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New Indian Express
2 days ago
- Entertainment
- New Indian Express
Marathon ready, always
Haruki Murakami told The Paris Review that when he's writing a novel, he wakes up at 4 o' clock , writes for five or six hours, runs ten kilometres or swims fifteen hundred metres, reads, listens to music, and is asleep by nine. Day after day, month after month, this routine doesn't change. For Murakami, repetition is a spell. The same magic lies not in sentences but in strides for retired IPS officer K Jayanth Murali. His mornings, begin with meditation and movement. And like Murakami, his discipline has carried him far — far enough to run over 200 marathons, earn a place in the India Book of Records 2026. Rewards of discipline Speaking about his journey, Jayanth recalls that his first marathon was in 2012, when he was 50 years old. 'At that point of time, I was actually feeling that I had to do something in life. Life was just passing on,' he says. Though he had been running regularly on the treadmill, it was the Chennai Marathon that truly set him on a new path. 'Four months later, I ran the Auroville Marathon in February 2013,' he adds. That run became his fastest, clocking in at three hours and 47 minutes.
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.'
CBC
24-03-2025
- Entertainment
- CBC
3 'thrilling' novels about women breaking free in midlife
When Miranda July's novel All Fours was released last May, it generated enormous buzz for bringing to light the fears, desires and longings of a middle-aged woman — touching on themes of motherhood, marriage, sexuality and perimenopause. Canadian journalist Alicia Cox Thomson says it has sparked a positive trend in the literary world, bringing about discussions that tackle a topic and perspective once considered taboo — and she brought two books to the table that also feature women in middle age. " Some women might not be comfortable talking about it, some men might not want to hear it. I feel like with this full force, these books are about a real important point in a woman's life," said Thomson. "Hopefully it'll normalize it, and then we'll start to see more — where the focus isn't 'This character is going through this,' it's just a book about a person who happens to be that age who might be experiencing that, but that's not the main point." On The Next Chapter with Antonio Michael Downing, Thomson spoke about three literary novels that depict women in their midlife. All Fours by Miranda July All Fours follows an unnamed artist in her mid-forties as she grapples with the breakdown of her marriage and the physical and emotional toils of perimenopause. She escapes on a road trip — leaving behind her husband and son, and gets involved in extramarital affairs. Miranda July is a writer, filmmaker and artist based in Los Angeles. Her previous works include the novel The First Bad Man and short story collection No One Belongs Here More Than You which won the Frank O'Connor International Short Story Award. July's work has also been featured in The Paris Review, Harper's and The New Yorker, Alicia Cox Thomson says:"I'm a writer, and I do find that when you become a mother, your priorities shift, rightfully so. Did I work as much on my craft when I was in the trenches with young children? 'No.' Have I tried to return to it now that they're older? 'Yes.' I do understand that struggle between your passion for your art, or your creative life, or your journey and your passion for your children." The Change by Kirsten Miller In The Change, three different women navigate the changes and challenges of mid-life. While they're each battling their own issues — marriage breakdowns, career shifts, empty nests and loss of loved ones, they're brought together through one woman's ability to hear from the dead, which leads them to solve a string of murders. Kristen Miller is an author who was born and raised in North Carolina, but now lives in Brooklyn, New York City. Her previous works include Lula Dean's Little Library of Banned Books which was a GMA Book Club pick and the YA series featuring Kiki Strike. Alicia Cox Thomson says:"It's like a juicy thriller that you just want to turn the pages. It's a thoughtful work about women and power and coming into your own. It is a powerful discussion of what happens to powerful, wealthy men who are finally pushed back against." The Mother Act by Heidi Reimer The Mother Act depicts the tumultuous relationship between Sadie Jones, a famous actress and feminist, and her estranged daughter, Jude. Despite Sadie's fame from a one-woman show about motherhood, Jude has spent her life seeking validation from her mother. Two decades later, when they meet at Sadie's play premiere, they explore whether it's possible to balance motherhood with career. Heidi Reimer is a writer based in northern Ontario. Her work has been featured in Chatelaine, The New Quarterly, Literary Mama and the anthologies The M Word: Conversations about Motherhood and Body & Soul: Stories for Skeptics and Seekers. Her debut novel is The Mother Act.
