The story begins with the narrator, a man named Syvert, driving home from Kongsberg where he has been on business. On the way, his car suddenly breaks down outside of Arendal in the biting winter cold. The engine loses power, traffic piles up behind him, and he manages only to pull over before the car dies completely. With temperatures around minus twenty degrees, he sets out the warning triangle and tries to diagnose the fault under the hood, suspecting ignition problems. Stranded on the roadside, he endures the cold, waves away some drivers who slow down, and finally decides he must find a phone to call for help.
Walking down toward a cluster of houses, he first tries one with skis propped outside but no one answers. At the next house a man in his forties with a short moustache and glasses lets him in to use the phone. Syvert calls the roadside assistance service, Falken, and gives directions to where his orange Ascona is parked. He then calls his wife Evelyn to explain the situation. Evelyn is disappointed since she and their two sons, Syvert and Joar, were expecting him home that evening, but he says the car must go to a workshop and he will probably stay in a hotel overnight. Their conversation is practical but tense, Evelyn frustrated and he weary, before they agree he will call later to say goodnight to the boys.
Back in the car, Syvert waits, drinking from a hip flask and smoking. His thoughts drift inevitably to Asja, a woman with whom he had an affair, and whose presence lingers in him like a horizon in his inner landscape. Her memory brings a mixture of warmth and grief. He reflects on the solitude, the icy stillness, and the uncomfortable sense of being exposed whenever trucks or cars pass. At last, a tow truck arrives, driven by a lively, tobacco-chewing man named Rolf. Rolf inspects the engine, suspects a blown head gasket, and insists it must go to a workshop. With brisk familiarity he chats with Syvert, teasing him for looking like a schoolteacher, until Syvert jokingly says he works for Kripos before admitting he is an engineer. They set off toward Hove, where Rolf recommends a mechanic.
The journey to Hove takes them across the bridge over Tromøya, the sea below frozen solid, the sky a deep black dotted with stars. Rolf talks about wartime history, how the Germans once took Arendal with a mere bicycle company. They pass frozen bays and the ruins of German fortifications. At the workshop, they meet Amundsen, the hefty mechanic who agrees to check the car the next day and lends Syvert a Volkswagen Beetle in the meantime. Feeling somewhat humiliated, suspected of being drunk because of a flask, Syvert drives off into the snowy darkness.
Free for the evening, he turns down a narrow road and comes upon a medieval stone church by the sea. Snow glimmers in the moonlight, and memories flood back of visiting the church as a boy with his mother and grandmother. He recalls his grandmother’s energy and black hair streaked with grey, her stories of the church’s long history, and his own childish obsession with science, space, and war machines rather than religion. As he stands before the church now, he reflects on time itself, on childhood experiences of hallucinations where he seemed to see his parents before they actually arrived, on the strange delay of consciousness, and on the mysteries of memory and existence. He contemplates the church’s role through centuries, its black paint during the Napoleonic wars to hide it from enemies, and the notion of past and future existing as ungraspable possibilities.
From the churchyard he notices figures far out on the ice, building something, and soon a car arrives with a tall man who unloads sacks. The man greets him, strangely asking if he is “a friend of us,” before brushing it off and heading down toward the ice. Uneasy, Syvert withdraws and drives on. His mind returns to Evelyn and the children, Syvert the stoic elder son and Joar the clingy younger one, and the gaps between them. He longs for warmth but is trapped in the cold Beetle with failing heating. Passing through landscapes of snowy bridges, frozen harbors, and small settlements, he recognizes places from dreams, until at last he reaches the outskirts of Arendal itself.
Stopping at an Esso station, he buys cigarettes from a teenage girl with strikingly small features, while local boys and girls pass in and out, filling the quiet evening with youthful energy. Continuing on, he arrives in the city, the harbor with its frozen ships looming like ancient monsters. As he parks, he sees two dark figures crossing the ice and climbing up to the street, then disappearing into town. The sense of isolation deepens. He thinks about the planet’s long survival through ages of ice and fire, and the stubborn persistence of life. He takes his suitcase and heads toward the hotels.
