Who is your favorite fictional hero or heroine? Your favorite antihero or villain?

I’m very easily led, and my life is full of characters from novels that I have followed. The first was in a novel my father gave me, the book was from the Fifties, and the protagonist was such a good boy — he was fatherless, and his mother was ill, I guess she was dying, so he was taking care of her. He was bullied at school by a gang of terrible and rude boys, and the unfairness of his situation made a deep impact on me, so deep that I became a Christian, as he was, trying to make my friends stop swearing and stop stealing apples, I remember. Ten years later I read “White Niggers,” by Ingvar Ambjornsen. The protagonist smoked a lot of pot, so I started doing that; in my twisted teenage mind it somehow represented freedom. My first relation to and understanding of love also came from a literary character, Lieutenant Glahn, the protagonist in Knut Hamsun’s novel “Pan.” I read it when I was 16 and became kind of obsessed by it. It wasn’t a particularly healthy identification; Lieutenant Glahn was a very romantic, very narcissistic and reclusive man who shot himself in the foot to make an impression on the woman he loved. I would have saved myself a lot of trouble if I hadn’t read that book.

What kind of reader were you as a child? Which childhood books and authors stick with you most?

I read absolutely everything I came over when I was a child. My brother and myself went with my mother to the library once a week, and I usually returned with two bags of books, which I read during the week. What I loved the most was the French novels, like “The Three Musketeers”; ; “The Count of Monte Cristo”; “Around the World in 80 Days”; “The Secret of the Island,” “Michel Strogoff.” But I also loved biographies about famous people — always crying when they ended, since they died — about Helen Keller, Florence Nightingale, Jean d’Arc, for instance, or Thomas Alva Edison, Walt Disney, Henry Ford, Winston Churchill, Louis Armstrong. Books about Robin Hood intrigued me, and King Arthur, but also books about the Roman Empire and Marco Polo’s journeys in China. Books about sail ships fascinated me a lot — I once started writing one myself at the age of 9, 10 — and of course “Treasure Island” and all the other Robert Louis Stevenson books. Since I didn’t know anything, I read “Madame Bovary” as it should have been written by Jules Verne, and “The Red and the Black” as by Alexandre Dumas. I also dived into Henri Troyat’s two-volume biography about Lev Tolstoy because it was in the shelves at home, in much the same way I read the Hardy boys or the Bobsey children or the Nancy Drew books. I couldn’t have understood much of Tolstoy’s life, though, but that didn’t really matter, the whole point was to disappear into other worlds, other places, other times. I don’t have that wild drive anymore, except when I read “War and Peace”: Then I’m 12 years old again. (And with my bad memory, I’m able to read it as new every fifth year or so.)

If you could require the American president to read one book, what would it be? The prime minister of Norway?

I would recommend everybody to spend a summer reading Proust’s “Remembrance of Things Past,” also the president and the prime minister. It opens the world up in a way no other book I have read does. But please don’t stop after two and a half volumes, you have to go all the way; it is all about the accumulation. It won’t make you a better person, nor more empathetic or intelligent, but it will make you see and smell and think slightly differently, also about yourself, and so enrichen your life and your understanding of it.

You’re organizing a literary dinner party. Which three writers, dead or alive, do you invite?

James Joyce has to be the most intriguing writer from the last century, but I have a feeling that he was a dominating person, and with only two other guests available that would perhaps make for a one-sided evening. Therefore, to make him a bit more humble, I would invite Homer. Just by showing up, he would also have settled the Homeric question once and for all. I’m sure Homer would have loved hearing about “Ulysses” and the, to him, strange and futuristic but maybe also familiar world it describes. The last guest would be one of the most interesting contemporary writers, Anne Carson, who also has immersed herself in the ancient Greek literature. I would enjoy listening to their conversation, and after a while, when I was starting to get a bit drunk, maybe talk with Joyce about raising children, with Homer about the color of the sea and with Carson about love — which all, we maybe would agree on, is associated with blindness.

Disappointing, overrated, just not good: What book did you feel you were supposed to like, and didn’t?

I don’t read my own books, but sometimes I have to do so at events, and the thoughts swirling around in my head then are these: disappointing, overrated, just not good.