himself about non-academical topics, and guest starring people like Andrej Tarkovsky and Erich Mielke, the novel explores the idea that time might never really have been on our side after all.

This is a large-scale story about waiting; for life to begin, for things to pass, waiting for the right one, waiting for death and waiting in vain. It is the novel about Ingmar, Jonatan and Peter. And Ebba.