Max, Mischa and the Tet Offensive

Max Hansen is a theatre director on tour across the US. He can’t sleep. It’s possible that he has turned into an American. He hasn’t been home for over 20 years.

If it was up to him he would never have left the place he was born, a suburb to Stavanger on the west coast of Norway, where kids made as much noise as they wanted while their fathers were away, working on the oil rigs in the North Sea, and where a heavy silence descended on the houses when they returned. But no one gets what they want.

In the summer of 1990, just before Max turns 13, he reluctantly migrates to USA with his family, as his father has a new job at American Airlines waiting for him. On Long Island, NY, Max is forced to find new streets and make them his own while his family slowly falls apart around him. It is in these new surroundings he befriends Mordecai and through him, Mischa, a Canadian girl seven years older than them, already an up-and-coming visual artist who spends her summers on Fire Island.

And then there’s Ove, Max’s uncle, now named Owen and living in the Apthorp building on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, a man who in the late sixties left Oslo and Norway behind to become a jazz musician in America, but who blew it, ended up serving in Vietnam as the war was coming to an end and who none in his family has heard a word from since 1970. 

Max, Mischa and the Tet Offensive is a sprawling novel about art, homesickness and trying to create a place to call home; about the applicability of Vietnamese guerilla warfare in everyday life, about those who have been to war and those who protested against it; about generic library music, hyperrealist paintings of washing machines and girls who look like Shelley Duvall, complicated productions of open-ended plays and films; about growing up with communist parents or growing at all; about the sun’s glare out on Fire Island and a sought-after workprint copy of Coppola’s Apocalypse Now. But more than anything this is a novel about the big question anyone who has ever left home sooner or later has to ask himself: How long can you be gone before it is too late to go home?

Foreign Sales:
Denmark, Hr. Ferdinand
Germany, Rowohlt Verlag
The Netherlands, Uitgeverij Podium
Spain, Tres Hermanas
France, Editions du Seuil
Croatia, Oceanmore
Italy, Sellerio
Poland, Wydawnicza
Serbia, Boka

German praise for the novel

‘It's entertaining and smart, compassionate and cheeky, sharp and rousing – simply a great novel.’
Deutschlandrundfunk Kultur

“The novel has a fearsome draw, like a tidal wave receding. The narrator pushes back with all his powers of recollection so as not to lose his footing. With Proustian precision he clings to objects, to pieces of music, to films, to friends, to art. This is a book about homelessness. About someone wanting to clutch everything tight: time, childhood, safety, the past.“
Der Spiegel

‘Harstad's novel moves powerfully and effortlessly between Norway and America and redefines the relationship of home, belonging and identity. Max, Mischa & the Tet-offensive is ambitiously constructed and spectacular in style.’
Fatin Abbas, author of The Interventionists

‘[A] new In Search of a Lost Time, a double Buddenbrooks for the very last generation, who was a child in the pre-digital age and who wrote letters to their parents from the holiday camp and played their favorite films on clunky VHS-tapes.’ Die Zeit

‘Johan Harstad's Max, Mischa and the Tet Offensive is […] an attempt to combine a coming-of-age drama and an artist’s novel with stories of emigration and love. Harstad’s prose overflows with flair, cameos and details, which are never mere ends in themselves, but part of a larger whole […].’ Süddeutsche Zeitung

‘With his sumptuous novel, Johan Harstad conducts a grand experiment. A virtuoso, the Norwegian author joins the dots between the Vietnam war, friendship, art, and migration to the USA into a credible story about life.’ taz

‘[…] like a natural phenomenon, almost a tsunami […] As entertaining as it is astute, and as amusing as it is melancholic. He takes on so much and still manages not to overexert himself. Have we ever read a book that deals with so much, has such high aims and works with so many references to art, theatre, literature and film, all without failing?’ Berliner Zeitung

Norwegian praise for the novel

“Open your eyes wide! This is a novel which aims high, overflowing with the joy of storytelling, sharp reflections and a deep knowledge of the human being (...) Brutally clever!
VG (6 out of 6 stars)

