American critics tend to invoke a common repertoire of tropes in their descriptions of Norwegian authors: the profundity of the prosaic, the transcendence of the quotidian, the existential and the unremarkable. To read Karl Ove Knausgaard is to “find even the most mundane action pulsing with, if not meaning, then at least beauty, which can function as its own kind of meaning.” Nobel laureate Jon Fosse’s prose is “bleak,” “spare and existential,” “austere,” “slow, lambent, druidic,” “intimate,” and “dirgelike.” Dag Solstad’s subject is “the heaped disappointments of existence.” Jenny Hval explores the “grotesque banalities of human existence.” Vigdis Hjorth “specializes in life’s subtle flavors and rhythms . . . between the lines of the mundane.” One could easily make a game of how frequently these words — banal, mundane, intimate, spare, austere, bleak, existential, human , and so on — appear. Bingø! These descriptions are essentially apt.…