Tomas Olsen Myrbråten's initials spell 'tom' — Norwegian for empty — and Lund wants you to notice. This is a book where everything means something and nothing means anything, where a man who considers himself a 'life-of-the-mind individual' ends up digging ditches next to a drunk wife and a caged brother. The novel was published in 1999 and is only now appearing in English; that delay is itself a small indictment of Anglophone literary culture. The plot, such as it is: Tomas blurts an obscenity at the Norwegian culture minister while trying to deliver a think piece about the death of authentic culture, gets thrown out, loses his reputation, loses his housing, and retreats to his parents' farm in eastern Norway, where he finds not pastoral salvation but a landscape of liquefaction — slime, moonshine, blood, vomit, grease. The farm section is the book's gamble. Lund holds you there, in discomfort, far longer than a conventional novel would dare. What Lund is actually doing is running two arguments simultaneously. The first is the universal modernist complaint — commodity culture eating lived experience, wildness disappearing, mountain roads no longer winding. Tomas hears Thoreau in the woods and Berger in the fields, and so does the reader. The second argument is specifically Norwegian: the governing class as 'a gang of boasting sanctimonious humanistoid individuals' presiding over a 'Norwegian global hell.' The two arguments reinforce each other without collapsing into each other, which is the book's structural achievement. David M Smith's translation deserves its own paragraph. The neologisms — 'enfletted,' 'enhammered,' 'vocabulation' — are not eccentricities to be tolerated. They are the point. Lund's prose enacts what it describes: language bending under the pressure of a world that has stopped making sense. The long, clause-larded paragraphs give way, in the forest finale, to something sparse and attuned. That tonal shift is earned, not granted. The funny-tragic register is where the book lives. Tomas is objectively ridiculous — a man who cries the world's tears, who loses a government commission by swearing at a minister, who romanticizes peasant authenticity and finds horror instead. But Lund never lets the comedy entirely defuse the critique. By 2026, the 'computer engineers, course facilitators, business commissioners' Tomas lists as false prophets read less like parody and more like a LinkedIn feed. Twenty-five years on, this book has become more accurate, not less. The nightmarish middle section — somewhere between Hieronymus Bosch and Lars von Trier, as the review rightly notes — is where most readers will want to bail. It is unpleasant in a way that is not decorative. Lund is not interested in making disintegration tasteful. If you stay, the final forest section pays back the investment: Tomas alone in the trees, hearing himself, his past, his surroundings, arriving at a materialist-mystical epiphany about language and substance. It is one of the stranger and more satisfying endings in recent European fiction. This is Lund's first novel in English. If And Other Stories is smart, it won't be his last.