“A gigantic novel about war, love, flight and art which takes your breath away (…) Harstad brings to life the most complex themes with a literary ease, orality and originality which make this a hypnotical read.”
Dagbladet (6 out of 6 stars)

“A novel can do so many interesting things to you. It can induce laughter and tears, reflection and doubt, forgetting and remembering, understanding and empathy, impatience and irritation. Harstad’s novel does all of this. I have only one thing to say: Respect!”
Aftenposten

“Outstanding (…) It is an incredible achievement, and almost impossible to describe. You would have to experience it yourself – which you can if you read this novel.”
Dagsavisen

“Harstad's masterpiece (...) A truly great novel.”
Adresseavisen

“Brilliant colossus.”
Stavanger Aftenblad

“Listen to Harstad’s magnificent song.”
Vårt land

“A literary achievement of a rare kind, enforcing Harstad’s position as one of the leading Norwegian writers of his generation.”
Morgenbladet

Dutch praise for the novel

Chosen as "best Book of the Month of all seasons" by The Book Panel on DWDD

“The literary event of the year.”
Het Niuwsblad (5 out of 5 stars)

“One of the most interesting writers of our  time.”
Standaard der Letteren (5 out of 5 stars)

“The talk of the town.”
Jeroen Vullings, De Nieuwsshow

“An engrossing novel that makes you work for it and leaves you exhausted, but impressed.”
De Volkskrant

“A monumental novel.”
Trouw

“Rarely have I read a book that got under my skin like this.”
Wim Opbrouck

“A literary tome by Johan Harstad that you simply have to read.”
Bart Moeyaert

“For this novel book printing was invented.”
Walter Jansen,boekhandel Jansen & de Feijter

“An enormous, sprawling story about homesickness, art and the question of what home means.”
Jan Magazine

Danish praise for the novel

“This year’s Great American Novel is written by a Norwegian. Johan Harstad takes on the best of the best in his behemoth work on art, love and war. (…) The novel contains all the elements that characterize a classic, and then some, for the author and playwright Johan Harstad is a rarely generous person. The novel stretches over a mere 1,100 pages and a half a century, and it's not a page or a paragraph too much. (…) Remember the name Johan Harstad. He is the next big name in Scandinavian literature.”
Jyllands-posten (6 out of 6 stars)

“Max, Mischa & The Tet Offensive is not a single page too long. (...) Johan Harstad has an admirable ability to convey social and cultural inspirations that over the years form Max's view of the world and itself. (…) Harstad, whose love obviously does not confine himself to literature alone, also lets Max recount all the (fictional) theatrical performances and works of art that both himself and Mischa produce over the years, and this literary cultivation of art's many forms of expression has rarely been done better.”
Weekendavisen

"(…) when I feel confident that I will also remember the novel in a special way, it's not just because I've spent so many hours in its company these recent days – it's also because it's deeply breathtaking. (…) Such a comprehensive book cannot be given justice in this little review; Therefore, let me conclude by  saying that it deserves all the readers it can get. Max, Mischa & Tet Offensive is simply among the most wonderful I have read for a long time."
Information

“Johan Harstad creates magic with the novel’s epic possibilities. (…) There are many types of novels, and then there’s - I'm tempted to say - Norwegian Johan Harstad’s 1,066 pages long Max, Mischa & The Tet Offensive. (…) Goddamn impressive.”
Politiken (5 out of 5 stars)

"The ultimate Norwegian novel about the United States and the longing to find home. The translation of Max, Mischa & The Tet Offensive is a real event. (...) absolutely amazing prose. The novel (...) has bids for all conceivable readers: The politically interested , the US-interested, the Norwegian-interested, the art-theory-interested, the coming-of-age-novel-interested, the love-interested. In short: To anyone with an interest in superb art that transcends time and place and in the most peculiar way is about the reader himself."
Kristeligt Dagblad (6 out of 6 stars)