Gunstein Bakke

WINNER

Maud and Aud consists of short chapters that alternate between narrative flashes and poetic descriptions, containing reflections on traffic and the physical aspects of human life in a society where technology has become an increasingly important part of our bodies as well as our lives.

At the centre of the plot is a family which is devastated by a car accident: the mother dies, the father can only live on supported by artificial body parts, and the twin sisters Maud and Aud survive with bodily and mental scars. As it turns out, the sister with the lesser physical injuries is the one who cannot shake off the trauma of her family’s encounter with death, and she is drawn to the thrill of reckless driving, both in her job as a traffic reporter and secretly during nightly drives to scenes of recent car accidents.

From this starting point, the author creates an essayistic net of reflections on thematically connected topics. These include how the first heart transplant operation performed in Cape Town in 1967 expanded our possibilities of fighting physical death, and how Princess Diana in 1997 was chased to her death as her car crashed in the Pont de l’Alma-tunnel in Paris. Furthermore, he dwells on how cars represent one of the greatest threats to human life in modern civil society, but they are still perceived as a smaller threat to man than wild animals hunted to near extinction, arguing that evolution has not caught up with the rapid development of modern civilization.

In short, Gunstein Bakke touches on questions of existential importance in a country where oil fuels not only the cars, but also a large part of society’s development – and possibly also environmental developments that may eventually pose new threats to human life.