Published in 1993, ‘Byen og verden’ (The City and the World) is a novel by Danish author Peer Hultberg that won the ‘Nordic Council Literature Prize’ in 1993. Hultberg grew up in Horsens and spent some of his teenage years in Viborg: he studied musicology and Slavic philology, and graduated in analytical psychology from the ‘C. G. Jung Institute’ in Zurich in the 1970s. He made his literary breakthrough with his barrier-breaking novel ‘Requiem’ in 1985, and spent the latter part of his life in Germany. ‘Byen og verden’ is a novel consisting of 100 micro-novels about the citizens of Viborg: the narrator is omniscient in the old-fashioned way, but keeps an ironic distance to people, and the stories are not connected. Literally, no “Vi-borg” (no “we”) is established in the portrayal of the town: it is up to the reader to make the mortar and build connections. The picture of the town is dark, characterised by cruelty and cramped small-town mentality: feelings of guilt and shame dominate the story, and the formal fragmentation of the novel is an artistically adapt contrast to the human isolation and exposure of the town dwellers. According to the Adjudicating Committee, ‘Byen og Verden’ is an uncompromising novel, rich and entertaining in its tension between material and form. The town of Viborg’s voice apparently tells us objectively about the residents in different social groups in a hundred micro-novels from birth to death: an intense feeling in every private fate with some meeting each other and others remaining alone.
