Long story, but I've been on a Norwegian literature kick as of late.
This guy Karl Ove Knausgaard is a big deal in his native Norway. He wrote a series of painfully honest and revealing books about him and his family in a kind of rediculously detail-oriented, "Proustian" style... And named it after the magnum opus of our pal, Adolf Hitler.
Good read if you are socially awkward and have father issues. I am both.
Tor Ulven was a Norwegian poet who killed himself. From the back cover-
"Replacement, his only novel, published two years before Ulven?s suicide, is a miniature symphony, wherein the perspectives of fifteen unrelated characters are united into what seems a single narrative voice: each personality, having reached a point of stasis in their lives, directing the book in turn. These people reminisce, dream, reflect, observe, and talk to themselves; each stuck in their respective traps, each fantasizing about how their lives might have turned out differently. A masterpiece of compression and confession, Replacement dramatizes the tension between the concrete realities we think we cannot alter, and our interior lives, where we feel anything might still be possible."
It's a book about sweet, sweet isolation.
Starting this behemoth today: (not a literary product of Norway)