Manny’s Reviews > Mykle: Et diktet liv > Status Update

I den sobre samtalebok En annen Mykle berettet Jane fra sitt eget liv. Her, mot slutten, ga hun også svaret på et spørsmål man måtte kjenne historien for å kunne stille:

- Hender det at du tenker at den som gir noe, også skal få noe tilbake?

- Nei, hvorfor det? Hvis man gir noe, er det fordi man har lyst.

It was often said later that Mykle became quiet after Largo. This is not really true; it would be accurate to say that people stopped listening to him.

1968. Mykle has just written and produced the puppet play Ali Baba og de førti røverne, the last thing he'll do which anyone is going to see before his death 27 years later. It ends thus:

(Til publikum): Dere kan få lov å klappe! Klapp masse! Åh, det er intet som et publikum som klapper masse! Hva var jeg uten dere! Og hva var dere...? Ha ha!

(Teppe)

"Well-off European writer (novelist and film-writer) who intends to live in Japan, wants young Japanese girl (15-22 years). She must be small, very slim (waistline 42-52 cm), graceful, good-looking, with warmth and kindness. Must have some high-school or college education, and be intelligent, economical and energetic."

- Ad placed by Mykle in Japanese newspaper, 1963, shortly after his third divorce.

"Her prøver å hvile Agnar Mykle
Skapt til å hane. Det blev mest å kjykle
Han prøvde å vidne. De fant ham å hykle
Han kom til en vei. Men han kunne ei sykle.
...
Enn virrer han i urnen, Agnar Mykle.
Legg inn till ham helhetens nykle."

- from the obituary he wrote for himself before an unsuccessful/hypothetical suicide attempt.

In Mirakelstigen, Mykle goes all the way. It's no longer a mostly-autobiographical novel about "Ask" or "a young Norwegian", it's explicitly about Agnar Mykle, the world's most interesting person. He paints a picture of himself as the greatest living thinker, explaining that while Jesus Christ was a psychopathic madman, he, Mykle, is "the genius our time requires".

[free translation]

In 1957, the Norwegian criminal courts have a list of four key criteria used when determining whether a book is pornographic. One of them is "det kvinnelige begjær" - i.e. that women are portrayed as wanting or enjoying sex.

15 years earlier, Mykle was working for the Nazis. Now he's on trial for obscenity, and they've just called Arnulf Øverland, one of his literary heroes, as an expert witness. Øverland gives an impassioned speech where he compares Mykle with Giordano Bruno, Socrates and Jesus Christ. Mykle breaks down and starts crying - why, I'm not entirely sure.

You really and truly couldn't make this up.

Sangen om den røde rubin is not a novel. It is a memoir with a few amusing descriptions in the middle of a mass of paper, to be honest well hidden at the bottom. But taken as a whole it is a very dull book, since one can only write a good autobiography if one has experienced something worth telling people about. And Agnar Mykle has not done that.

- From Jens Bjørneboe's review of the book [my translation]

Mykle is now 38, and according to his carefully updated journal has managed to seduce over a hundred different women. He's just fallen in love with a beautiful 19-year-old Danish girl. He writes a letter to his wife explaining that he can no longer live with her, because the thought of all the men she's slept with before they met is driving him insane. There are a dozen of them.

Oh, and he's discovered religion.