Muleum

We’re crashing.
We love you.
Do what you want to do.
Dad

These are the words in a text-message that turns 16-year-old Julie’s life into a catastrophe. Her mum, dad and her older brother, Tom, are killed in a plane crash in Namibia. Julie sits there in the family’s big house in Oslo's West End with Krzysztof, the Polish craftsman, employed to tile the family’s swimming pool.

Julie has been advised by «Psycho Geir with the beard» to write a diary, and reluctantly she has to admit that she has benefited from putting her thoughts down on paper. The thoughts are depressive, suicidal and aggressive. She plans and attempts suicide at the school’s Christmas show, but fails and wakes up in hospital. After this setback she decides there’s only one thing to do; to leave the country, away from family, school and friends. She has plenty of money and she discovers that airports are good places to be. «Just being at the airport gives me a kind of sense of freedom. I can go wherever I want to from here. I don’t know where I want to go. But I want to leave the ground. I want to be in the air. It feels as if that’s where I belong. I don’t want to be on the ground.» She heads for Kastrup first where she meets a young man who wants to have sex with her in the toilet. And then on to Brussels where she meets Marijke who works in the prayer room at the airport, and she stays with Marijke for a few days before she heads off for Bangkok.

‘Potent, playful and very easy to read.’
VG

‘Muleum has become a beautiful little text – painful and sad, but at the same time as funny and verbally quick as Loe can be at his best.’
Dagbladet

‘… language and content is terrific.’
Dagsavisen

‘It is beautiful and dark and funny and sad.’
Bergens Tidende

‘Entertaining and wise. … Erlend Loe demonstrates that it doesn’t have to be boring to read about serious subjects.’
Oppland Arbeiderblad