Calf

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. 

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.