Trondheim is Sigur Johanson’s devastated hometown, a place defined in the novel by the loss of his house and by the distance between physical shelter and the refuge he considers home. Its destruction makes the European catastrophe personal, while Johanson’s recollections give the city a second meaning: the origin he has left behind, measured against a sanctuary of his own making.

The City and Its Destruction

Gerhard Bohrmann identifies Johanson as Norwegian and explains that he comes from Trondheim, where “there isn't much of it left.” He tells Sue Oliviera that Johanson has lost his home, turning the remote calamity visible in television images into a concrete loss attached to a person present among them. The city’s devastation is thus introduced not through a street-by-street account, but through the blunt fact that little remains and that Johanson is one of its displaced inhabitants.

The description of Johanson’s house as flattened supplies the physical image behind that loss. Trondheim matters as a home damaged by the wider disaster, but the narrative does not treat the house and the idea of home as interchangeable. That distinction becomes central when the account moves from what happened to the city to what Johanson remembers as his true refuge.

Johanson’s Connection to Trondheim

Johanson thinks of his flattened house while considering the extraordinary signs of animal intelligence around him: worms, jellies, whales and sharks, alongside fish capable of planning and forming alliances. Against this widening picture of life, the ruined house feels strangely distant. He is not as saddened by its loss as might be expected, because he locates his real home elsewhere, at the edge of a watery mirror that, on clear nights, contains the universe.

That other home is an inward and chosen refuge. Johanson has seen himself reflected there and made a haven for what he regards as beautiful and true; the house he built becomes an embodiment of himself. The contrast does not erase Trondheim or the destruction of his property. It shows instead that the city’s loss reaches him differently from the loss of the sanctuary through which he understands his own life.

Home, Memory, and Uncertainty

Johanson distinguishes this refuge from a rented town-house, which could provide shelter but never become a home in the same sense. His idea of belonging is attached to a place he has made meaningful, not simply to a building that can be occupied. Trondheim therefore frames a tension between material security and personal habitation: the former can be flattened, while the latter depends on an inward bond and a space shaped by the self.

The memory is also linked to Tina Lund. Johanson has not been to his refuge since the weekend he spent with her, and the thought of the ruined Trondheim house leads him to wonder whether that other place would have changed too. The city’s destruction does not answer the question. Instead, Trondheim becomes the point from which the novel leaves Johanson facing uncertainty about whether a private haven can remain intact when both home and the world around it are under threat.