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 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.