The Mannequin Murder

Meet Karsten—a little Holden Caulfield, a little Patrick Bateman—in this delirious, darkly comic stream of consciousness from one of Norway’s great literary talents, thrillingly translated by Kari Dickson. For your average fourteen-year-old, it would be a normal, middle-class life: father’s a doctor, mother’s an English teacher, a baby sister toddles aimlessly around the house in sagging diapers. But Karsten is not like other fourteen-year-olds. He processes every object, every event, in exquisite, reality-bending detail—a breathless, never-ending narration that moves faster than the speed of thought. The intricacies of the optic nerve, the proper gutting of a fish, the queasy consistency of his mother’s burst blackheads, spied upon surreptitiously through a crack in the bathroom door—nothing escapes his field of view. It doesn’t always make him popular; lately, a gang of neighbourhood boys has been sending him threatening letters signed “The Enemy.” But Karsten has other things on his mind: no sooner did his father give him a video camera than he discovered the bloody corpse of a mannequin in the compost. An investigation had to commence, complete with witness interrogations and a dramatic recreation of the terrible crime itself—with his mother cast in the role of the murder victim. Suddenly, one morning, Karsten’s father asks him to say goodbye to his childhood home. An overnight bag is packed, and he is told they are leaving for a trip—and everything is set into motion. Through sheer ecstatic storytelling, Ingvild Schade has created an instantly unforgettable literary character. You’ve never met a mind quite like Karsten’s.