Dag Solstad obituary

The Guardian

30-03-2025

The novel Professor Andersen's Night (1996) by the Norwegian author Dag Solstad, who has died aged 83 following a heart attack, starts late on Christmas Eve. The middle-aged literary scholar Pål Andersen is celebrating alone. In the apartment block opposite he sees a beautiful young woman, and then behind her appears a young man. The latter puts his hands round her neck and squeezes until she becomes still and limp.
'I must call the police,' the professor thinks, 'it was murder.' But he finds himself unable to, and confiding in a close friend proves equally impossible. Weeks pass with no report of any missing woman. But in late February Andersen goes to the local sushi bar and finds himself sitting next to the opposite flat's owner, Henrik Nordstrøm, as he now knows him to be. The men talk, Henrik is friendly, and Andersen's sense of bemused inability to act sets in further. Whatever the mystery here, it is not the nature of the actual crime, but the existential helplessness of its witness.
However, some Solstad protagonists are strikingly capable of definitive action, if still with moral uncertainty and incomplete self-knowledge. In Novel 11, Book 18 (1992) the life of Bjørn Hansen – for many years town treasurer in the prosperous mining community of Kongsberg – fails to satisfy him, let down by the woman he surrendered so much for and by his uncommunicative son. Bjørn forms a plan to 'actualise his No, his great Negative … through an action that would be irrevocable'. So, with medical assistance he fakes an accident that gives him the pretext for always using a wheelchair in public.
Shyness and Dignity (1994) is a study of despair even within security (or probably intensified by it) – its most dramatic moment coming when the generally frustrated schoolteacher Elias Rukla goes into a meltdown after his umbrella fails to open, leading to him quitting his job. Solstad's rendering of atmosphere is both sociologically and psychically acute.
T Singer (1999) takes these bleak tendencies to a new level. The difficulty, even unwillingness, of Singer (it is not revealed what the T stands for) to arrive at definitions of his personality, might appear to portend eventual disaster. We first meet him aged 34, arriving as a librarian in the meticulously rendered Notodden, south-east of Oslo. Yet as we follow him - leaving him in his 50s in the well-heeled Majorstua district of Oslo - he shows sufficient appreciation of the complex realities of both situations and individuals to preserve an eminently sane detachment and attain a not unadmirable, if aloof, survival. Its subtly controlled explorations brought Solstad wider recognition as an insightful writer.
But he was hard on himself about what was to follow. Armand V (2006) constitutes the triumph of Solstad's modernism. Told in 99 footnotes (some sub-divided) to a novel the author explicitly declines to write, it presents contemporary ideological – and experiential – dilemmas with comprehensive yet often searingly critical perception: the inwardly enlightened prepared to accommodate themselves to every shift of the status quo, adjusting self-consciousness accordingly: 'Footnote 86. Love of luxury. Vanity. Clothing. Sparkling wines. Life in all its incomparableness. I can't help the fact that I'm going to miss it, thought Armand.'
All these personal histories pose questions that defy conventional analysis and terminology, leading Solstad to ask in Armand V: 'Is a novel something that has already been written, and is the author merely the one who finds it, laboriously digging it out?' This sense of shared discovery gave Solstad a sustained reputation as both seer and comrade for readers and other writers for half a century.
Born in the port of Sandefjord in the south of Norway during wartime occupation by Germany, Dag was the son of Ragna Sofie (nee Tveitan), an assistant in a shoe shop, and Ole Modal Solstad, a grocer who unsuccessfully tried to become an inventor of toys, and then became a shipyard clerk. After leaving the local high school, Dag worked as a teacher in the Lofoten Islands, off the country's northern coast, and from 1962 as a journalist, on the Labour party affiliated newspaper Tiden, based in the southern town of Arendal.
He gained a degree in the history of ideas at the University of Oslo (1965-68), where he became involved with the modernist magazine Profil. His first published book was a volume of stories, Spirals (1965), followed by his first novel Verdigris! Green! (1969), which brought him the first of three Norwegian critics prizes.
While his work always represented something of a dialogue with the legacy of the dramatist Henrik Ibsen, Solstad found literary mentors outside Norway, in the search for style and structures appropriate for the treatment of society and selfhood that he felt the times demanded. He turned to the French nouveau roman, with Alain Robbe-Grillet an acknowledged influence, and to the Polish modernist Witold Gombrowicz.
In the 1970s Solstad joined the Maoist AKP (Workers' communist party, Marxist-Leninist). His writings reflected the need for implementation of its tenets, however comparatively free and democratic his own society, as with the young man's sense of a need for revolution in the novel Arild Asnes, 1970 (1971).
By the 80s, Solstad's work acknowledged the inevitable limitations of this outlook in an increasingly globalised world. There was a growing following for a novel with a comically long title with overtones of honourable failure: Gymnaslærer Pedersens Beretning om den Store Politske Vekkelsen Som Har Hjemsøkt Vårt Land (Gymnasium Teacher Pedersen's Account of the Great Political Awakening That Has Haunted Our Country, 1982). The film director Hans Petter Moland added to its popularity with his 2006 film adaptation, Gymnaslærer Pedersen. Later, in 2021, Solstad declared: 'I'd like to be remembered as a communist.'
The novels of the 1990s marked his high point. In Armand V Solstad observed: 'I'm writing on overtime. My literary output ended with T Singer … Everything after that is an exception, which will never be repeated. Including this.' The one subject which he could write on with unabated enthusiasm was football, producing accounts with his fellow novelist Jon Michelet of the World Cup competitions from 1982 to 1998.
His marriages to Erna Irene Asp and Tone Elisabeth Melgård ended in divorce. He is survived by his third wife, Therese Bjørneboe, three daughters and three grandchildren.
Dag Solstad, writer, born 16 July 1941; died 14 March 2025