The novel Professor Andersen’s Night (1996) by the Norwegian author Dag Solstad, who has died aged 83 following a heart attack, starts late on Christmas Eve. The middle-aged literary scholar Pål Andersen is celebrating alone. In the apartment block opposite he sees a beautiful young woman, and then behind her appears a young man. The latter puts his hands round her neck and squeezes until she becomes still and limp.
“I must call the police,” the professor thinks, “it was murder.” But he finds himself unable to, and confiding in a close friend proves equally impossible. Weeks pass with no report of any missing woman. But in late February Andersen goes to the local sushi bar and finds himself sitting next to the opposite flat’s owner, Henrik Nordstrøm, as he now knows him to be. The men talk, Henrik is friendly, and Andersen’s sense of bemused inability to act sets in further. Whatever the mystery here, it is not the nature of the actual crime, but the existential helplessness of its witness.
