Translation
Life on Earth
It is hardly a coincidence that the word «weed» crops up time and again in Theis Ørntoft’s novel Habitat (2025). The Danish author has written a wild and strong-willed work of autofiction, one that pushes relentlessly through every obstacle in its path. Like a dandelion, the novel strains toward the light, even (or should I say especially) when everything seems dark and hopeless.
The first-person narrator, Theis, who by all appearances is identical to the author himself, struggles not only with writer’s block and crippling anxiety attacks. He has also become the unhappy owner of a dilapidated, overgrown holiday house on the Danish island of Møn. Having bought the house in hopes of finding the peace and concentration needed to write, he finds himself constantly distracted by the natural world pressing in from beyond its four walls.
Those walls are riddled with holes, allowing beetles, slugs, and rainwater to find their way into the writer’s study. When a family of mice takes up residence in the living room, Theis resorts to mouse poison. Before long, he witnesses a mouse’s death in real time: «I stand there watching it draw its last breath. I suppose I’ve killed an entire little family. Father, mother, and child.»[i]
This distressing experience sets off a stream of self-scrutiny and civilizational critique. Theis tries to make «emotional sense of his reaction.» He is «unmoved by forest fires, plane crashes, and landslides in Indonesia, yet killing four mice awakens something almost unbearable.»i The narrator expresses how it feels to be an environmentally conscious Western consumer in an age of climate and ecological crisis. How are we to live with ourselves when we know the harm we inflict on the natural world simply by being alive? This cognitive dissonance runs like a red thread through both Habitat and much of Ørntoft’s body of work.
Autobiography and Ecology
Habitat is rich in references to Ørntoft’s earlier books, especially his debut novel Solar (2019). Several scenes from that novel reappear in Habitat. The fact that Solar, like Habitat, draws on the author’s own experiences further blurs the boundary between the writer and his oeuvre. Like an environmentally conscious and hypersensitive Karl Ove Knausgård[ii], Ørntoft does not shy away from exposing his own flaws and vulnerabilities.
Reading about the author’s many bad habits is as unsettling as it is fascinating. With a considerable measure of shame and self-awareness, Ørntoft writes about his addiction to online pornography and his frequent visits to prostitutes. He reads the manifesto of the Unabomber, Ted Kaczynski, and recognizes aspects of himself in the terrorist’s critique of modern civilization. He writes about his diagnoses, his drug use and his darkest thoughts. In Ørntoft’s fictional universe, everything is allowed, including what is forbidden.
Although the author’s own inner world occupies a great deal of space on the page, Habitat is far from a self-absorbed novel. Ørntoft approaches the world with extraordinary sensitivity. He is constantly searching for connections between his own life, society and the planet we inhabit. At times, Habitat reads like an autobiographical systems novel,[iii] or even like an ecosystems novel. Indeed, Ørntoft is deeply concerned with the fragile state of the planet, a concern already signalled by the novel’s title.
Every ecological system is made up of habitats, defined by Merriam-Webster as «the place or environment where a plant or animal naturally or normally lives and grows.»[iv] A habitat is a place where we feel at home. Theis’ core problem is that he doesn’t feel at home anywhere. He struggles to establish boundaries around his own existence on earth. He is unable to shield himself from the digital reality, which intrudes in the form of addictive online pornography and doomscrolling. He repeatedly allows himself to be drawn into deep, digital rabbit holes from which he struggles to find his way back out.
Digital Weeds and Dirty Supply Chains
Theis’ compulsive internet browsing leaves a distinct mark on the novel’s text. The internet gives him access to an inexhaustible flow of information, causing his notes to «grow like weeds.» This digital overgrowth nourishes the novel’s radical critique of contemporary civilization. In a lengthy and polemical stream of thought, he immerses himself in what he calls «the dirty realities» of the supposedly eco-friendly industries:
Electric cars, solar panels, wind turbines. Mine after mine, supply chain after supply chain. (…) An electric car means dynamite blasted into the earth, mountaintops blown apart, bulldozers and excavators tearing into the ground; it means black smoke from coal and oil, toxins in lakes and rivers, the destruction of habitats (…)[v]
It is worth noting the term «supply chain», which recurs throughout the novel. The term is very much a product of the industrial age. According to Wikipedia, it denotes a «complex logistics system that consists of facilities that convert raw materials into finished products and distribute them to end consumers». The term conjures up images of assembly lines, container ports, forklift trucks and inexpensive cotton garments. We might also envision the endpoint of the supply chain: vast and unwieldy mountains of waste, of which no one quite knows what to do.
