Furthermore, I Consider That Carthage Must Be Destroyed

No one ought to come and talk to me about burnout. I mean, is there anything enjoyable about being disabled? To lose your livelihood and be sent on a temporary work placement? The pills brushed away the worst of it, but the aggression gave way to indifference, turned into emptiness. I felt completely numb. I knew what it was like to lie in the cold, hard ground and be nothing. I knew what it being dead felt like.

After Krister Larsen slips a few discs, he’s forced to give up his work as an electrician and is instead sent on a temporary work placement at a community college to teach Norwegian to immigrants. Work felt like being in prison. As if I was merely waiting for my life to begin anew. Krister is married to Marianne, but instead of empathizing with Krister’s situation, her whole attention is fixed on building a pergola in their garden. The problem is that she isn’t intelligent enough to understand how stupid she is. Their eleven-year-old son Andreas is having trouble in school. No wonder he resorts to violence, when violence is the language he was trained in. And then there’s Yvonne. What is there to be said about Yvonne? Krister is intensely attracted to her. That’s the gist of it. Why couldn’t Marianne have been more like Yvonne? Taken care of me, like Yvonne did?

Through scattered fragments, fleeting glimpses and inner ramblings, the contours of a man gradually emerge. What begins as the steady thrum of unexplained anger and resentment, evolves into a portrayal of a life caught between addiction and the slow collapse of a marriage, of a man who suffers the cruel descent into narcissism, while believing the entire world to be against him.

Kyrre Andreassen’s uncompromising novel Furthermore, I Consider That Carthage Must Be Destroyed is a rendition of a man whose righteousness and sense of self begins to fracture. Funny and brutal all at once, with moments of love and tenderness, Andreassen’s writing moves with remarkable ease between the mundane and menacing, with effortless transitions into the darker and irrational sides of human nature.