Mads Nygaard's When Me and God Were Little, translated by Steve Schein, is a stark portrayal of a hardscrabble childhood in a blue-collar, small town in Denmark, on the coast of the North Sea. Its narrator is seven-year-old Karl Gustav, and his distinctive point of view is filled with preposterous details that make perfect sense to him. "In our town you couldn't drown barefoot," he begins, and yet his big brother, Alexander, has managed to do just that, permanently upsetting Karl Gustav's worldview.
His father is a drunk, but owns his own business building houses, and "Our house was so big that Mom still hadn't gotten around to vacuuming all the rooms." "Dad weighed 250 pounds and it was all muscle, except for the hair," but then Dad goes to jail (something about the papers in his file drawers; the young narrator isn't concerned with the details), so Karl Gustav and his mother move into a county-owned house in a new town. Unperturbed, the child continues obsessing over soccer and terrorizing his teachers. Years pass, very few friends come and go, and readers follow Karl Gustav's experiments with porn, disastrous employment, grifting, a doomed love affair with another damaged young person and a developing relationship with his father. The loss of his brother will always loom large, for Alexander was a hero: "He just smiled, knowing everything."
This is an unusual novel, its narrator's voice colorful, unpolished and unforgettable in Schein's gruff translation. It is Karl Gustav's singular perspective that makes When Me and God Were Little the memorable, bizarre, poignant adventure that it is. --Julia Kastner, librarian and blogger at pagesofjulia