Dag Solstad, 83, dies; his novels of alienation delighted Norwegians

Boston Globe

25-03-2025

In summing up his career in 2015, leading Norwegian critic Ane Farsethas called Mr. Solstad 'a literary provocateur' who was known for 'frequently sparking debates with both literary experiments and essays.' She acknowledged that he was largely unfamiliar to readers outside Norway, though he and his books were prominently discussed in European and American publications like Le Monde, The New Yorker, The Paris Review, and The New York Times. (A headline in the Times Book Review in 2018 asked, 'Does the Name Dag Solstad Mean Anything to You? It Should.')
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Mr. Solstad's bleak universe was peopled by characters ill at ease with themselves and at odds with their surroundings. Narrative was neither his main interest nor his strongest suit; he told Farsethas in an interview for The Paris Review in 2016 that he was 'not terribly interested in storytelling.'
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But the inner lives of his principal figures obsessed him. They have difficulty breaking out of their imprisoning circumstances, except through self-analysis; the author himself is often in the background, egging them on.
"Looking back, he sees that his life has been marked primarily by restlessness, brooding, spinelessness and abruptly abandoned plans," the narrator comments coolly on his principal character in the novel "T Singer" (1999), among the few of his nearly two dozen works of fiction to be translated into English.
In a laudatory review of that book — it tells the story of a librarian who moves to a small town and adopts his deceased estranged wife's daughter — James Wood of The New Yorker called it 'perhaps Solstad's most challenging work.'
Wood noted that 'tedium, in Solstad's work, achieves a kind of hallucinatory power' with long descriptions of, among other things, the Norwegian hydroelectricity company.
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The style itself mimics these evocations of tedium. Phrases are repeated and worked over — "a pattern of stylized, highly recognizable repetitions," Farsethas called it in the Paris Review interview — and tiny points are endlessly circled.
The beginning of "T Singer" (we never learn what the "T" stands for) is marked by hypnotic paragraphs revolving, on repeated pages, around what the author calls Singer's "embarrassing mistake": He "thinks he's talking to B when he's actually talking to K," a lapse that torments Singer far into the future.
Singer, like other Mr. Solstad characters, is 'an individual floating inside himself, as though he is wearing too-big clothing,' critic Elena Balzamo wrote in Le Monde in 2001. Mr. Solstad identified 20th-century Polish master Witold Gombrowicz as a major influence; like Gombrowicz's characters, Mr. Solstad's are self-obsessed, strangers to themselves, and appear to be in the hands of more powerful, unnamed forces.
His experiments with form and preoccupations with figures who 'tried not to stand out in any way,' as he put it in 'T Singer,' helped put Mr. Solstad 'at the center of public life' in Norway, Farsethas, the literary critic of the weekly newspaper Morgenbladet, wrote.
But he was a tougher sell elsewhere. Wood's 2018 appraisal in The New Yorker was one of the few sustained critiques to appear in the English-speaking literary world. Reviews were often respectful but mystified.
Reviewing "Armand V.: Footnotes From an Unexcavated Novel" (2006), the story of a disabused Norwegian diplomat told entirely through footnotes, critic Adam Mars-Jones wrote in the London Review of Books in 2019:
"There are tiny sparks of seductiveness in the text, but they're rapidly stamped out. It seems that obsession with the writer's struggles is accompanied by indifference to the reader's — an indifference that may border on hostility."
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Other works struck a more 'humane' tone, as Wood put it in praising 'Shyness and Dignity' (1994). In that novel, a high school teacher's umbrella fails to open, triggering a public tantrum and the unraveling of his life as he quits his job. Mr. Solstad, Wood wrote, was as 'politically searching as he is humanly subtle' in exploring the gnawing private frustrations of an outwardly contented citizen in one of Europe's most comfortable societies.
"Novel 11, Book 18" (1992) also explored those living in anonymity: The town treasurer of Kongsberg, living alone, welcomes home a son he has not seen in six years. But the father resents the son, and the homecoming turns bitter. To escape the monotony of his existence, the father fakes an accident and makes others believe he must use a wheelchair.
Small characters living lives of quiet desperation might have seemed an imaginative leap for a writer who achieved eminence in his country's literary pantheon. But Mr. Solstad told interviewers that he remained haunted by the ruined destiny of his father, a small-town shopkeeper, who went bankrupt and died when Mr. Solstad was 11. 'I am at heart an outsider, with a strong hint of the typical outsider mentality,' he told The Paris Review.
Dag Solstad was born July 16, 1941, in Sandefjord, an old whaling town in the south of what was then German-occupied Norway. He was the son of Ole Modal Solstad, a grocer who unsuccessfully tried to become an inventor of toys and ended up a shipyard clerk, and Ragna Sofie (Tveitan) Solstad, a salesperson in a shoe store.
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Dag attended Sandefjord Municipal High School, taught for several years after graduating, worked as a journalist in 1962, and enrolled at the University of Oslo in 1965 to study the history of ideas, graduating in 1968. His first book of stories, "Spiraler," appeared in 1965.
In 1966, he became an editor of the leftist literary magazine Profil, which he described as "an extreme case of luck."
"I have no idea how my writing would have turned out without it," he said in the Paris Review interview. "I chose the role of the observer."
His first novel, "Irr! Gront!" ("Green!"), was published in 1969 and drew comparisons to Gombrowicz. The next year, fascinated with Mao Zedong, he joined the Norwegian Workers Communist Party.
"It meant a lot to me to find my place within such a grand system, fighting for one of the greatest, most ambitious ideas mankind has ever produced," he told The Paris Review. He added that, although he hadn't written about communism since 1987, he would "support it in any form it may make a comeback."
He continued to write prolifically until the early 2000s, including a trilogy about World War II, and won his country's major literary prizes, including the Norwegian Critics Prize for Literature three times. A soccer enthusiast, he also published five books about the World Cup.
He is survived by his wife, journalist Therese Bjorneboe; three daughters, Gry Asp Solstad, Ellen Melgaard Solstad and Kjersti Solstad; and three grandchildren. Two earlier marriages ended in divorce.
Mr. Solstad's interest in socialism was deeply felt, though his work is not often a fiction of ideas. He put into play characters who are alienated as much from themselves as from the bourgeois society surrounding them — the first alienation becoming a function of the second. 'The protagonists of Solstad's fictions,' Wood wrote in The New Yorker, 'have coldly identified the life-lie but seem to have resigned themselves to yet more of it.'
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Of one his best-known creations, Mr. Solstad wrote: 'He squandered his life by observing it, and all the while time passed and his youth did too, and Singer didn't lift a finger to hold on to or enjoy youth's enviable state.'
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