The Mystery of What Befell in the Ditch

A man, Myrbråten, has been commissioned by an official body in Norway to compose a report on the status of Norway's national monuments and their preservation. Myrbråten abandons the project and throws his mobile phone and laptop into a ditch, then meets a woman, Helene, in a pub, and convinces her to move to the country with him. On the farm lives Myrbråten's older brother, Bjørnar, who raves and keeps calling Helene mother.

Helene tells Myrbråten he must solve the Bjørnar problem, which he does by driving him to Sweden and letting him loose, though he tells Helene he has murdered him and buried the body. As the police pursue Myrbråten, suspecting him of murder, he flees into the forest, becomes a "man of the forest," and this new phase gives rise to a new series of ruminations, particularly about language, how we make a language our own, how we distinguish our own thoughts from those that have been fed into us.