Johan Harstad’s The Red Handler presents itself as the collected and annotated crime novels featuring a private detective called The Red Handler by a fictional Norwegian author, Frode Brandeggen. Except these are experimental micro novels that are mere pages long - some “chapters” are literally a sentence and there are maybe four or five chapters to a “novel”. So that’s how you can fit 15 “novels” into less than 150 pages (especially if you space them out to a sentence/chapter per page)!
Which also explains why there need to be annotations for a collection of crime novels - they’re so strangely truncated that they’d be even more pointless without something to accompany them. Enter the extensive endnotes by a fictional professional annotator called Bruno Aigner who provides biographical details of Brandeggen, as well as his own meandering, irrelevant thoughts on his own life, and the most superfluous annotations you’ve ever read, like “A shocking outcome. But also ingenious.” and the note following the sentence “As the rain beat down upon his hat, he spotted a mysterious figure sneak into one of the train station’s back doors.” that reads “He is wearing a hat.”
Harstad’s book is quite imaginative and initially I enjoyed the novelty of how it was presented (this is the only book I’ve ever used two bookmarks for - the annotations are at the back and you need to keep flipping back and forth throughout). And there are definitely funny moments in how bizarre the stories are written. The Red Handler sees a crime, stops it, the end, onto the next - there’s no finesse, the dialogue is absurdly simple (the criminals immediately confess to save time), and whole scenes of potential drama are dismissed with sentences like “A short chase ensued. Then it was over.”
I guess Harstad is taking the piss out of overwritten, formulaic crime novels, as well as pretentious academic-minded collections that provide far more detail on the stories/author than you’d ever need. And maybe even avant-garde literary works too, in how irrelevant and silly they often are - there’s a reason why nobody unironically publishes micro novels.
But very quickly it becomes tiresome to keep flipping back and forth between the front and back of the book, especially when the annotator completely loses it and starts including notes at the end of practically every sentence, notes that are stupidly pointless, and adds to the mounting tedium of the book.
Because, as is often the case with avant-garbage, it’s less about the content and more about the form. The Red Handler stories are so simplistic and repetitive, they’re not entertaining or memorable in the slightest. The endnotes are similarly dull and become unfunny quickly. The annotator’s endless digressions turn into their own serpentine bores, with footnotes tacked onto footnotes that add up to nothing more than form for the sake of it. Occasionally learning a bit about the fictional author’s life was mildly interesting but neither were these addendums that remarkable to feel like he deserved an entire book about him and his terrible literary experiment.
The idea of the book is a sound one - not so much the micro novel format but the fictional crime author, his work, and an annotator/biographer commenting on them - but Harstad needed to back it up with more intriguing content than the same one-note slop repeated over and over. The concept of a micro novel with far longer endnotes works in small doses but it becomes very boring even in a relatively short 250ish page book. I can’t recommend checking out this failed Wes Anderson in book form-wannabe The Red Handler.
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