The Calf
By Leif Høghaug
Translated by David M. Smith
Publication Date: October 28, 2025
Paperback: 9781913744243
eBook: 9781913744526
Description
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.
Biographical Note
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.
Reviews
“Crazy! Amazing! I want more!” —Bjørn Hatterud
“A working-class novel for the 21st century.” —Matthias Friedrich
“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