New York Times
03-03-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
‘My 10,000 Hours': The Diaries That Made Helen Garner a Writer
The Australian writer Helen Garner's fiction has long been prized by people whose taste I trust. Yet when I've picked up her novels, I've bounced off them, like a spacecraft that has botched re-entry into the earth's atmosphere. Every reader must have a writer or two like this, ones they sense they should like but do not. Garner's work has seemed, in my brief encounters with it, thin and in want of polish. Now comes 'How to End a Story,' a barbell-weight book that collects three volumes of her diaries from 1978 to 1998, beginning in her mid-30s. At more than 800 pages, this a lot of Garner (no relation). I almost put this one down, too, because it gets off to a tentative and makeshift start. Book critics, like people who work in publishing, are always looking for an excuse to stop reading. But after a while I began to sync with her voice. By a quarter of the way in, I was utterly in her hands. Mea maxima culpa. This is one for the introverts — the wary and the peevish, the uncertain of their looks, taste, talent and class status. Garner has an ideal voice to express late-night pangs of precariousness and distress, some more comic than others. Her prose is clear, honest and economical; take it or leave it, in the Australian manner. She is, in her telling, the kind of person who gets mistaken for the staff at book festivals. People walk up to her out of the blue and ask, 'What's the matter?' (This is a special hatred of mine, too.) She fears for her table manners. Photographers say things to her like, 'Your profile, it is not the best.' If you have ever looked at a photograph of yourself and were floored by your own unsightliness, well, Garner is a laureate of this experience: Her sense of unworthiness extends to her own writing. 'I'm just a middle-level craftswoman,' she writes. And: 'Grief is not too strong a word for what one feels before one's own weakness and mediocrity.' She battles nuclear-grade levels of impostor syndrome. Writers have kept diaries for myriad reasons. Anaïs Nin wished to taste life twice. Patricia Highsmith longed to clarify 'items that might otherwise drift in my head.' Anne Frank wanted to go on living after her death. Sheila Heti felt that if she didn't look at her life closely she was abandoning an important task. These are Garner's instincts, too. But she also says, charmingly: 'Why do I write down this stuff? Partly for the pleasure of seeing the golden nib roll over the paper as it did when I was 10.' This writing served a more serious purpose. Garner told The Paris Review: 'The diaries are how I turned myself into a writer — there's my 10,000 hours.' The quotidian details of life shine in this book — her pot plants, shopping trips ('Kmart, fount of all goodness'), dinner parties, washing her knickers in a bucket, defleaing a dog, mending a skirt, going to the movies, keeping a copy of 'Paradise Lost' in the outdoor bathroom. Sometimes she lives in small urban apartments, and at others in a rural house where she sees koalas and kangaroos and eagles and kookaburras. Here is her report of one meal out: 'At the hippies' house for dinner, I find in my slice of quiche two foreign items: a dead match and a pubic hair. I hide them under a lettuce leaf and we go on talking.' Her lit talk is ardent and adept: 'Sentimentality keeps looking over its shoulder to see how you are taking it.' 'Emotion,' though, doesn't care 'whether anyone's looking or not.' She appraises the blast zone around certain bores. About a dinner with academics, she writes: 'Spare me from old men's calm assumption that anything they say, no matter how dull, slow or perfunctory, deserves and will have an audience.' This book does not need an injection of drama, but one arrives. After two failed marriages, Garner enters a relationship with a thorny, and married, male writer whom she calls 'V.' (He is the novelist Murray Bail.) They eventually marry, and his needs crowd out her own. She begins to feel like an intruder in her own apartment. He's the one who gets to write there, while she must go elsewhere to work. He's jealous of whatever success she has. Which is the host and which is the parasite? He commences an affair with another woman, a painter, and he prevaricates and lies. Garner pretends, for months, not to notice. She hangs on longer than you would think possible. It becomes harrowing. Their relationship is the mortar in which she is nearly ground into paste. 'For the first time,' she writes, 'I begin to understand the women who stay with men who hit them.' Work is her salvation and her bridge to the world. My plan is to return to her other books, and to wade in, this time, further than my ankles.
