A writer the Guardian describes as having been called the ‘greatest Norwegian contemporary writer’ by Karl Ove Knausgård has finally reached English-language readers. The Mystery of What Befell in the Ditch, originally published in 1999, is the first novel by Thure Erik Lund to appear in English translation, and it has taken twenty-seven years to make the crossing.
Translated by David M. Smith and published by And Other Stories, as Escape Into Books notes, the novel centres on Tomas Olsen Myrbråten, whose initials, T-O-M, spell the Norwegian word for ’empty’. Approaching 38, he is already a man who feels redundant to the age he inhabits: slumped at kitchen tables, convinced the ceiling will fall, convinced the world is crying through him. The book’s territory is Nordic weltschmerz, but Lund pushes it somewhere stranger and more uncomfortable than the genre usually permits.
A portrait of modernity’s discontents
Tomas is what he repeatedly calls a ‘life-of-the-mind individual’, a condition he treats as both curse and vocation. His sharpest perceptions concern what modernisation has done to Norway: folk traditions repackaged for tourists, ancient wildness rationalised away, even mountain roads straightened out. The governing class, in his account, has presided over ‘a thoroughly criminal, narcotised shopping-mall world’, a ‘Norwegian global hell’ full of ‘pale, withered souls who seek solace in cinemas and fitness studios’. The Guardian’s review hears in these passages an echo of Thomas Bernhard’s grumpus narrators railing against Austrian pieties, with the same furious, self-undermining eloquence.
There are other literary coordinates at work. The novel’s invocations of children lost in forests without signage, guided only by celestial bodies, carry traces of Thoreau. Its attention to how machinery reshapes peasant speech and sociability recalls John Berger’s Pig Earth. What distinguishes Lund is the specifically Norwegian grounding: the farmworker ancestry, the betrayal of moving to university and learning to speak of one’s origins with condescension, and the slow, guilty return to what that condescension had dismissed.
Language as protagonist
The novel’s formal character is as much a subject as its themes. Paragraphs run long, clause accumulating on clause, with neologisms that Smith renders as ‘enfletted’, ‘enhammered’, ‘vocabulation’. Elsewhere, when Tomas sheds his urban register, the prose turns slangy and blunt. The book is, among other things, prescient about the ‘language forms’ that digital capitalism requires, the data, the information, the ‘demonic and inhuman’ scientism, the suppression of allegory.
The novel’s middle section is deliberately harrowing: Tomas returns to his parents’ farm hoping for something Arcadian, and finds decomposition instead, slime, moonshine, blood, a drunken wife, a mentally defective brother caged and eventually abandoned in a remote Swedish village. The Guardian’s reviewer describes this stretch as somewhere between Hieronymus Bosch and Lars von Trier. What redeems, or at least resolves, the book is its final section: Tomas alone in a forest, attending with new clarity to everything around and inside him, arriving at the formulation that he is ‘a kind of pulverised form of language which, by chance, had been imbued with natural substances, here and there.’
Knausgård’s endorsement and the novel’s long-delayed translation will bring Lund to readers who will be encountering him for the first time.
