Norway’s mass murderer Breivik still unfathomable to author

Norwegian author Asne Seierstad says the hardest part of writing a book about Anders Breivik was his victims and their families.

Murderer Breivik still unfathomable

For Norwegian journalist and author Asne Seierstad, the hardest part of writing a book about Anders Breivik was not entering the world of the mass murderer but that of his victims and still-grieving families.

“I had a hard time putting the victims and Breivik in the same book, of ending one chapter with him and starting another with them,’’ Seierstad, in Australia for the Sydney Writers’ Festival, said yesterday.

“It was an internal struggle because I didn’t want to hurt anyone; at the same time I didn’t want to use words like monster to describe Breivik, because part of being human is a capacity for evil.

“Like everyone, I had a deep disgust for him, and such an anger. I would be writing about a victim and I’d think: ‘You should read this, you should know who you killed.’ But I had to be neutral in the writing, to try to find out what made him and why he did what he did.’’

The result is One of Us: The Story of Anders Breivik and the Massacre in Norway, a 500-page account of Breivik’s July 2011 shooting rampage in Oslo and on the island of Utoya that left 77 people dead, most of them from a Norwegian Labour Party youth camp.

The book is harrowing, with Breivik’s murders recounted in forensic detail, the impact of his bullets on each body charted.

Seierstad said she showed the chapters to the parents of the victims and no one asked for changes, “not to one drop of blood’’.

“The parents already knew how their children were killed — they had seen it,’’ she said.

“What they didn’t know — what they most wanted to know — was how did their child feel at that last moment?” Seierstad’s journalistic career has been as a foreign correspondent, reporting from trouble spots including Afghanistan, Iran and Chechnya.

She took two years to write the book, talking to almost everyone involved, drawing on voluminous official records and sitting through Breivik’s trial, at which he was sentenced to indefinite imprisonment.

He was the one person who refused to speak to her. Asked if she was today any closer to understanding Breivik and his actions, she said: “No and yes. If I did meet him, my main question would still be: ‘Why did you do it?’ ’’