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. Perhaps it was always meant to be this way. His family line consisted of poor, mostly illiterate farmworkers in eastern Norway and, after he moved away to university, he learned to speak about his upbringing in casual, almost condescending fashion.
Over time though, especially as he travels across the country, he begins to question his snobbery. He’s aghast at how history is being turned into heritage, ancient folk traditions repackaged for tourists, culture seen as being not so much about lived experiences and relations as a commodity. Wildness is disappearing.
Even mountain roads no longer wind like they used to. There are echoes of Thoreau in his invocations of “children getting lost in the woods, in a world without human signifiers, without signage or trails, only celestial bodies and natural forms”. Echoes too of John Berger’s Pig Earth, as he charts the impact of machinery on how peasants speak and engage with each other.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
