Incredibly Strong Diet – Book Review: Robert Steen: “At Night the Stars Shine” – VG

“What you have to go through in this life, you have to go through, you can’t move,” said the young Robert Steen’s grandmother when his mother died. But Robert and his family had to go through more than many things.

The life story of Mats Steen apparently shocked the whole of Norway when it was first told in an NRK article written by journalist Vicky Schaubert. Now the story has been extended into a book, this time penned by Father Robert Steen, in collaboration with Hallgeir Opedal.

And like the original NRK case, the book should almost come with an emotional warning, because both the pain and the beauty of Mats’ life are incredibly strong.

In the book, Robert Steen, son of AP bauta Reiluf Steen, tells about his own childhood, about meeting his wife Trude and about the dreams they had for the family they wanted to create. His dreams and ideals were naturally based on his own experiences and frames of reference. Something that would eventually come into strong conflict with reality.

Commentary: It is important to understand the enormous positive value that games can have for young people.

“At night the stars shine” is the story of something that dies and something that is created.

Mats Steen was born on July 3, 1989. After several years, he is diagnosed with Duchenne muscular dystrophy, an incurable disease that causes his muscles to slowly but surely disappear. He will likely die in his early 20s, his parents were first told. Mats lives to be 25 years old.

A large part of the book is about the horribleness of being more or less helpless on the sidelines and watching a child die of a disease without cure. It is unbearable.

At the same time, this is also the story of new knowledge that is emerging. At the same time that Mats is growing, the age of the Internet and computer games is also growing. The parents watch with concerned eyes as Mats turns more and more to the games as her body fails. When Robert and Trude evaluate their son’s life based on their own frames of reference, they don’t think it works so well to live much of their lives in virtual reality.

But Mats still lives a good and free life in the game World of Warcraft, where the child who usually sits in a motorized wheelchair, can run, flirt, play games, comfort and talk with friends from all over the world.

“At night the stars shine” largely revolves around the question “What constitutes a good life?” And who has the right to define it?

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Robert writes about the pain of having an isolated and seemingly lonely child. But when Mats dies, unknown friends suddenly flock to him, telling about the close, important, and very real friends they’ve had with him. It turns out that people all over the world light candles for Mats and are deeply saddened that he is gone. Their stories of what Mats has meant to them are moving to read.

And when Robert comes into contact with Mats’ “friends”, as he first refers to them, and realizes that they are very close friends, he is forced into a process of self-examination in which much of his idea of ​​computer games and what constitutes both good lives and good friendships change.

By exposing that process, you give the reader a chance to achieve something of the same eye-opening vision. It is generous.

In that sense, “At Night the Stars Shine” is the kind of book that can challenge your image of reality. Robert Steen’s narrator’s voice is sober and muffled, and in some places very uplifting. But it’s almost delightful that the form and language are as “boring” and plain as they are, because the story is more than fierce enough.

The generation gap between parent-child players is very large for many. By exposing his own biases, intimate pain, and self-examination, Steen goes to great lengths to reduce it.

Reviewed by: Oda Faremo Lindholm