DISCOVERIES

SCANDINAVIAN writers long ago cornered the market on interior novels -- great long works in which the author barely leaves the confines of the protagonist’s consciousness. (Knut Hamsun of Norway, the Danish-born Norwegian Aksel Sandemose, Halldor Laxness of Iceland and Swedish playwright and novelist Johan August Strindberg are just a few of the examples that come to mind.) James Joyce and Virginia Woolf (think of “Ulysses” and “The Waves”) were also masters of the genre, but those long, dark Scandinavian winters seem to evoke a note of playful desperation -- a sense of no escape, so dark it’s funny (or at least tinged with sarcasm and irony).

Jan Kjaerstad, winner of the Nordic Prize for Literature and many other Scandinavian honors, has inherited that wry, twisted voice.

And it’s a good thing too. Kjaerstad’s main character in this fascinating, irritating, thought-provoking novel is Jonas Wergeland. Wergeland is a bit of a joke -- a television producer with an international reputation thanks to “Thinking Big,” his series on Norwegian mythology, and a national reputation thanks to his enormous (some say magical) penis. Taking him as seriously as we take Leopold Bloom would be a big mistake.

Wergeland is not a bad person; in fact, on two separate occasions, he has heroically saved another human being from death, one a lifelong enemy. He’s made a number of women -- 23, to be exact -- deliriously happy. He loves his wife, Margrete, even if he hasn’t got a clue about her interests or her world. It isn’t until he arrives home from one of his many exciting adventures filming an episode of “Thinking Big” and finds her dead on the living room floor that he even considers the possibility that she might have been more than just one of the many interlinked stories that make up his life.

In that moment, the most important incidents in Wergeland’s past flood his brain, literally paralyzing him, so that for what seems like several hours, he is unable to pick up the phone and call the police. This conceit makes sense: As a producer, he’s fascinated most by the defining stories in people’s lives (especially his own).

“The Seducer’s” first-person narrator is an ingratiating, omniscient observer of Wergeland’s existence, who apologizes profusely for his many digressions; the narration, annoyingly, shifts into the second person for the chapters in which Wergeland is actually in the present, in the living room -- a shift that is undoubtedly meant to make readers feel as though they inhabit Wergeland’s skin. (“[Y]ou crouch down next to Margrete, and you think and you think, and you look at Margrete and think long and hard.”)

The principal narrator -- who coyly insists on not revealing his (or her?) identity, in part because “I do not believe in such a concept as ‘identity’ ” -- has another agenda, which is to “say something to the Norwegian people and even to influence them in some way.”

Throughout the novel, Kjaerstad makes several references to faults in the Norwegian national character (Norway is “a nation of spoiled children”), to his countrymen’s smugness, their love of brooding, even their xenophobic and racist tendencies. “Sir William,” he writes of a particularly obnoxious, opinionated character, “is Norway.”

This self-criticism, a refutation of patriotic nationalism as well as a warning against its perils, is common in Scandinavian literature and is often found side by side with an attack on hubris. It’s a version of the so-called Jante law (in Danish and Norwegian, Janteloven), which originated in Sandemose’s 1933 novel, “A Fugitive Crosses His Tracks,” set in the Danish town of Jante. The short form of the Janteloven is “Thou shalt not get too big for thy britches.” Jonas Wergeland, it seems, has violated the Janteloven.

“So walk those last few metres, the hard road to the telephone,” advises the narrator, both to his readers and to poor Wergeland (who suspects, by now, that his seductive powers had something or other to do with his wife’s death), “thinking as you do so that it must be possible to go on living, because you are alive to the alchemy of storytelling ... that even tragedy can be transformed into stories one can live on, live off.... “