“Alexander’s the one who taught me all the rules,” says Karl Gustav, the narrator of Mads Nygaard’s coming-of-age novel When Me and God Were Little. Alexander is little Karl Gustav’s much older brother, and he has drowned in the North Sea. Their father, a boisterous boozer with a penchant for creative accounting, soon ends up on the wrong side of the law. This earthy, heartfelt novel asks big questions: How is a boy to become a man when he has lost the two most important men in his life? Who will teach him the rules?

Mads Nygaard is a Danish writer from Hirtshals, the rural town that provides the setting for When Me and God Were Little. As the author of five children’s books in addition to as many novels for adults, his experience writing for and about children clearly informs this effort to give voice to a child’s inner life. Karl Gustav is both bewildered and brave in a world that feels fractured yet magical.

Nygaard is also a co-founder of a volunteer network called Venligboerne, “the friendly neighbors,” that helps refugees settling in Denmark. An ensemble of friendly, if irascible, neighbors nurtures Karl Gustav as well. Deadeye, a blind sailor, dispatches the boy on frequent beer runs. Siegfried Tightwallet, a soccer coach, runs much-needed interference for a kid with serious anger management problems. And Leftover, a scrap dealer, gives Karl Gustav his first job, fries him eggs, and enlists him in a walkie-talkie bingo scheme to raid the wallets of the local old folks. In Nygaard’s world, everyone’s scraping by and getting into scrapes. Take Leftover: “[He] wrote everything down. He had a whole bookcase with folders that were full of all the good business he’d done, starting at the age of seven when he’d sold a sick parakeet to a raging, drunk vagabond.” Think “Northern Exposure,” but set in Jutland.

Karl Gustav doesn’t have a lot of friends, but Nygaard suggests that you only need a couple of loyal ones while you’re growing up. Like an issue of Mad magazine from the 1970s, every possible excretion and secretion takes at least one star turn as Karl Gustav matures, often in the company of his best buddy Tim, who knows how to locate the raciest bits in medical books, not to mention the local adult movie theater. For some, this aspect of the book might feel overdone, but it is central to the vision of human life that Nygaard conveys. His characters are motivated by essential bodily needs and desires, not so different from their livestock or their pets. We are animals in the first instance, the final instance, and always.

This is Nygaard’s English-language debut, and Steve Schein’s translation from the Danish creates a demotic blend of surrealism, folklore, and the realities of rural working-class life. Schein also handles dexterously the task of adjusting the narrator’s voice to each stage of Karl Gustav’s development. When Me and God Were Little stands in friendly relationship to other novels narrated by boys such as the classic There is a Happy Land (1968) by Keith Waterhouse, set in 1950s England and written with lots of humor and more realism, and the more recent We the Animals (2011) by Justin Torres, which has a similarly propulsive and scary energy. All three are full of the sort of little-bro brio that shows up in Karl Gustav’s proud reportage: “We played soccer in puddles of blood and our knees stuck to our pants in winter . . . We refused to wear band-aids.”

In the second half of the novel, as Karl Gustav grows from awkward teen to young man, his relationships become more emotionally complex in a world replete with tender absurdities. He meets his first love, Gina, under far from romantic circumstances, although he does give her the shirt off his back. They spend time on her family’s broken-down farm with a broken-down horse and an alcoholic mother who gives free rein to her pet hedgehogs and belongs to a club of hedgehog owners that publishes a specialist newsletter. Karl Gustav is not precocious, but he is exquisitely attentive to the things that bring people joy, like Gina’s mom’s contributions to The Hedgehog Herald: “Gina’s mom sent in hedgehog drawings she’d made herself. It made her incredibly glad when the mailman delivered a newssheet with one of her drawings.”

Nygaard limns how each major relationship evolves under the pressure of tragic circumstances. Karl Gustav and his mother are reunited with his father, who takes center stage as he struggles to reinvent himself. The formerly high-flying contractor starts over with a tool box on the back of his bicycle. An aspect of the book that stays with me is the emotional distance that persists between Karl Gustav and his mother. She is diligent and devoted — always cooking, cleaning, or knitting — but, from the narrator’s perspective, she lacks the charm of virtually everyone else in his life. She is the highest-functioning person in Karl Gustav’s world, but she is also anxious and traumatized by losses that keep arriving like storms from the North Sea. “Mom believed all of us were going to die all the time,” he reports, “including in the bathtub.” And maybe Karl Gustav needs that distance, because he has a secret he can’t bring himself to share with her.

There is a traditional Nordic ceremony known as topping-out. When the framing of a new building is complete, a pine bough is hung from the roof’s peak, and the crew celebrates. In this novel, there are many topping-out ceremonies, and altogether they are an apt metaphor for coming of age: not finished, but well-begun. When we take our leave of Karl Gustav, Mads Nygaard has shown us that despite poverty and great loss, a boy can become a man, but community is required, the more eccentric the better. This winning, modern folktale celebrates the miracle that integrity and maturity can take shape on the very site of disaster.

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