Published two years before Tor Ulven’s suicide, Replacement has been billed as the Norwegian author’s only “novel.” But this word doesn’t fully define a book without familiar narrative features; one which immerses us in a storyless world. Replacement is about the banal, not the novelistic. It’s a work in which, as one character says, “nothing stands out any more than anything else.” Nothing is artificially emphasized; all is equally weighted, whether people or things, or even the most microscopic physical processes. The end result is less like reading a novel than listening in on the background noise of the universe.
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