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”.…