Melancholy (Norwegian Literature Series) - Tapa blanda

"What he writes is so simple and so deep at the same time. He has a restlessness, a tension in his narrative style, and he writes about situations everyone feels involved in, no matter where in the world they are." --Bergens Tidende

"His novel presents itself as an exploration of zones that are murky, dangerous, crucial, where craftsmanship and inspiration seek and repulse each other up to the coils of madness. . . . It is the restrained patience and anxiety that shape, beleaguer and design this radiant nucleus that justifies writing--or painting." --Le Monde

"He has a surgeon's ability to use the scalpel and to cut into the most prosaic, everyday happenings, to tear loose fragments from life, to place them under the microscope and examine them minutely, in order to present them afterwards as a precipitous, West-Norway-colored, feverish dream of a Hieronymous Bosch nightmare, sometimes so endlessly desolate, dark, and fearful that Kafka himself would have been frightened." --Aftenposten