Professor Andersen's Night

In this existential murder mystery, it is Christmas Eve, and fifty-five-year-old professor Pal Andersen is alone, drinking coffee and cognac in his living room. Lost in thought, he looks out of the window and sees a man strangle a woman in the apartment across the street. Failing to report the murder, he becomes paralyzed by indecision. Professor Andersen's Night is an unsettling yet highly entertaining novel, written in Dag Solstad's signature concise, dark, and witty prose. "He's a kind of surrealistic writer of very strange novels," Huraki Murakami wrote, "I think he is serious literature."