ars Saabye Christensen's captivating 10th novel was an unlikely candidate for his big international debut: nearly 700 pages (short on graf breaks) of mythopoeic longing and recombinant metaphors, with a narrative that bevels queasily about a realist-surrealist axis. But after The Half Brother won the 2002 Nordic Prize, British critics queued up to laud Kenneth Steven's translation. It's as much a "Norwegian" novel as Ulysses is an "Irish" one, but the basic premise is familiar. Barnum Nilsen, a dipsomaniacal screenwriter, is trying to "stitch [his] life together into one impossible but necessary picture." Necessary, because he's reached a tragic reckoning; impossible, because much of what he describes comes via secondhand memories and imaginings, beginning with the rape of his mother by a retreating Nazi soldier.

The Half Brother By Lars Saabye Christensen Translated by Kenneth Steven Arcade, 682 pp., $27 Buy this book

Fred, Barnum's older brother, is the doomed offspring of the crime, a sullen dyslexic and incorrigible outsider with a habit of going "out wandering." Skinny and tough, he's the counterpart to and protector of Barnum, a weak, insecure "midget" whose only legitimacy comes from his familial status—he has a father (the largely absent Arnold). Per bildungsroman, Barnum suffers the ignominies of youth, befriends Peder and Vivian, is inspired by the filming of Hamsun's Hunger, loses the Big V. Except for a dalliance with boxing, Fred mostly looms on the fringes of the story, a sporadic, catalytic presence, redolent of a bruised worldview, which Barnum begins to acquire. Sometime during Fred's eventual 28-year absence, an existential convergence has taken place: "It struck me that I was halfway in regard to almost everything," writes Barnum. "I was a half person."

Rife with cinematic detail, Christensen's prose is nevertheless straightforward, nearly to a fault. Yet the ultimate effect is one of concealment. Connections remain diffuse; the truth, indefinitely deferred—not surprising in a book laden with images of deception (the world's "tallest" man; a corrupt insurance salesman) and outright confession ("How much do you have to lie before someone believes it's actually the truth?"). Christensen's is a sincere reticence, born of memory's cracks and creations, inspiring a rare and unfashionable affect: wonder.