Loki is full of life, a utopian and a self-declared idealist. He’s had it with Norway and all its mediocracy, not to mention Europe itself. He travels to Bangkok, convinced that it’s in in Southeast Asia that people will start using new technology to take the next step in our evolution, to completely transgress our old limitations. He wanders the streets of Bangkok looking for a hotel he can’t seem to find, pushed forward into increasingly absurd situations.
Torgersen’s novel is intense, fast-paced and absurdly funny, written in direct, no-nonsense prose. It is a story about a world where the future can’t seem to come fast enough, and about a man guided by his own whims and unstoppable enthusiasm.
«Futurism is back! With his latest novel, Bård Torgersen succeeds in provoking reflection around tecnological development … To read Bård Torgersen’s latest novel involves feeling your own stress level … I start thinking and acting like Loki while I read, the prose pulls me in and makes my pulse rise. And I like it … The echo of Marinetti’s futurist manifesto can be heard throughout this novel, in everything Loki does and thinks … if Torgersen is trying to describe a reflective person confronting the modern world, he has in my opinion failed. Loki has a limited inner life and the development in his character is close to zero. But I do suspect that character development is not the point about this novel. Loki should rather be seen as a symbol, or a symptom, of a futurist world view … Torgersen shows us an aspect of the spirit and challenge of our age in this little novel. The thought that we are on the verge of a development we don’t understand the significance of ourselves … the novel succeeds in provoking reflection around a technological development that is often seen as new and frightening, and […] it manages to say something about how the human mind can be changed by living in a world we ourselves don’t understand the mechanisms behind. It is quite elegant how Torgersen manages this without becoming moralistic or normative, but by instead pushing Loki, a one-dimensional, strange figure, before him, all the way to the precipice”
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