Rating: 4 stars
Nowhere Books Bingo: A book by a local author
Ivor and his three friends Marco, Arjan and Jonas are a tight-knit gang, their own found family. According to Ivor, school used to be easy, until he and his friends lost interest and started making money and names for themselves on the streets. Ignoring the admonition from parents, teachers, social workers and others, they live hard and fast, not really caring who they have to hurt as long as they have each other. Their way of life isn't one that leads to happy endings, however, and it's only a matter of time before tragedy strikes.
This semi-autobiographical novel, written by a 19-year-old on his phone, has been a huge success since its publication in 2023. It's won several awards, and been nominated for several more. It's a fast and relatively easy read, despite being written in a vernacular used mainly by the youths in the bigger cities, with a non-standard sentence syntax and vocabulary from a number of languages and cultures (there's a dictionary of sorts on the end papers of the book, which came in handy more than once, as I'm not as experienced with all the slang terms used here). The author writes in exactly the way a lot of people his age speak, and there is very little punctution or capitalisation in any of his many brief chapters.
The author has in interviews confessed that by the time he was 15, he's seen several of his friends overdose, and for a while, he was honestly unsure that he would survive to see his 17th birthday, considering his drug-fueled and violent existence. In Oslo, violent crime among teenagers is on the rise, and the author says he was motivated to write his book to give more nuance to the discussion about youth gangs and crime. Basing his protagonist and other characters on himself, friends and other people in the environment in which he grew up, Lovrenski wanted to show the tightness of the bonds between these boys and the affection and loyalty between them, even as they are disappointing their family members or trying to escape foster care.
Lovrenski has said in interviews that hopes that some of the young readers who pick up his book might recognise themselves or friends, and see that there is a way out if you work for it, and that teachers, social workers and others who work with teens might get more perspective on what it's like. Now, having turned 20, the only way he was able to get clean and stay away from his former lifestyle is by entirely cutting contact with his previous environment. He had no idea that the story he started by writing short anecdotes to himself on his phone would be picked up by a publisher in less than 24 hours, after a bidding war from several interested publishing houses, and that the book would become a huge publishing success.
I read this in June because my co-workers and I were wondering about assigning it as a text to our 10th graders next year. Having finished it, my conclusion is that while the book is very engaging, it doesn't exactly help our pupils (many of whom struggle with reading longer texts or expressing themselves in writing) improve their own writing and it also very much glorifies drug use, violence and youth crime. While it's obvious by the end of the book that the author lived a very hard life and lost friends to overdoses and suicide, it's also not the sort of thing we necessarily need to hightlight, just in case some of the more impressionable souls decide to take inspiration from the earlier sections. It's an interesting book, though, and while I don't think we'll use the whole novel as assigned reading, it's a great example of a narrative written in a particular sociolect, and can be used to compare and contrast several other works written in the same style in the last few years.
Judging a book by its cover: I don't know why the publishers chose this cover design, it seems messy and a bit haphazard to me.
Crossposted on Cannonball Read
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