Latest news with #Solstad
Yahoo
3 days ago
- Business
- Yahoo
Kongsberg Maritime introduces K-Sail to support WAPS uptake
Kongsberg Maritime has introduced K-Sail, a new service aimed at assisting vessel owners in the selection and integration of wind-assist technology. K-Sail is described as an 'advanced' technology platform that aims to enhance vessel operations and decision-making while driving efficiency across fleets. K-Sail is designed to simplify the adoption of wind-assist technology for ship owners by focusing on integration and collaborating with various technology partners. Kongsberg Maritime's expertise in maritime technology is claimed to be central to the new service. The optimisation process is structured around five primary areas: first, an analysis phase that assesses the vessel's operational parameters to identify suitable sail technology. Second is on steering optimisation to adjust the steering system for the additional thrust from the sails, and third is on propulsion optimisation to ensure the propeller functions efficiently with the new wind propulsion. Fourth, power management to balance the energy generated by the sails with the vessel's requirements, and finally, voyage optimisation, which employs AI and real-time data to enhance route and speed for improved efficiency. The K-Sail platform integrates sail management, vessel automation, and route optimisation into a cohesive system, providing operators with comprehensive control over wind-assisted performance without complexity. Kongsberg Maritime Business Concepts vice president Henrik Alpo Sjoblom said: 'Ship owners can choose their preferred type of wind assist technology. There are several available and they all have their own attributes. 'However, to date, these technologies, whether incorporated in a new build, or retrofitted, are essentially an add-on technology. We believe they can be used in a much more effective way.' Recently, Kongsberg Maritime, Solstad, Østensjø, DeepOcean, and Remota signed a memorandum of understanding (MoU) to initiate a pilot project assessing the feasibility of remote Dynamic Positioning (DP) operations in the offshore industry. "Kongsberg Maritime introduces K-Sail to support WAPS uptake" was originally created and published by Ship Technology, a GlobalData owned brand. The information on this site has been included in good faith for general informational purposes only. It is not intended to amount to advice on which you should rely, and we give no representation, warranty or guarantee, whether express or implied as to its accuracy or completeness. You must obtain professional or specialist advice before taking, or refraining from, any action on the basis of the content on our site.
The Guardian
30-03-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Dag Solstad obituary
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
Boston Globe
25-03-2025
- Entertainment
- Boston Globe
Dag Solstad, 83, dies; his novels of alienation delighted Norwegians
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.') Get Starting Point A guide through the most important stories of the morning, delivered Monday through Friday. Enter Email Sign Up 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.' Advertisement 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. Advertisement 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." Advertisement 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. Advertisement 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.' Advertisement 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.' This article originally appeared in
New York Times
24-03-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
Dag Solstad, 83, Dies; His Novels of Alienation Delighted Norwegians
Dag Solstad, a Norwegian novelist who teased form and style to create a world of alienation and disenchantment, enthralling and sometimes baffling his compatriots, died on March 14 in Oslo. He was 83. His death, in a hospital after a heart attack, was announced on Facebook by his publisher, Forlaget Oktober. Prime Minister Jonas Gahr Store told the news agency Norsk Telegrambyra that Mr. Solstad 'made us see Norway and the world in new ways.' His publisher called his death 'a great loss for Norwegian literature.' In summing up his career in 2015, the 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.') 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 Ms. Farsethas in an interview for The Paris Review in 2016 that he was 'not terribly interested in storytelling.' 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.' Mr. 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. The style itself mimics these evocations of tedium. Phrases are repeated and worked over — 'a pattern of stylized, highly recognizable repetitions,' Ms. 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 Solstad characters, is 'an individual floating inside himself, as though he is wearing too-big clothing,' the critic Elena Balzamo wrote in Le Monde in 2001. Mr. Solstad identified the 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, Ms. Farsethas, the literary critic of the weekly newspaper Morgenbladet, wrote. But he was a tougher sell elsewhere. Mr. 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, the 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.' Other works struck a more 'humane' tone, as Mr. 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, Mr. 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 on 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. 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, the 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,' Mr. Wood wrote in The New Yorker, 'have coldly identified the life-lie but seem to have resigned themselves to yet more of it.' 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.'
The Guardian
17-03-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Norwegian writer Dag Solstad dies aged 83
Dag Solstad, a towering figure of Norwegian letters admired by literary greats around the world, has died aged 83. Known for prose combining existential despair, political subjects and a droll sense of humour, Solstad won the Norwegian critics prize for literature an unprecedented three times. A perennial contender for the Nobel prize in literature, Solstad was translated into Japanese by Haruki Murakami, and US author Lydia Davis taught herself Norwegian by reading his 400-page 'Telemark novel' (full title: The Insoluble Epic Element in Telemark in the Years 1592–1896). Karl Ove Knausgård admired his 'old-fashioned elegance'; Per Petterson called him 'Norway's bravest, most intelligent novelist'. In an essay for the Paris Review, Damion Searls likened Solstad to the John Lennon of Norwegian letters: 'the experimentalist, the ideas man.' Born in the Sandefjord municipality in south-eastern Norway in 1941, Solstad began his writing career as a journalist for a local newspaper, before taking up short fiction aged 23. A former member of the Maoist Communist party of Norway, he described himself in recent years as a 'political amateur', but also stated on his 80th birthday that he would like to be remembered as a communist. Sign up to Bookmarks Discover new books and learn more about your favourite authors with our expert reviews, interviews and news stories. Literary delights delivered direct to you after newsletter promotion Politics infused some of his prose, such as 2006's Armand V, about a diplomat rising through the ranks of the Norwegian Foreign Office and acquiescing with US policy. The core concerns of his 18 novels, stories, plays and essays, however, were more personal, frequently featuring difficult father-son relationships. In a Guardian review, British writer Geoff Dyer likened his characters as living 'as Philip Larkin might have done if he'd got a job in Telemark instead of Hull'. With crime writer Jon Michelet, Solstad also wrote five books about football's World Cups between 1982 and 1998. Solstad died on Friday evening after a short hospital stay, Norwegian newspaper Aftenposten reported. His wife Therese Bjørneboe was with him when he died. Norway's prime minister Jonas Gahr Støre told broadcaster NTB that Solstad was one of the most significant Norwegian authors of all time. 'His work will continue to engage and inspire new readers. Today my thoughts go out to his family and loved ones,' he said.
