“On the way to a friend” by Niels Fredrik Dahl

This is a review. The author is responsible for the opinions in the text.

A screaming elephant lies like a gray pile of mud on one of the exits from Oslo in July 2001. Photographer Joel Sternfeld is on site and can take the photo of a lifetime of the unlikely and poignant situation. But there is also an ego that describes the picture and already knows a lot about how the elephant comes to be there.

It’s time for me to tell myself about the Coca-Cola Man and his vision that led him to where he is now, as if locked out of life. But he has to start with the eleven-year-old boy Vilgot: “He is me, but I am not him”. On a cold January evening about thirty years ago, Vilgot says he is on his way to see a friend.

Norwegian Niels Fredrik Dahl has had a major and well-deserved breakthrough in Sweden since the novel Father is Back (2025) won the Nordic Council Literary Prize in 2024 and was published in a brilliant Swedish translation by Gun-Britt Sundström. About the lonely upbringing of a distant and kind man between the First and Second World Wars in Alexandria, Geneva, Norway, guided by his father, the narrator’s grandfather, the tyrannical judge. But it is also about the loss of a son and the attempt to fill in a possible story about the father and about oneself based on the few traces that remained after the father’s death.

The novel “Mor om natten” was published in 2017, the dense double portrait of a mother with deep depression and a son who is increasingly falling into alcohol abuse. But Niels Fredrik Dahl made his debut in 1988 with a collection of poems and went on to write plays, short stories, several volumes of poetry and novels. His second novel “På väg till en vän” received the prestigious Brage Prize in Norway in 2002 and was first published in Swedish in 2004. Today it appears in a new Swedish edition.

The three in question I read the novels as a loosely composed trilogy or as texts that enter into dialogue with one another both thematically and formally. But it is in “På väg till en vän” that the play between fiction and fact becomes most clear and it also provides keys to reading the later novels, which are also heavily influenced by fiction

For example, there is a famous photo of an elephant slumped on a highway ramp, taken by Joel Sternfeld, but in Washington in 1979. In the novel’s universe, it is a “believable” fact that the elephant remained in the narrator’s hut in Oslo after a Russian ringmaster left the country. Fairy tales by the Brothers Grimm, most notably Little Red Riding Hood and indirectly Hansel and Gretel, as well as early film comedians such as Chaplin and Harold Lloyd place the reading focus on the dreamy, nightmarish and a comedy that is both cruel and liberating. Urban Andersson’s translation really captures the rhythm of the prose, the dense darkness that simultaneously shimmers with light.

The comic protects the reader, but also lures us in with clues and a series of enigmatic and tragicomic characters who stand in the way of both Vilgot and the narrator. The fact that a Russian circus troupe stays in Oslo with vodka to drink and a sack of onions to eat is necessary to sensitize the reader to what is more difficult to put into words in Vilgot’s story. About his loneliness and vulnerability. Mother and father in the rented apartment – or the subway – are not doing well, mother has recurring attacks of severe pain that make her just want to die. She and perhaps her father are afraid of other people and prefer to keep to themselves. But Vilgot longs for contact, for someone who can stroke a cheek when needed. This hunger also becomes deadly and dangerous. Mother reads aloud: “Little Red Riding Hood didn’t know what a mean animal the wolf was. That’s why she wasn’t afraid at all.”

So Vilgot drives usually near its home area in western Oslo, an area that returns to Dahl. At the same time a fictional and real geography – at the interface of various social groups and historical events. There is the shipowners’ school, the spectacular high-rise residence of former UN Secretary General Trygve Lie, the artists’ townhouses and the run-down house of the farmer Count von Hoffs/Arge. Hoff also has a film projector and Vilgot can share the lonely aging man’s lost love captured on film. They keep looking at the woman’s face, but once Vilgot fatally asks if they could play the film backwards because he knows it could be fun.

It is violent in places, but there is a reconciling light

The structure of the novel is also partly backwards. You’ve “arrived” at the end of the beginning of the novel, so to speak, but you have to read on to find out how the various lonely people in the area – whom Vilgot sees or who you want to be seen by – get to the crying elephant. On re-reading it becomes clear how effectively Dahl works with laying out signs to decipher, traces, a guide, a bit like the stones and breadcrumbs of Hansel and Gretel.

The novel’s complex structure and the interplay between the boy and the adult narrator are reminiscent of Jonas Brun’s “Shadowland”, also a very impressive depiction of childhood. There is an adult self who has great knowledge about an event, but how should it be told? What detours need to be taken? And how can you understand what you went through and what consequences it had? It is violent in places, but there is a reconciling light. Dahl’s three Sverigeaktuelle novels are a brilliant example of how really good texts are significantly nourished by biographical material, but are shaped into maximally true literature through the possibilities of fiction. This is truly urgent reading.

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