I can understand those who are confused when they encounter this novel. It moves in the absolute lowest circle of hell among actions that according to the majority of moral codes are thoroughly evil. Still, I wish you read on, for this is literature of a kind that says something hard to bear but essential about the conditions of life provided by nature.
The Norwegian author Leander Djønne received the 2025 Brage Prize for the novel "Alt et" and now it comes in Swedish, "Allt äter", in Helena Fagertun's excellent translation. He debuted in 2022 with "Oskespiralen".
The novel scene is a dilapidated farm in the country where a man obsessed with violence lives in a unkempt house with his passive, submissive, Sami wife. The grandchildren's parents have died in a car accident, so now Våle and his disabled sister Rind, called "Efterblivna", live with this old couple, who barely feed them.
A wolverine lives in a cairn nearby. In addition to being a scavenger and voraciously gluttonous animal, the lone wolf is associated in folklore with evil and bad luck. In the novel, this particular wolverine tells us confidently about his urges, about the longing to kill the locat, the predator's special enemy. The wolf, which moves over large areas of the mountain landscape, has the lyrical language for nature, for the stone, the earth, the colors, the shifts. The underlying, which the place has to tell.
The novel takes the reader forward in short chapters where each one has its own voice and description of what happens in this evil saga. This means that the figures are sketched through the gaze of the others. The grandfather has urges similar to the wolverine. He thinks when, for once, he's not sleeping in the shack but lying stinkingly next to his wrinkled old wife, hell's bitch: "Feel the urge inside me. Put my hands around the skinny neck. Strangle her." He sees it as a relief that his son is gone, "a slack jib, a weathervane" and it's "a shame that the kids didn't get involved in the accident".
Tide law, incest, all the wickedness you can think of has a place in this small circle of animals and people.
The violence and the home-burnt alcohol pump the action forward and the sadism and abominations going on have no end. When the abused children flee to a neighbor, it turns out that things are even worse there than at the grandfather's. Moreover, it becomes clear how the violence of the fathers, with abuse and evil, literally propagated downward through the generations, continues and continues - original sin.
Leander Djønne is skilled at making language out of existence's lowest emotions and animal instincts. Tide law, incest, all the wickedness you can think of has a place in this small circle of animals and people. Even if the plot feels unusually raw, it can be connected to popular culture's entertainment violence (Friday's cozy), violence-inspiring sites (the Fagersta murders) and acts of war.
The reader desperately searches for hope, meaning or morality to escape the suffering, but no: not here, in this dark universe. In the dull and lost, Djønne is joined by another Hardanger writer who writes in Nynorsk: Jon Fosse. Both seem to see the light elsewhere than in the suffering on earth. And that the meaning takes place outside the body.
At the same time that "Everything eats" is concrete, it is a linguistic project of ideas. Strongly poetic. If we were only our bodies, it could go like this. But we are not just our bodies. Spirits and souls live in reincarnations in this book. Different belief systems are invisibly given place, even the Christian one.
It is between the siblings Våle and Rind that the expansion of meaning exists. Rind is epileptic, in some cultures connected with demons and religious gifts. Våle's mission in life and only desire is to take care of his sister. And it is in her that the light breaks out: "She turned towards me, and I was dazzled by her light. All just white, crystal clear light".
There is hope after all, but in this novel only after death.
The 45-year-old writer Leander Djønne, visual artist, former teacher and farmer, has ventured in the art of fiction into areas of human nature that one would rather not visit. But once there, a powerful and shaking experience is given. And the experience of a great authorship in the making.
