-O-M. The initials of Tomas Olsen Myrbråten, the narrator in Thure Erik Lund's The Mystery of What Befell in the Ditch, spell out the Norwegian word for "empty". Approaching 38, he's already a relic. He spends his days slumped at the kitchen table or staring out of the window, convinced that the ceiling is about to fall and crush him. He sobs about the state he's in and the state of society around him. Of one thing he's sure: "It is no longer me who cries, but the world, the world crying, in me." Nordic weltschmerz: you'd have to be a saint not to giggle.

Lund has been described by Karl Ove Knausgård as the "greatest Norwegian contemporary writer"; this novel, originally published in 1999, is his first to be translated into English. In it, Tomas describes himself, over and over and over again, as a "life-of-the-mind individual". Cursed as much as blessed, life-of-the mind individuals have a keen and unconsoling sense of how things are ("one is a wretched, contemptible, and unworthy being") and how things will end for them ("in the sewers of society, at nature's nadir, incessantly ground down into the mud and the mire so that one day, millions of years from now, they become oil, life-of-the-mind oil, at the very bottom of life itself"). Is he making fun of himself? In 2026, he seems closer to an eco-prophet.

Perhaps it was always meant to be this way. His family line consisted of poor, mostly illiterate farmworkers in eastern Norway and, after he moved away to university, he learned to speak about his upbringing in casual, almost condescending fashion. Over time though, especially as he travels across the country, he begins to question his snobbery. He's aghast at how history is being turned into heritage, ancient folk traditions repackaged for tourists, culture seen as being not so much about lived experiences and relations as a commodity. Wildness is disappearing. Even mountain roads no longer wind like they used to. There are echoes of Thoreau in his invocations of "children getting lost in the woods, in a world without human signifiers, without signage or trails, only celestial bodies and natural forms". Echoes too of John Berger's Pig Earth, as he charts the impact of machinery on how peasants speak and engage with each other.

This is a universal story of modernity and its discontents, but Lund is at pains to give it a specifically Norwegian dimension. Like one of Thomas Bernhard's grumpus narrators railing against Austrian idiocracy, Tomas lays into his country's governing class ("a gang of boasting sanctimonious humanistoid individuals") which has ushered in "a thoroughly criminal, narcotised shopping-mall world", a "Norwegian global hell" full of "pale, withered souls who seek solace in cinemas and fitness studios". Listing his present-day false prophets – "computer engineers, course facilitators, business commissioners" – he sounds like someone who's read the Unabomber Manifesto.

What's funniest – or maybe funny-tragic – is that Tomas thinks he can express all this not only in a think piece commissioned by the Royal Norwegian Ministry of Culture, but to the face of the culture minister herself. She is not amused, especially when he blurts out a four-letter word. Dragged out of her office by security guards, his reputation and social standing are destroyed. He's assumed to be a nationalist, a Nazi even, is unable to get work, and becomes homeless.

Then things get even worse: in a nightmarish middle section, somewhere between Hieronymus Bosch and Lars von Trier, he returns to his parents' farm. He's hoping to turn his back on decadent city ways, but there's nothing Arcadian here. In this perverted pastoral Tomas digs ditches, lives with his drunken wife Helena, whose gaze is a "pustulated mongrel-eyed leer", cages his mentally defective brother and dumps him in a remote Swedish village. Is this the authentic Norway he's been hankering for? It's in a state of decomposition and liquefaction – all slime, moonshine, blood, vomit, grease.

Language is a key actor throughout. Paragraphs are often long, larded with clauses that repeat, with sententious neologisms that David M Smith translates as "enfletted", "enhammered", "vocabulation". At other times, when Tomas lets go his urban sensibilities, the sentences are slangy and pungent.

The Mystery of What Befell in the Ditch is prescient about the "language forms" that digital capitalism requires – the data and information, the "demonic and inhuman" scientism, the fear of allegory. Its astonishing final section sees Tomas, alone in a forest, all ears. He can hear himself, his surroundings, the past, the future. He's attuned to what connects him to shit, steel wire, dead plant tissue, bacterial cultures. Eureka! "That's what I was. A kind of pulverised form of language which, by chance, had been imbued with natural substances, here and there." Nordic weltschmerz: what a wonder it is.