His name means Day Sun City.
I’ve been studying Norwegian (Bokmal) using Duolingo since January 1, 2022. It’s my Words With Friends, or at least that’s how I justify the half an hour (split in two sessions) each day to the wife, a WWF master.
I’m not sure why I’m bothering to learn a new language at this point in life. I should focus on shoring/sure-ing (?) up my English, or at least extending my understanding of Spanish. But it’s been worth it to learn what some common/famous surnames mean (Fisk, fish; Hester, horses).
I suppose it’s also recommended to learn new languages for the sake of neuroplasticity, creation of new cerebral pathways as cognitive capacities otherwise atrophy with age.
And there are a lot of Dag Solstad novels that haven’t been translated, so maybe one day in the next few years I’ll give one a try.
Also, I’ve spent a good deal of time in Norge this past decade, thanks to Hamsun, Knausgaard, Tomas Espedal, Jon Fosse, Tarjei Vesaas, and now Dag Solstad. I can easily imagine a family vacation upon the fjords, and it’d be cool to understand the natives even if they all speak fluent engelsk.
For now, here are some brief impressions of the handful of Dag Solstad novels available in English translation, mostly from New Directions.
Novel 11, Book 18
Sverre Lyngstad (Translation)
“Dag” is something I sometimes said as a kid to mean “damn” or “wow” — and it holds up to describe my first Dag Solstad experience.
A few pages into this, once the peculiar protagonist who likes to read good lit sets off into the interior of Norway, a string of sentence fragments activated my magic-eye co-creating imagination capacities. Midway through the first of the novel’s three sections, as Bjorn Hanson dances in sync with others in a musical, the thump of their feet on the boards of the stage, in particular, I experienced the same sort of teleportation.
It feels like it was an improvised first-person narration and then at one point the author hit ctrl + F and replaced “I” with “Bjorn Hanson” and then attended to the tenses.
Seemed to lose a little steam midway through the section with his son, but recovered in the last section thanks in part to withholding the details of his deal with the drug-addict doctor.
The ending seems like self-inflicted symbolic-parallel justice for his immature flightiness with his two marriages, although his ambiguous disability perfectly jibes with his second wife’s ambiguous fidelity (physically yet not emotionally loyal) and his ambiguous relation with his abandoned son.
Generally I just enjoyed the vibe — flowing clear prose and approach, plus the Norwegian setting and overall peculiarity.
Ordered all other Dag Solstad novels available in English translation about midway through the first section — can’t think of a better recommendation than the fact this one activated the completist instinct.
(Dag is good name for a dog BTW.)
Shyness and Dignity
Sverre Lyngstad (Translation)
Dag is becoming a downright favorite, marking late December 2021 and, I’m sure, early 2022 as I run through his complete translated work. After Novel 11, Book 18, I knew what to expect, more or less, but still this seemed a little more stylistically refined or individuated, Bernhardian at times with repetition of certain key phrases and long paragraphs albeit not as exaggerated, less artful, therefore more real seeming, not specifically structured in separate chapters but like Novel 11, Book 18, there are clear sections, an initial section emphasizing the role of a minor character (Dr. Relling) in Ibsen’s “The Wild Ducks” (downloaded the complete Ibsen for a few bucks and will try to make my way through it over time) to bored high school students, followed by a wonderful freakout with an umbrella that won’t open, smashing the poor thing, Elias Rukla cutting his hand, and calling a student a name I will not repeat herein, before it proceeds into a long passage of backstory, at first about a charismatic philosopher friend / drinking buddy (Johan Corneliussen) who loves hockey, Wittgenstein, Marx, advertising, drinking to excess, everything equally.
Elias Rukla, the primary character (feels like a first-person narrator but it’s close third), and Johan Corneliussen, who like all characters in Solstad novels apparently are always referred to by their complete names, are inseparable, all life is happening to them in the late ’60s/early ’70s, and it’s ahead of them. The friend takes up with an indescribably beautiful woman (Eva Linde), marries her, they have a child (often referred to by only her first name), and then in the mid ’70s, Johan Corneliussen suddenly . . . oh I guess I shouldn’t just regurgitate everything that happens.
The point is that Elias Rukla, the primary character in the novel, is a minor character in life. By the time he has his umbrella freakout he’s 53 and life has passed him by, he feels unnecessary, the culture as presented in TV and newspapers no longer reflects his interests in literature and philosophy. A great Finnish poet dies and isn’t mentioned in the paper yet a newscaster dies and it’s front page news and there’s a day of mourning. He no longer has anything to say and his colleagues don’t either.
In a great bit toward the end he imagines himself auditioning before Proust, Mann, Celine, Joyce, Musil, et al, for a role in one of their novels, and only Mann he believes would consider casting him with his characteristic gentle irony. Proust would dismiss him with a raised eyebrow, Celine with a huge laugh.
In one of the most moving parts in this, he’s giddy when a mathematics teacher makes an offhand comment that he’s feeling like Hans Castrop and should’ve stayed home under the eiderdown — the reference to the primary character in Mann’s The Magic Mountain suggesting an opportunity for the sort of spirited conversation and connection Elias knew in college. This bit hit home for me, someone who once nearly fell to the floor as though having a stroke when a new colleague said they’d previously interned at Archipelago Books, a major rarity in my particular corner of the professional world. For a reader approaching 50, I appreciated many of Elias’s concerns and observations.
Generally, as with Novel 11, Book 18, I’m more or less the same age as the primary male characters, and both so far have been readers of canonical literature and generally stable but somewhat cracked, again which I totally relate to.
