Jo Nesbø: ‘Tom Sawyer was my first murder mystery’
My favourite book growing upAdventures of Huckleberry Finn and Tom Sawyer. My father grew up in New York; I guess that’s why there were a lot of American books in our house. These two by Mark Twain were food for the imagination for a kid like me. The Huck book was my first road novel, Tom Sawyer my first murder mystery.
The book that changed me as a teenagerThe Thief ’s Journal, Jean Genet’s classic novel about life and exploitation as a gay man living on the margins in 1930s Europe, changed my view on what literature can and should deal with. At that age, I found it tough reading because the mental landscape of the main character was repellent to me. Not his sexual orientation, but because he found some kind of pleasure in being treated badly. I couldn’t grasp that. And that was probably what drew me to the novel.
The book that made me want to be a writer Both On the Road by Jack Kerouac and Charles Bukowski’s Ham on Rye were important. I do think writing is a result of reading, like making music is a result of listening to music. That it’s mainly a social reflex, like stories being told around a dinner table; somebody has contributed a story, now it’s your turn.
The book I could never read againI was a big fan of Ernest Hemingway. Recently I started rereading (which I very seldom do) a novel of his, and realised it felt dated. I don’t know if it’s because Hemingway, like Raymond Chandler, has influenced so many writers that they now can come across as almost comic copies. When I mentioned my disappointment, my 25-years-younger editor said, with a world-weary sigh: “But, you know, Hemingway is a young man’s writer.”
The book I discovered later in lifeJoseph Roth’s The Radetzky March. I was recently going through the books I’ve inherited from my parents. It follows three generations of a family, with the breakdown of the Austro-Hungarian
monarchy as a backdrop, and it’s a gem of a novel. It has this sense of time and place that I know is impossible to construct – it has to already be there within the writer. It’s sad, it’s epic and it has a tragic gravity to it that brings a lump to my throat: the fact that you can’t go back, that the past – not the future – is the promised garden.
The author I came back to Well,
Henrik Ibsen was mandatory reading when you went to school in Norway, and at that young age he felt old and boring. It was only later, when I was living a life where I could relate, that I started reading him. I went on to read all of his plays, every one of them, and realised what a great entertainer he is.
The book I am currently readingThe Righteous Mind by Jonathan Haidt. Haidt has a background in social anthropology and psychology and it’s a convincing argument on how morality has evolved and on how it divides us in politics and social behaviour, enlightening when it comes to understanding why some Americans vote Republican in spite of being decent, intelligent human beings. Like David Hume said, reason is the slave of emotions. We use our intellect to find confirmation that what we feel and want to be true is actually the truth. Confirmation bias may carry us from our childhood to our grave, without ever feeling we were proved wrong. That goes for “them” and for me and you, Guardian readers.
• The Night House by Jo Nesbø will be published by Harvill Secker on 28 September. To support the Guardian and Observer, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.