Walking through Arendal’s streets in the early evening, he encounters Bodil, once a neighbor to his grandparents. She recognizes him despite his beard. In a hurried conversation, she reveals that Lars, another childhood acquaintance, has died of cancer only weeks after diagnosis. Shocked, Syvert listens as she hurries off, leaving him stunned by the sudden intrusion of mortality into memory. He continues past shops still open on a Thursday evening, through the bus station area, recalling his mother’s return to Arendal after his father’s death, her roots in the city, and the complicated history with his grandparents. He remembers his grandfather’s quietness, his grandmother’s impatience, their stories, their garden, their attitudes during the war, and his father’s disdain for his collaborator father-in-law. These recollections open into meditations on childhood, family loyalty, and the inescapable pull of origins.
Eventually Syvert chooses to take a room at the Central Hotel rather than disturb his mother on Skibberheia. At the hotel, alone in the room, his thoughts drift again to Asja. He remembers her small apartment, their intimacy in her old bathtub, their meals and conversations, the light she brought out in him, the joy of simply watching her perform ordinary tasks. With Evelyn, his marriage is dutiful, practical, filled with family life, but with Asja he had experienced an intensity of happiness he never found elsewhere. Yet he also knew it could not last, that life with her was not possible. In this solitude, between past and present, guilt and longing, he feels her absence keenly.
The night continues with Syvert moving through Arendal, observing the frozen harbor, the silos, the hills rising steeply behind the city, the echoes of wartime bunkers in the mountains, and the traffic of anonymous cars. At one point he is followed menacingly by a black Volvo that refuses to pass him, heightening his unease, until he escapes by parking on Langbryggen. All around him, the ice, the dark, and the shadows of people crossing the frozen water contribute to a sense of mystery and threat.
Throughout, the narrative intertwines Syvert’s present wanderings with memories of his family, his childhood, and his affair. Time folds back on itself: his grandmother’s stories, his grandfather’s gifts of caramels or snippets of knowledge, his mother’s silence, his father’s political disdain, all resurface. The juxtaposition of the frozen night in Arendal with the warmth of memory and the passion of his secret love builds a dense layering of presence and absence. Encounters with strangers—Rolf the tow truck driver, Amundsen the mechanic, the suspicious man at the church, Bodil on the street—give the night a dreamlike quality, as if reality itself were slipping.
The novel’s middle sections develop this weaving of inner and outer worlds. The broken car forces Syvert into an unexpected detour, and the detour becomes a journey into memory and self. The cold, the snow, the dark landscapes are mirrors for his own isolation. His conversations with Evelyn by phone underscore his distance from his domestic life. His reminiscences of Asja reveal a lost world of love and intimacy. The city of Arendal itself becomes a stage where past and present converge: his mother’s childhood home, the family tensions of the war years, the faces of old neighbors, the sudden news of Lars’s death.
As the novel moves toward its conclusion, Syvert settles into the hotel, continuing to smoke, drink, and think. He phones Evelyn again to say goodnight to the boys, performing his role as husband and father even as he is absorbed in thoughts of another woman and another life. The city outside is quiet, wrapped in frost. Ships lie frozen in the harbor, vast and silent. People move like shadows across the ice or hurry through the streets, while Syvert remains detached, watching, remembering, drifting. The broken car at Hove is almost forgotten; what matters is the deeper recognition of time, mortality, and the fragile connections between past and present.
In the end, the night in Arendal is less about practical inconvenience than about confrontation with himself. The breakdown of the car triggers a breakdown in certainty: he confronts his divided loyalties between Evelyn and Asja, the gap between himself and his children, the weight of family history, the inevitability of death, and the incomprehensible flow of time. The novel closes in this state of suspension, Syvert alone in the city of his mother’s past, haunted by memory and desire, surrounded by the frozen sea and the silent night.