July 22 terrorism in Norway

What is it about?

Memories of World War II reverberate through many reactions to the 2011 terrorist attack, not only as explicit references but also implicitly as patterns of silent imagination. This chapter analyses examples from Norwegian post-July 22nd fiction—Karl Ove Knausgaard and Kjartan Fløgstad—and discuss their different approaches to the complexity of public memory in politically charged situations. My readings show, first, that the question of nationalism and its implied Norwegian master narrative intensifies in moments of crisis, and second, that the authors engage with the current terrorist threat as a political ideology with links to the past. I argue that these are essential concerns in both authors’ literary works on the July 22 terrorism, although with different accentuation.

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