Try to imagine the total volume of goods circulating through the global economy, from factory to consumer, from consumer to landfill, and then back into the cycle once more. It is an overwhelming, almost incomprehensible thought. Are we approaching the realm of the hyperobject?
From Hyperobject to Hyperabject
The concept of the hyperobject was coined by the philosopher Timothy Morton in 2012. It describes a phenomenon so vast in its spatial and temporal dimensions that it cannot be perceived in its entirety. In All Art Is Ecological (2025)[vi], Morton offers the following examples of hyperobjects: the «vast distribution processes» of evolution, the El Niño weather system, the «inner, invisible forces» of capitalism and the human unconscious. Not to mention the climate crisis, the ultimate hyperobject.
In Habitat, Ørntoft engages with all these hyperobjects. He delves into geological epochs and prehistoric mass extinctions. He writes about the climate crisis, the biodiversity crisis and the financial crisis. He probes deeply into his own unconscious. He contemplates the planets and the solar system with a sense of wonder. Nothing is too large or unwieldy to find its way into Ørntoft’s fictional universe, not even the universe itself.
It is therefore no surprise that Ørntoft is thoroughly familiar with Morton’s concept. Indeed, he has effectively appropriated and reshaped it by altering a single vowel. In an essay from 2019, he introduces the term hyperabject, inspired directly by the sight of a permafrost crater in Siberia:
We walked around the crater, observing. It or us. The sight of the pale brown permafrost, visible a few metres below in the dissolved and ruptured layers of earth, sent shivers down my spine. A row of teeth in a mass grave. From time to time, a clump of mud would fall, or a stream of mud would slide down the crater walls and land heavily in the brown water below. Sounds and smells. The precise geochemical processes behind these craters remain unknown, but it is known that the tundra’s permafrost is thawing because of planetary warming, and that this thaw makes possible the release of explosive methane gas from the subsoil.[vii]
A hyperabject is a fusion of Morton’s concept of the hyperobject and Julia Kristeva’s notion of abjection. In Kristeva’s work, the term refers to a sense of revulsion toward that which transgresses established boundaries and therefore has the potential to disrupt our identity, our rationality and the social order itself. The abject destabilizes the distinction between subject and object, thereby threatening the very organization of reality.
The permafrost crater in Siberia is likely a consequence of the climate crisis.[viii] At the same time, it exceeds the limits of what we are capable of fully understanding or predicting. We do not know what tipping points may be triggered by the thawing of the tundra. In this sense, the crater becomes an image of the climate crisis’ unpredictable consequences. Like the monster in a psychological horror film, the climate crisis is both concrete and abstract, both subject and object. The climate crisis exists outside us, yet it is also within us. We have created it ourselves, but now it threatens to reshape the ecosystems in which we live, and upon which we depend.
A Planet Without an Atmosphere
Partway through Habitat, we receive an early indication that it is not only the prospect of ecological collapse that troubles Theis: «I recognize it. As if my veins are tingling.»[ix] An anxiety attack is breathing down his neck. The first-person narrator’s recurring anxiety attacks can be traced back to a car accident he was involved in during his youth. The accident led to a diagnosis of PTSD and a declaration of partial disability. The experience has left him with a profound and persistent sense of unease.
When, in adulthood, he is struck by another crushing anxiety attack, he finds himself unable to connect with the world around him. Everything appears unreal: «Every surface I touch feels artificial, the streets, the sky, the stairs at the publishing house; it is as though I am moving through a dream, a simulation, a video game (…)»[x] This description again calls to mind Timothy Morton, who in All Art Is Ecological writes that «[t]he feeling of not-quite-being-real is precisely the feeling of being in a catastrophe.»vi
Reading about Theis’s personal breakdown is like witnessing a catastrophe unfolding in real time. He moves through a world that appears increasingly fragmented and unreal. Like a modern-day incarnation of Norwegian poet Sigbjørn Obstfelder[xi], Ørntoft is existentially homeless. He compares his own brain to the planet Mars, which «once had an atmosphere. Liquid water, clouds, wind, and rain. But the atmosphere disappeared. The planet ended up a barren and desolate sphere, bathed in radiation from the universe, which would be like acid to a human being.»
