In an era that often feels profoundly joyless, when crises continue to stack up like a dismal game of Jenga, Joanna Kavenna’s latest novel provides a buoyant and often dizzying exploration of the nature and values of play. It begins in Oslo, where the narrator, never named and of unspecified gender, is hired as a research assistant for a terrifying philosopher, Professor Alda Jónsdóttir. Jónsdóttir is working on a book titled Thinking Outside the Box about Thinking Outside the Box, or TOTBATOTB. She is among the most famous proponents of ‘Box Philosophy’ – a branch of knowledge that engages with ‘the study of categories, the ways we organise reality into groups and sets. The ways we end up thinking inside the box, even when we are trying to think outside the box.’ 

Early on, the narrator is invited to dinner by Professor Jónsdóttir, an occasion that induces terror about clothing and the unspoken rules of dinner party behaviour. The narrator is unable to buy a bottle of wine and arrives overdressed and with holes in their socks. But any awkwardness fades when Jónsdóttir’s husband, Guðmund, a brilliant man and renowned expert on quasars, produces a hard Icelandic spirit: Black Death. We’re told it is ‘stronger than hell’. One of the other dinner party guests, a philosopher whose latest work is called Listen! (‘because all we do is speak’), is furious with Jónsdóttir for overlooking him for an award. He delivers a tirade about prize-giving ethics, intellectual fraud, personal loss and the emptiness of institutional recognition. Gesturing wildly, he smashes a bottle, ruining a salmon obtained by the professor after absurd effort.

The scene establishes the novel’s tone – amusing without being glib – and demonstrates Kavenna’s ability to shift from philosophical musing to comic drama and raw grief. Compared with the sharper satire of her previous novel, Zed, Seven displays warmth for its characters (with some exceptions). The image of the