Geir Angell Øygarden Norway
Geir Angell Øygarden was born in 1968 and lives in Stockholm. In 2000 he finished his doctoral thesis on boxing at the University of Uppsala (The Aesthetics of the Broken Nose, Solum Forlag: 2001). In 2003 he went to Bagdad where he stayed during the invasion of Iraq for three highly intense months which he spent the next eight eight years trying to capture in writing.
Bagdad Indigo
Pelikanen. September 2011
In early February 2003 peace activists from all over the world travelled to Bagdad to prevent the American invasion of Iraq. They were going to live at the bombing targets, and they called themselves human shields. Among them was the Norwegian sociologist Geir Angell Øygarden. What he didn’t tell them was that he wasn’t there to stop a war but to describe one from the inside.
Bagdad Indigo is the book about his journey into the dark heart of war. Out of all the interviews done with civilians, soldiers, journalists and peaceworkers during the rain of bombs, comes a chorus of war, as beautiful as it is frightening. Bagdad Indigo gives a unique representation of the nature of war, why it is waged and what is it that makes us so drawn to it.
Rights sold: Sweden: Leopard Förlag
Readers’ reactions: “It took Geir Angell Øygarden seven years to write his highly original testament from one of the world’s frontlines. He came to Bagdad as a peace guard when the Americans launched their invasion of Iraq in 2003, but it wasn’t political motivations that lead him to risk his life. Rather, it was sociological curiosity. He wanted to explore life when it becomes intense and extreme, not as a guardian of peace but as an examiner of war and of human drama when it is at its most naked and exposed. A remarkable and courageous book by a writer who both literally and figuratively dares to write with his life on the line. Without a trace of any of today’s catchphrases and easy clichés, brimful of human lives and hard-earned, often controversial insights from the borderland where human beings are forced to redefine themselves, Geir Angell Øygarden gives the word “eye witness” a whole new meaning. Reading Bagdad Indigo is like watching Sisyphos finally wrestling his rock into place.” CARSTEN JENSEN
“A colossus of a work, obsessively written, you read it so fast your eyes seem on fire until you run out of pages. And it digresses, but only in the way that all good literature does: with intensity and heart.
Approx. 1000 pages about the anatomy of peace and of war, and where the two intersect – about hatred and love and faith and fidelity, and about how these too intersect. War – and peace – as experience, as omnipotence and narcissism.
Unforgettable characters. A real thriller where (almost) everything is true.” MONIKA FAGERHOLM
“At one point in this book, the writer is labelled – with perfect accuracy – a Gonzo-sociologist. Many are the men who have written about war, but no one has done it like Geir Angell Øygarden. Bagdad Indigo is a fount of interviews, essays, observations and reflections by a man who first experienced the war in Iraq as a human shield and later, among the American soldiers. Angell Øygarden is as furiously learned as a tempest, but at the same time linguistically fresh and never dull. What a magnificent book. “ ERLEND LOE Excerpts from the reviews: ”A unique representation of a journey into the heart of war.” INGVAR AMBJÖRNSEN The best book of the year, VERDENS GANG
“A veritable sensation of a book.” AGDERPOSTEN
“Øygarden is of the same format as Hunter S. Thompson, Tom Wolfe and Ernest Hemingway in his contemporary description of his life with the peace-organisation before, during and after the bombing of Iraq.” AGDERPOSTEN
“Bagdad Indigo sets a new standard in Norwegian non-fiction and literature, and must be read and discussed for many years to come.” AGDERPOSTEN
“An interesting and problematic document from an incomprehensible situation.” KLASSEKAMPEN
“No other narrative non-fic-book has given me the same feeling of actually being present in Bagdad.” MORGENBLADET
“Bagdad Indigo is like no other book about war, neither the one in Iraq nor the one anywhere else. It mixes supremely well-written essayism and narrative non-fiction (‘the room is filling up like a glass of champagne’ and “the words are written with letters as black as gangrene’) with sociological documentarism,” WEEKENDAVISEN (DENMARK)
“Geir Angell is a pleasant narrator; he possesses an intellect as keen as a knife and breaks into one essayistic passage after another while at the same time being transparent and energetic; the wind blows through him and we are given access to a vast cast of characters.” KLASSEKAMPEN