Reviewed by Jan Wilm

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.