One of Us

One of Us: The Story of Anders Breivik and the Massacre in Norway by Asne Seierstad, translated by Sarah Death, 524 pages

On July 22, 2011, a car bomb exploded in downtown Oslo, killing eight people.  It was only the beginning of the horror.  The perpetrator, Anders Breivik, the founder, leader, and only member of a terrorist secret society dubbed "The Knights Templar", launched a heavily armed assault against a youth camp run by the progressive Labour Party, killing 69 people, mostly adolescents, before surrendering to police.

As Norwegian journalist Seierstad (The Bookseller of Kabul) recounts, Breivik had passed through a number of enthusiasms - graffiti tagger, right-wing activist, entrepreneur,  Freemason, World of Warcraft guild leader.  His commitment to each had less to do with its specific nature than his ambition to be recognized as someone extraordinary, to somehow distinguish himself as better than average, worthy of respect - a cool kid, a leader, rich, an elite.  His constant search for a new identity was clearly reflected in a series of pseudonyms - Morg, Anders Behring, andersnordic, Andrew Berwick.  In each environment, he repeated the same pattern - initially friendly and even sycophantic, totally invested and eager for recognition, until his ambition led him to overstep his bounds and offend the very people whose favor he had sought.  This pattern held true in his final obsession, fighting the Islamicization of Europe, but tragically that failure did not lead to depression followed by a new obsession, but mass murder.

Seierstad not only follows Breivik on his path to the massacre, but several of the victims as well, denying the killer the satisfaction of reducing them to mere props in his story and making clear to the reader the human cost of the massacre.  This accentuates the book's central theme - not only was Breivik "one of us", his victims were "us", too, and the evil and the loss belong to all of us.