Dag Solstad, a Norwegian novelist who teased kind and type to create a world of alienation and disenchantment, enthralling and generally baffling his compatriots, died on March 14 in Oslo. He was 83.
His dying, in a hospital after a coronary heart assault, was introduced on Fb by his writer, Forlaget Oktober.
Prime Minister Jonas Gahr Retailer advised the information company Norsk Telegrambyra that Mr. Solstad “made us see Norway and the world in new methods.” His writer known as his dying “an important loss for Norwegian literature.”
In summing up his profession in 2015, the main Norwegian critic Ane Farsethas known as Mr. Solstad “a literary provocateur” who was recognized for “continuously sparking debates with each literary experiments and essays.” She acknowledged that he was largely unfamiliar to readers outdoors Norway, although he and his books have been prominently mentioned in European and American publications like Le Monde, The New Yorker, The Paris Assessment and The New York Occasions. (A headline in The Occasions E-book Assessment in 2018 requested, “Does the Identify Dag Solstad Imply Something to You? It Ought to.”)
Mr. Solstad’s bleak universe was peopled by characters in poor health at ease with themselves and at odds with their environment. Narrative was neither his essential curiosity nor his strongest go well with; he advised Ms. Farsethas in an interview for The Paris Assessment in 2016 that he was “not terribly taken with storytelling.”
However the inside lives of his principal figures obsessed him. They’ve problem breaking out of their imprisoning circumstances, besides via self-analysis; the writer himself is commonly within the background, egging them on.
“Trying again, he sees that his life has been marked primarily by restlessness, brooding, spinelessness and abruptly deserted plans,” the narrator feedback coolly on his principal character within the novel “T Singer” (1999), among the many few of his practically two dozen works of fiction to be translated into English.
In a laudatory assessment of that guide — it tells the story of a librarian who strikes to a small city and adopts his deceased estranged spouse’s daughter — James Wooden of The New Yorker known as it “maybe Solstad’s most difficult work.”
Mr. Wooden famous that “tedium, in Solstad’s work, achieves a form of hallucinatory energy” with lengthy descriptions of, amongst different issues, the Norwegian hydroelectricity firm.
The type itself mimics these evocations of tedium. Phrases are repeated and labored over — “a sample of stylized, extremely recognizable repetitions,” Ms. Farsethas known as it within the Paris Assessment interview — and tiny factors are endlessly circled.
The start of “T Singer” (we by no means be taught what the “T” stands for) is marked by hypnotic paragraphs revolving, on repeated pages, round what the writer calls Singer’s “embarrassing mistake”: He “thinks he’s speaking to B when he’s really speaking to Okay,” a lapse that torments Singer far into the longer term.
Singer, like different Solstad characters, is “a person floating inside himself, as if he’s sporting too-big clothes,” the critic Elena Balzamo wrote in Le Monde in 2001. Mr. Solstad recognized the Twentieth-century Polish grasp Witold Gombrowicz as a significant affect; like Gombrowicz’s characters, Mr. Solstad’s are self-obsessed, strangers to themselves, and look like within the fingers of extra highly effective, unnamed forces.
His experiments with kind and preoccupations with figures who “tried to not stand out in any method,” as he put it in “T Singer,” helped put Mr. Solstad “at the middle of public life” in Norway, Ms. Farsethas, the literary critic of the weekly newspaper Morgenbladet, wrote.
However he was a more durable promote elsewhere. Mr. Wooden’s 2018 appraisal in The New Yorker was one of many few sustained critiques to look within the English-speaking literary world. Evaluations have been typically respectful however mystified.
Reviewing “Armand V.: Footnotes From an Unexcavated Novel” (2006), the story of a disabused Norwegian diplomat advised completely via footnotes, the critic Adam Mars-Jones wrote within the London Assessment of Books in 2019:
“There are tiny sparks of seductiveness within the textual content, however they’re quickly stamped out. It appears that evidently obsession with the author’s struggles is accompanied by indifference to the reader’s — an indifference which will border on hostility.”
Different works struck a extra “humane” tone, as Mr. Wooden put it in praising “Shyness and Dignity” (1994). In that novel, a highschool trainer’s umbrella fails to open, triggering a public tantrum and the unraveling of his life as he quits his job. Mr. Solstad, Mr. Wooden wrote, was as “politically looking as he’s humanly delicate” in exploring the gnawing personal frustrations of an outwardly contented citizen in considered one of Europe’s most snug societies.
“Novel 11, E-book 18” (1992) additionally explored these dwelling in anonymity: The city treasurer of Kongsberg, dwelling alone, welcomes residence a son he has not seen in six years. However the father resents the son, and the homecoming turns bitter. To flee the monotony of his existence, the daddy fakes an accident and makes others consider he should use a wheelchair.
Small characters dwelling lives of quiet desperation may need appeared an imaginative leap for a author who achieved eminence in his nation’s literary pantheon. However Mr. Solstad advised interviewers that he remained haunted by the ruined future of his father, a small-town shopkeeper, who went bankrupt and died when Mr. Solstad was 11. “I’m at coronary heart an outsider, with a powerful trace of the everyday outsider mentality,” he advised The Paris Assessment.
Dag Solstad was born on July 16, 1941, in Sandefjord, an outdated whaling city within the south of what was then German-occupied Norway. He was the son of Ole Modal Solstad, a grocer who unsuccessfully tried to change into an inventor of toys and ended up a shipyard clerk, and Ragna Sofie (Tveitan) Solstad, a salesman in a shoe retailer.
Dag attended Sandefjord Municipal Excessive College, taught for a number of years after graduating, labored as a journalist in 1962, and enrolled at the College of Oslo in 1965 to review the historical past of concepts, graduating in 1968. His first guide of tales, “Spiraler,” appeared in 1965.
In 1966, he grew to become an editor of the leftist literary journal Profil, which he described as “an excessive case of luck.”
“I don’t know how my writing would have turned out with out it,” he mentioned within the Paris Assessment interview. “I selected the function of the observer.”
His first novel, “Irr! Gront!” (“Inexperienced!”), was printed in 1969 and drew comparisons to Gombrowicz. The subsequent 12 months, fascinated with Mao Zedong, he joined the Norwegian Staff Communist Occasion.
“It meant so much to me to seek out my place inside such a grand system, preventing for one of many best, most bold concepts mankind has ever produced,” he advised The Paris Assessment. He added that, though he hadn’t written about Communism since 1987, he would “assist it in any kind it could make a comeback.”
He continued to write down prolifically till the early 2000s, together with a trilogy about World Struggle II, and received his nation’s main literary prizes, together with the Norwegian Critics Prize for Literature thrice. A soccer fanatic, he additionally printed 5 books in regards to the World Cup.
He’s survived by his spouse, the journalist Therese Bjorneboe; three daughters, Gry Asp Solstad, Ellen Melgaard Solstad and Kjersti Solstad; and three grandchildren. Two earlier marriages resulted in divorce.
Mr. Solstad’s curiosity in socialism was deeply felt, although his work will not be typically a fiction of concepts. He put into play characters who’re alienated as a lot from themselves as from the bourgeois society surrounding them — the primary alienation changing into a operate of the second. “The protagonists of Solstad’s fictions,” Mr. Wooden wrote in The New Yorker, “have coldly recognized the life-lie however appear to have resigned themselves to but extra of it.”
Of considered one of his best-known creations, Mr. Solstad wrote: “He squandered his life by observing it, and all of the whereas time handed and his youth did too, and Singer didn’t raise a finger to carry on to or take pleasure in youth’s enviable state.”
Alain Delaquérière contributed analysis.
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