Translated into English at last, this portrait of a man appalled by modernity and desperate to get back to nature is brimming with Nordic weltschmerz
T-O-M. The initials of Tomas Olsen Myrbråten, the narrator in Thure Erik Lund’s The Mystery of What Befell in the Ditch, spell out the Norwegian word for “empty”. Approaching 38, he’s already a relic. He spends his days slumped at the kitchen table or staring out of the window, convinced that the ceiling is about to fall and crush him. He sobs about the state he’s in and the state of society around him. Of one thing he’s sure: “It is no longer me who cries, but the world, the world crying, in me.” Nordic weltschmerz: you’d have to be a saint not to giggle.
Lund has been described by Karl Ove Knausgård as the “greatest Norwegian contemporary writer”; this novel, originally published in 1999, is his first to be translated into English. In it, Tomas describes himself, over and over and over again, as a “life-of-the-mind individual”. Cursed as much as blessed, life-of-the mind individuals have a keen and unconsoling sense of how things are (“one is a wretched, contemptible, and unworthy being”) and how things will end for them (“in the sewers of society, at nature’s nadir, incessantly ground down into the mud and the mire so that one day, millions of years from now, they become oil, life-of-the-mind oil, at the very bottom of life itself”). Is he making fun of himself? In 2026, he seems closer to an eco-prophet.