The Mystery of What Befell in the Ditch
Thure Erik Lund author David M Smith translator
Format:Paperback
Publisher:And Other Stories
Published:20th Oct '26
Should be back in stock very soon
The ‘greatest Norwegian contemporary writer’ (Knausgård) finally in English: An exhilarating, hallucinatory exploration of language, isolation, and the search for an authentic life.
Deep in the Norwegian wilderness, Myrbråten is a man at war with the modern world.. After a bureaucratic job spirals into a public scandal and his desperate flight, Tomas attempts to become a ‘man of the forest’.
Acclaimed writer Thure Erik Lund is now available in English for the first time in this cornerstone of contemporary Norwegian literature.
Deep in the Norwegian wilderness, Tomas Olsen Myrbråten is a man at war with the modern world. After a bureaucratic cultural assignment spirals into a public scandal and his desperate flight, Tomas attempts to shed civilisation to become a ‘man of the forest’. Long acclaimed in Norway, but considered untranslatable, Thure Erik Lund is now available in English for the first time in David M. Smith's radically brilliant translation. The Mystery of What Befell in the Ditch is a profound, hallucinatory exploration of language and isolation, particularly about how we make a language our own, how we distinguish our own thoughts from those that have been fed into us. This cornerstone of contemporary Norwegian literature is an exhilarating journey into the dark heart of the life of the mind.
‘For me, Thure Erik Lund is the greatest Norwegian contemporary writer. He is so innovative, his prose is so alive, he is the most vital writer I know.’ Karl Ove Knausgård, Vagant
‘A masterful storyteller.’ Dagbladet
‘Lund will be remembered as one of the great authors of our time, and one of those who took the novel genre the furthest.’ Tom Egil Hverven
‘Envelope-pushing…and patience-testing.’ Kirkus
‘The astonishment and the strangeness only multiply beyond any comparison . . . I feel so lucky to read this translation of a book so mind-bendingly brilliant, real, and utterly lonely, that I too spent some time crying at the kitchen table.’ Emily Tarr, Thank You Books
‘Everything pretty much breaks down, including language and meaning, in this quite mad novel, which will either give you a nervous breakdown, bore you senseless or leave you exhilarated by the possibilities of the form.’ Claire Allfree, Daily Mail
'A book with many distinctive qualities . . . convincing and alarming.’ Declan O’Driscoll, Irish Times
‘Envelope-pushing…and patience-testing.’ Kirkus
‘A universal story of modernity and its discontents . . . The Mystery of What Befell in the Ditch is prescient about the “language forms” that digital capitalism requires – the data and information, the “demonic and inhuman” scientism, the fear of allegory.’ Sukhdev Sandhu, The Guardian
ISBN: 9781916751712
Dimensions: unknown
Weight: unknown
304 pages