Don Martin and Zeshan Shakar: “Can You Hear the City Exhale”

See all reviews

Unrivaled writing duo

Last year it was ten years since Martin released “En Gang Romsåsgutt Alltid Romsåsgutt”. The album contains the single “Nilsen”, which gave Martin his breakthrough as a solo artist and the Spellemann prize.

The book “Kan du høre byen puste ut” is a celebration of the anniversary, and a tribute to, and an expansion of, the album. Martin and Shakar take turns to lead the pen, and in their chapters Martin talks about the album’s creation and delivers a lot of strong lines about the thoughts behind it. The title of the book mirrors rapper Tommy Tee’s first line in “Nilsen” – “Then you can hear the city breathe in” – and each chapter in the book opens with one or more lines from this or other songs on the album.

In his chapters, Shakar flexibly adds his own reflections on the relationship between Oslo residents in the middle class, and the people in and from east Oslo. He alternates with Martin in the right places. The authors complement each other’s thoughts and experiences unsurpassed. Mentioning each other and the other’s previous works and their immediate impression of the works helps to stitch it all together.

Dramaturgically, the book is virtually flawless.

Language confused

It is in other aspects of the book that it cuts across. Too many passages are, linguistically speaking, pancake flat. Here I miss the feelings for Oslo East that Martin and Shakar are eager to convey.

The language is otherwise elegantly rough, until it slips into linguistic images and other formulations with hesitant impact – “It’s better to put on a rain jacket than to fight the rain” – and a strange use of expressions. The clearest examples are “a feather became many chickens” and “(s)if neither the devil painted the wall nor the poo rose-red”.

The book seems, by and large, confused by language.

An occasional repetition would undoubtedly have smelled out. This is especially true where a paragraph opens with a line that is almost identical to a line in the paragraph immediately before it. The book also contains some minor punctuation errors – and some deadpan lines of the type “Winter turned into spring”. Spring turned into early summer”. In one of the middle chapters, the reader also has to swallow a real gut punch from a letter rhyme.

The book would not have benefited from another round with the editor.

A series of funerals

But Martin and Shakar should be congratulated for expressing well-founded reflections on a topic that does not matter if we get ten more books about it – preferably even more. Shakar’s story about a man who suffers a heart attack during a general meeting in the housing association, and dies on the spot, makes one think.

So does Martin’s story about all the funerals of friends under thirty that he has been to.

Martin writes: “Who ends up where, is probably more about what choices they have had, than what choices they have made”, and that has the force of a fist in the stomach.

Every now and then, both have glimpses of rhythmic passages, but the book is thus uneven.

In the book, Martin reproduces fragments of an article he had published in Aftenposten, and later an exchange of some text messages. In order to elevate the newspaper article and the exchange of messages, the material should be given a new framing in line with the book’s theme, making the reader – who has probably already read the newspaper article – see the material in a new light. But that doesn’t happen.

The reality from which the book draws its material is not processed well enough in the transition from reality to literature.

The authors may have thought that a reader-friendly language suit would mess with the events reproduced in the book, but it doesn’t work that way. Certain passages have obviously been written with the language in mind.

It is difficult to imagine that “Can you hear the city breathe out” will be among the most defining works Martin and Shakar, together and separately, are behind.