“Dag” is the Norwegian word for “day,” and for some of us, every day is Solstad Day. Dag Solstad, the strangest and most stupendous writer of Norway, has, over the last few decades, built up a small, discerning readership in English. And it’s looking for new members. This could be you.
Novel 11, Book 18
by Dag Solstad
tr. Sverre Lyngstad
(New Directions, June 2021)
Reviewed by Jan Wilm
For those of us to whom “Dag Solstad” at first sounded more like some folksy midsummer celebration than the name of a writer—we may rest assured, he is a writer, and his novels are mind-bogglingly brilliant. But first, some basics: Dag Solstad was born in the city of Sandefjord, Norway on the 16th of July 1941—easy to remember, as it’s the title of one of his as-yet untranslated novels, 16.07.1941 (2002)—he used to be a Maoist but, like many former radicals, has largely forsaken ideology in the conviction that nothing will ever change anyway. His large oeuvre consists of novels, plays, stories, essays—and the former communist even wrote the chronicle of one of Norway’s largest corporations. Today, Solstad lives in Oslo—but he writes for the world. And the whole world, it seems, loves Dag Solstad—or it should. His work has been translated into thirty languages, he has won numerous major awards, and is considered a perpetual contender for the Nobel Prize. Among his fans are Karl Ove Knausgård, Haruki Murakami, and Lydia Davis, who specially learned Norwegian to read more of Solstad than is available in English.
So far, New Directions has published four of his novels in handsome editions and very good translations, the latest of which is Solstad’s eleventh novel and eighteenth book overall—again, easy to remember, it’s called Novel 11, Book 18. First published in 1992, it introduced a recurring character: Bjørn Hansen. He would return in two further (still untranslated) novels: 17. roman (2009, translating to “17th novel”—New Directions, take note, it’s one of his best) and Tredje, og sidste, roman om Bjørn Hansen (2019, translating to “Third, and last, novel about Bjørn Hansen”).
For my money, Solstad is the contemporary writer most capable of expressing the death of the soul in our time. He’s also hilarious. The strange events that pepper the continually monotonous lives of his characters rival the weirdest literary incidents in a surrealist and absurdist tradition that ranges from Nikolai Gogol to Daniil Charms to Leonora Carrington to César Aira. The way these incidents transpire, however, is so singular that it should be described with Ane Fårsethas’s term “Solstadian”—though I personally would prefer something a little more suitably odd, perhaps “Dagesque.” What Fårsethas sees as Solstadian in her Paris Review interview with the author is concerned mostly with Solstad’s style, his long sentences that weave and wander like those corkscrew clauses of the two famed Thomases: Mann and Bernhard. Apart from Solstad’s idiosyncratic style and language, what I see as peculiarly—let’s go with it—“Dagesque” is the way the author structures his novels. Solstad surrounds the weird events in his fictions with lives lived in such a thicket of mundanity and boredom that the intruding strangeness seems much more striking than in the previously mentioned writers’ invariably weird worlds.
The first novel about Bjørn Hansen begins in the matter-of-fact way in which Solstad often starts his peculiar tales of lonely schlemiels that crave a bit of quixotic adventure to rattle their existential tedium: “When this story begins, Bjørn Hansen has just turned fifty and is waiting for someone at the Kongsberg Railway Station.”
Apparently, before the story may fully begin in that way, the novel digresses for over seventy brilliant pages of backstory until the narrative arrives at the promised train station. First, we learn about Bjørn Hansen’s bland life of little incident. He ends an uneventful marriage after an affair with a woman named Turid Lammers, “a secret erotic adventure.” Consequently, he starts a life with Turid, who leaves Oslo to return to the family villa in the small town of Kongsberg. Hansen explains that his life with Turid is not based on clear-cut emotions, but rooted in something more complex: “It was his obsession with the adventure that had sucked him in, so intensely that he could barely breathe, and not his love for Turid Lammers. The allure of it.” It’s an early glance into Bjørn’s character, that he is more readily drawn to more complicated and perhaps more abstract concepts than clearly felt emotions. Ultimately, this will lead him to take an extreme action when he is experiencing a midlife crisis, shortly after the story begins at the Kongsberg Railway Station.
Before that, he lives his quiet life with Turid. At his wife’s urging, Hansen becomes the town treasurer and joins an amateur theater group at the center of which stands his elegant wife. “Treasurer in the day, enthusiast in the evening.” The troupe performs operettas and musicals, with moderate success—after all, among them is a “singing dentist.” But out of a whim, Hansen points out to the members of the Kongsberg Theater Society “the feelings of emptiness they were left with once a performance was over, due to an operetta’s lack of intellectual substance.” So, the avid reader Hansen suggests they try their hand at putting on a play, a piece of high art. The epitome of high art in Solstad is always the work of Henrik Ibsen.
