The Calf

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 H oslash;ghaug'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.