The Calf - by Leif Høghaug (Paperback)

About the Book

"On violence, crime, guilt and atonement. We meet our narrator in an underground office where he sharpens pencils, shreds paper, makes coffee for the other employees and thinks over and over about a late night that he has been trying to forget for a long time. In between the meaningless work, he manages to scratch down some names and phrases, and conjures up a dream from 1980s Hadeland. In this saga, Hadeland is a shadow home where spooks, ghosts, angels and robot-like creatures are just as natural as animals and flesh and blood humans. But what happened that late summer night? What is it that the narrator has tried to forget? And who is this Calf, who was 'killed to death'? Our narrator takes readers in circles through different events, times and places; a whirlwind in which the calf and other characters are like prisoners in a tornado from Dante's Inferno. The Calf is a peasant story, a western novel, a dream quatrain, an adventure, science fiction and a black comedy about violence, crime, guilt and atonement"-- Provided by publisher

Book Synopsis

Part Appalachian gothic, part science fiction, part Norwegian western, The Calf is a darkly comic backwoods phantasmagoria that bends genres until they break in a feat of linguistic experimentation.

In a subterranean office labyrinth somewhere in Hadeland, Norway, a mechanical barn gnome with a metal bucket for a head spends his days shredding paper, brewing coffee, and trying to forget a certain late summer night in the woods sometime in the 1980s. That night--hazy, mythic, traumatic--centers on the Mare Cooter Canyon and a ragtag bunch of teenage boys calling themselves "the cowboys." As the narrator's memory crackles and sputters, we encounter grotesque archetypes: a resurrected Christ-like figure called the Dead Feller, a mysterious, moon-faced woman who may be an employment caseworker, and a strange, amorphous alien called the Calf. What happened out there, and who--or what--is telling the story?

Drawing on the linguistic inventions of Twain and Faulkner, translator David M. Smith boldly reimagines the rural dialect of Leif Høghaug's original, bringing it into a lush, inventive Appalachian English. The result is a voice that's as haunted, broken, and unforgettable as its narrator. The Calf is a howl from the margins, a cracked hymn of language under pressure--conceived and written alongside the author's Norwegian translation of Finnegans Wake, and unmistakably charged with that book's spirit of dream logic, doubleness, and rapturous musicality.

Review Quotes

Longlist, National Translation Award for Prose

"Lively and unique . . . Those willing to go the distance will find plenty of humor, intrigue, and literary ambition on offer here." --Publishers Weekly

"Author Leif Høghaug was translating Finnegans Wake into Norwegian as he wrote The Calf, and Joyce's linguistic virtuosity left a visible imprint on his work. Originally written in a rural Norwegian dialect, The Calf is the story of a mechanical barn gnome in an underground office block recounting--and trying to remember--a fateful day in his youth. Translator David M. Smith made the daring and inspired choice to render the text in Appalachian English, and the result is a delightfully absurd (and absurdly delightful) romp that includes a potential alien, schoolyard brawls, teenage incel cowboys, and a Christ-haunted canyon." --Judges citation, Longlist, National Translation Award in Prose

"Crazy! Amazing! I want more!" --Bjørn Hatterud, author of Against Normality

"A working-class novel for the 21st century." --Matthias Friedrich, writer and translator

"The Calf is stylistically completely different from anything I have read before." --Matthias Thurau

"What initially reads like late avant-garde l'art pour l'art quickly develops an astonishing narrative pull and psychological coherence that keeps you interested even in the most pun-stricken passages." --Christina Dongowski

"One of the most satisfying books I have ever read." --Lonningspils

About the Author

LEIF HØGHAUG, (1974) lives in Gran, Eastern Norway, and teaches at the Creative Writing Department at the University of South-Eastern Norway (USN). Fama, his first book of poetry was published in 2012. Since then, he has published two more poetry books, The Calf is his first novel. He is currently working on a Norwegian translation of James Joyce's Finnegans Wake.

DAVID M. SMITH is a native of Georgia, USA. Besides The Calf, his translations include The Red Handler by Johan Harstad and a forthcoming edition of Tarjei Vesaas's short fiction.