Hilariously, the novel describes how the troupe puts on one of Ibsen’s most challenging works—The Wild Duck, a play which is all about subtle emotion, high betrayal, and heated argument. They even hire “an unemployed director” from Oslo. “He came up, attended the rehearsals, drank steadily, and can scarcely have remembered anything of it all.” One of Solstad’s greatest charms is his pacing, and much of its comedy derives from the different weight he places on individual incidents. After a lengthy description of the preparation of The Wild Duck performance, he quickly shifts gears and brusquely summarizes: “To make a long story very short: it turned out to be a total flop. It was an extremely poor performance.” Yet, it wasn’t all spilt milk, because on stage Bjørn Hansen gains a significant insight into his wife, Turid. Whereas all the actors and actresses bombed shamelessly, Turid’s performance was a success, a diamond among the ashes. “He went down, but she refused to go down with him.” Bjørn considers this the ultimate betrayal and decides he can no longer live with Turid. So, the middle-aged tax collector leaves his wife, continues his life as a bachelor until he turns fifty, when he finally finds himself at the beginning of the story: “And so, there he stands one morning at the end of August. At Kongsberg Railway Station. Waiting for a train.” On this train will be his son from his first marriage, Peter.
The twenty-year-old is staying with his father for a while, and Solstad narrates their encounter with a near-objective dryness that has enough confidence in description and elides judgment or even analysis. Solstad’s lean prose sometimes gives way to a hardened poetic melancholy (“It is not enough to feel, inwardly”), existential dread (“the realization that his whole life had been in pursuit or something that was destined to dissolve, because Nature has no mercy”), and employs a number of slightly starchy stock expressions (“until the crack of dawn”) to couch his characters not only in dull lives but also in an outwardly bland prose. Sverre Lyngstad finds the right balance of sparing melancholy and wryly ironized cliché to make Solstad’s idiosyncratic tone sing in English as well.
As the remote father and his lost son try to get along, Solstad narrates yet another disastrous incident in Bjørn’s life, and as with the Ibsen performance, the transpiring tragedy isn’t outrageous, or even necessarily dramatic. Instead, its pain is exuded through the subtle observations Bjørn makes, which tell him how isolated and lonely he really is, and how lost in life, how few answers he has to the questions of existence. In Solstad’s hands—as it was in Ibsen’s—the conflict between the generations is often tragic and comic simultaneously, as when Bjørn judges that his son’s “naked face” is “almost obscene,” or when he rates this young man in “modern leisurewear” and “complacent track shoes” as “something of a stereotype,” only soon to wonder to himself: “When a twenty-year-old tells his father that we live in a tough world, what does it mean? When he glorifies a poster advertising a red sports car as if it was high art?”
The relationship between Bjørn and his wife Turid and that between Bjørn and his son Peter parallel each other, while they are marked by an important difference. Whereas with Turid, Bjørn simply sees no other way but to sunder the bond, he cannot let go of his son—and with his son he feels a deeper loneliness, a vicarious loneliness, namely that of his son, whom he understands is “friendless.” He sees himself much more in the child than he ever could in his wife. He recognizes that the son’s life is “his own, chillingly his own,” until he comes face to face with what he had suspected all along, that his life is a failure, not even a great failure, a modest one, but painful nonetheless. He speaks to himself of “the damn loneliness which is at the bottom of every modern soul.”
Shortly after this realization, the narrative takes a sharp and sudden turn and becomes one of the oddest literary texts you’ll ever read, as Bjørn makes one of the oddest choices in all of contemporary literature. He travels to Vilnius, Lithuania on business, but seeks out a doctor there instead: “The problem was to find the right man; if he did, everything would go like clockwork.” He does find the right man and undergoes some sort of treatment—narrated with vexing elusiveness—after which he will have “to spend the rest of his life in a wheelchair.” But, oh no, there hasn’t been an accident. The whole thing was staged by Bjørn Hansen, and from now on, he will act as though he is disabled, even at times when he’s all by himself.
The effect of all this is disorientation. But it’s an exciting disorientation, as it stimulates thought and questions, even at the most basic level: What is the meaning of all this? Is Bjørn Hansen’s act a great piece of theater or a symbol of existential absurdity in a life without meaning? And is Hansen a madman who really believes he is disabled, or is he finally what he couldn’t be on the boards of the theater—a great actor? The greatest thing about Solstad is that his novels are clever enough to stimulate these questions without spelling them out, and that his works are self-assured enough to trust they’re able to stimulate them. Despite the high absurdity and the hilarious surrealism, this author’s novels are that rare thing: works of art which take you, dear reader, seriously, which place enough trust in you to let you think. And that is a positively optimistic thing, especially in a world that might be beyond hope.
Jan Wilm is a writer and translator whose work has appeared in the Los Angeles Review of Books, The Believer, the Times Literary Supplement, and elsewhere. He is the author of The Slow Philosophy of J. M. Coetzee and the novel Winterjahrbuch. He is a lecturer at the Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf.
Banner image: Kongsberg Station by Trond Strandsberg, reproduced under CC BY-SA 3.0 license