‘To make sentences like prime numbers, sentences that cannot be divided, unique sentences, that is what I’m doing now. For the point of writing,’ he says, ‘is to make unique sentences.’

Schizothemia is written in an attempt to understand the author Thure Erik Lund, and thereby also understand the art of the novel. For almost forty years, Hans Petter Blad has studied his best friend, and quietly defended him against both real and imagined attacks on his works. The studies are an attempt to approach one of the most unfathomable figures of Norwegian literature, something that can only be achieved by placing him in a fictional text, since Lund, according to Blad, is the incarnation of writing itself.

Schizothemia is a novel about a living author, written in the belief that by drawing a portrait of a rare intellectual, it would be possible to understand one’s own vulnerability and place in what Lund calls ‘teksstrømmen’ – the stream of text. That is, a word that cannot be translated anywhere other than in the literary novel, but a word that can relate to the world as a whole, as well as everything the world is not.