Overall, I find Solstad’s approach magnetic and organic, effortless yet never debased, always flowing ahead, propelling meaning, significance, depth, using ambiguity to great effect (novel’s major character is a minor character in his own life). Everything feels real, autobiographical, even if it’s fictional, like a first-person narrative voice edited during the last draft to third person. It feels concise and open, sections may drag here and there and I may have checked the socials now and again in the middle of multi-page paragraphs but I always very much wanted to return to this and enjoyed reading it during most of a day off, that night, and another morning during gray down days between Xmas and New Year’s Eve 2021, and I look forward to becoming a Solstad completist in record time.
The title though? “Shyness” doesn’t feel like the right word. The end is about achieving dignity in light of the quiet desperation of aging etc but instead of shyness it should be a word that suggests a minor character, a Prufrock type, no Prince Hamlet. A reserved support player who with dignity earns the right to critique the proceedings, like Dr. Relling in The Wild Duck whose importance Elias argued for early on.
Professor Anderson’s Night
Agnes Scott Langeland (Translation)
So thankful I didn’t read the back cover copy on my edition until after I finished, otherwise this would be devoid of the plot momentum, intrigue, narrative drive, thriller/suspense mechanics that propel it through sections involving dinner conversation with established academics/artists in their mid-50s, including former radicals, and later discussion of the professor’s career devoted to Ibsen. A short novel that uses a “Rear Window” scenario to propel discussion, backstory, and essayistic insight mostly about the utility of literature, reading and teaching it, living with it, how at best it invigorates the life force, how it spans time from late ’90s Norway to Ibsen’s 1880s to the plays of Sophocles et al, and how occasional recognition of this makes student eyes gleam.
As with the other Solstads I’ve read so far, he’s a master of ambiguity. Ambiguity is always the answer, the punchline. In this the phrase “the ambiguity of the joke” appears after two female student “barmaids”/servers playfully, half-jokingly invite him to visit their bars one day. Similarly, the whole novel functions as an ambiguous joke — alone on Xmas in Norway, a vision like Scrooge’s not of Xmas past, present, or future, but of a murder, but did he really see it, should he report it and tell people about it, and what if he’s really only seeing his own past, some physical manifestation of a psychic struggle with his own ex-wife who may as well be dead to him now? He’s more than ambivalent about it — he’s multi/polyvalent, crossing and triple-crossing his tracks, deciding essentially not to decide what to do about it.
And then when confronted with the killer himself, when able to take action or continue waffling, when the killer himself dares to question the utility of the professor’s wall of books, each of which he holds in his head, do those books rise to the occasion or do they just present a precedent for further waffling in psychological/emotional/intellectual conflict that sends the professor to his sick bed for a bit?
Generally this functioned like a thriller, formally — I was rapt, reading at an elevated pace three-quarters through as the prof encountered the killer in person etc, and the narrative drive created by the possibly imagined murder seen across the way served to propel reams of perfectly enjoyable interpretation and abstraction mostly about literature and its role in lives dedicated to it.
There’s also a spiritual catharsis at one point, but at the pivotal point my engagement was interrupted by my wife showing me something silly she saw on Instagram. Such is life.
Maybe I’ll read it again one day. My reading experience generally was interrupted by New Year-related activities and recovery days on which I couldn’t quite read much. Would’ve liked to read this in two solid sittings.
T Singer
Tiina Nunnally (Translation)
Worth it alone for the three-page digression about Norwegian hammer throwers. Liked this one same as the others albeit a little less so, maybe because it’s 80 pages longer than the others and felt looser and somewhat repetitive or effortful/forced (instead of Solstad’s usually effortless/natural/organic proceedings) in the last Oslo section?
A somewhat different central character in this one — although Singer spends his life around books as a librarian, he isn’t a reader of literature, isn’t a professor or Ibsen devout or interested in the arts other than seeing movies, an expression maybe of his passivity?
In his twenties he had the first few lines for a novel (amusing pages demonstrating the development of his first line and possible second lines) but that falls away when he commits to becoming a librarian and then a family man and cook and adequate step-father.
Feels real and always engaging, the natural looseness of life, its mystery, although Singer is almost exaggeratedly removed from an engaged experience of life. (Solstad’s characteristic ironic ambiguity.)
Another atypical central character, a typical minor character given the lead role. (Solstad’s audacity of the unremarkable, possibly where KOK gets it from?)
All central characters so far have been around fifty which jibes with my particular temporal placement and so these books seem like the perfect accompaniment as I approach that pinnacle.
Loved the description of the train travel from Oslo to the Telemark region. Also appreciated the few amusing authorial intrusions/commentary, which I don’t remember appearing as much or at all in the other novels.
Armand V
Steven T. Murray (Translation)
Highly recommend reading any of his other translated novels before this one. Put it down on page 80 after skimming from page 60. Had some interesting metafictional moments but the conceit doesn’t seem to work for me — seems false and unnecessary and so I couldn’t stick with it and my eye wandered to other books. I might return to it one day and if so I’ll add to this here.
For now, enjoy this entertaining reveal of the author at home (he pets the cat, as any good protagonist should do in the first scene, says he prefers classical, discusses the two Swedish TV channels available to him, as far as I can understand — maybe 70% of the text at this point):
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To support the publishers who have supported my writing, please acquire a copy of Like It Matters: An Unpublishable Novel, Chaotic Good, Neutral Evil ))), and/or JRZDVLZ (all from Sagging Meniscus). Or my translation of Horacio Castellanos Moya’s Revulsion: Thomas Bernhard in San Salvador. Or Thanks + Sorry + Good Luck: Rejection Letters From the Eyeshot Outbox directly from the publisher. Or even a copy of The Shimmering Go-Between directly from me (the publisher is kaput).