In one particular scene — one of many very powerful scenes of a young man, the author presumably, the protagonist, becomes through his experiences an adult — the author describes Trond leaving his father on a bus for Oslo to his home with his mother, somehow knowing that this juncture is severe and huge, that something is happening for which he has no words and cannot grasp or understand the full significance of, and closes with this particularly powerful phrasing:

…and then I forced myself to sit still on my seat and finally I fell asleep with the rattling window banging against my head and the drone of the diesel engine singing in my ears.

And phrases like that after the scene portrayed rock me and send waves of feeling through my body.

Where do they learn this stuff? The words? The ‘tude? Eh?