Unlike Obstfelder, however, Theis has not merely «arrived on the wrong planet»; he is a damaged planet, a «planet without an atmosphere.»[xii] In this way, the author’s psychological collapse merges with both the Earth itself and the ecosystems that sustain life. The boundaries between self and world dissolve. His habitat has been shattered and dispersed.
The Art of Restoring a Habitat
In recent years, the loss of biodiversity and natural habitats has received increasing attention in the media, but the destruction of wild nature continues unabated. Old-growth forests and wetlands are giving way to data centres and motorways. Among the consequences of such policies is «habitat fragmentation», the process by which the living environments of different species become increasingly divided and disconnected.
As a scholar of literature and media, I should be cautious about venturing too far into the domain of biology. I will therefore limit myself to pointing out a possible semantic parallel: In 2026, it feels like we are living through a period of cultural habitat fragmentation, one that breaks apart our metaphorical habitats and ways of inhabiting the world. This fragmentation threatens to impair our ability to perceive, feel and make sense of reality. We rarely see the same things on our tiny mobile screens, and it is becoming increasingly difficult to determine whether what we are seeing is true.
This development is happening at a moment when we need a shared sense of reality more than ever. If we are to gain control over the hyperobjects that are generating disorder in the world, we must work together. That, in turn, requires agreement on certain common and established truths. Such agreement is difficult to achieve when digital media culture pulls in the opposite direction, aided by tech-lords whose intentions are, at best, deeply questionable.
How can we piece together the fragmented, metaphorical habitats of the present? Is it possible to «defragment» our collective perception of reality? Restoring a biological habitat requires «considerable resources, as well as extensive knowledge of the ecosystem in question, including the ecological requirements of different species and their vulnerability to human intervention and disturbance.»[xiii]
In Habitat, Ørntoft lays bare his own vulnerability. When his personal «ecological requirements» are not adequately met, the result is a breakdown. The same is likely true not only for Ørntoft, but for all human beings, and not least for the society in which we live. It is therefore imperative that we identify the «interventions» and «disturbances» that are degrading both our metaphorical and our physical habitats. Can Habitat assist us in such a process of mapping and diagnosis?
It has never, of course, been literature’s task to fix the world or to place the reader on the therapist’s couch. First and foremost, Habitat is the story of an individual attempting to repair himself and his own perception of reality. Yet it is precisely because the novel is so subjective, confessional and grounded in lived experience that I believe it has something important to show us. By viewing the world through Ørntoft’s sensitive and unfiltered gaze, we may become aware of causal relationships and psychological mechanisms that often go under the radar. We may even begin to discern the outlines of the many hyperobjects and hyperabjects that shape contemporary life.
An ecosystem is, by definition, circular. For that reason, it is tempting to let this essay bite its own tail by returning to the metaphor with which it began. Habitat is an untamed and tenacious novel, stretching toward the light whatever the cost. By the end of the novel, it even seems possible that Theis succeeds in finding a place of refuge. In this sense, the novel ultimately fulfils the promise implied by its title: if a habitat exists, then hope exists as well.
[i] Ørntoft, Theis (2025): Habitat. Gyldendal (p. 304) All quotes from the novel are translated by the present author.
[ii] Norwegian author Karl Ove Knausgård gained international fame after writing the autobiographical novels My Struggle 1 – 6(2009 – 2011).
[iii] A systems novel is a literary genre that explores the economic, cultural, and political systems that shape society. Several novels by Don DeLillo, Thomas Pynchon, and Ursula K. Le Guin may be considered part of this tradition.
[iv] https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/habitat
[v] Habitat, p. 330
[vi] Morton, T (2025) All kunst er økologisk. Cappelen Damm. Translated by the present author.
[vii] The essay was published in the now-defunct Danish journal Kritiken in 2019. I have been unable to locate the original text. The excerpt is therefore taken from a review published in the Norwegian magazine Bokvennen and translated by the present author: https://www.blabla.no/danmark-klima-klimafiksjon/det-sorte-guld-i-dansk-klimalitteratur/110086
[ix] Habitat, p. 335
[x] Habitat, p. 428
[xi] Sigbjørn Obstfelder (1866–1900) was a 19th-century Norwegian modernist poet. In his most famous poem, «Jeg ser» («I Look») from 1893, Obstfelder examines feelings of urban alienation and anxiety. He wonders if he has «arrived at the wrong planet».
[xii] Habitat, p. 408
[xiii] https://snl.no/habitatfragmentering