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Reading lists

10 must-read Scandinavian novels

T Singer

‘A kind of surrealist writer’ (Haruki Murakami), who ‘doesn’t write to please other people’ (Lydia Davis). T Singer is the new novel in English from one of Norway’s most celebrated writers, proving ‘good literature makes us wiser about life, ourselves and other people’ (Dagbladet).

Solstad’s construction of reality is uniquely his own… mad, sad and funny… the behavioural possibilities of the novel are subtly and fundamentally enlarged.

All of the whispers have been right: Solstad is a vital novelist.

Solstad is expert in delineating the absurdities of existence… Solstad exposes us to ourselves.

He’s a kind of surrealistic writer... I think that’s serious literature.

His language sparkles with its new old-fashioned elegance.

He doesn’t write to please other people... Do exactly what you want, that’s my idea… the drama exists in his voice, in his comments and views, and that works, it helps connect the reader to the story.

Solstad's novels are full of dryly comic, densely existential despair . . . reminiscent of Witold Gombrowicz, with his keen sense of the absurd. Both translators Tiina Nunnally and Steven T. Murray have rendered Solstad's rhythms into wonderfully idiosyncratic English.

[Solstad] is a wonderful stylist whose prose gives the impression of not being stylised at all… The prose is distracted and persistent, compelling and compelled.

Before Knausgaard, Norway had Solstad, whose pitiless, mesmeric, darkly comic stories of quiet desperation – here it’s a failed librarian – turn banality to sublimity.

An idiosyncratic, at times impish writer, whose voice – insinuating yet direct, droll but aghast – is impossible to ‘unhear’ once you’ve encountered it.

In Norway, Solstad is as celebrated as, say, Don DeLillo or Toni Morrison [in the US]... An utterly hypnotic and utterly humane writer.

Without question Norway's bravest, most intelligent novelist.

Since he published his first book of stories in 1965, Dag Solstad has been to Scandinavian literature what Philip Roth has been to American letters or Günter Grass to German writing: an unavoidable voice.

Solstad’s unusual, entertaining novel of restrained humor follows its protagonist, T Singer, over a lifetime of nonengagement... [it] brilliantly shows the humor and pain of obsessiveness, and the anxious, analytic Singer emerges as an enduring creation.

The new novel in English from one of Norway’s most celebrated writers. 
 
T Singer confronts indomitable loneliness in Solstad’s classic, heartbreaking yet darkly comic style. 
 
‘A kind of surrealistic writer… Serious literature’ Haruki Murakami 
‘Mad, sad and funny… Thrilling’ Geoff Dyer 
 
Singer, a thirty-four-year-old recently trained librarian, arrives by train in the small town of Notodden to begin a new and anonymous life. He falls in love with Merete, a ceramicist, and moves in with her and her young daughter. After a few years together, the relationship starts to falter, and as the couple is on the verge of separating a car accident prompts a dramatic change in Singer’s life… 
 
 
 ‘An utterly hypnotic writer’ James Wood 
‘Solstad is expert in delineating the absurdities of existence…’ Sunday Times 
 
Winner of the Norwegian Critics Prize

Armand V

A novel told exclusively in footnotes, this is Dag Solstad as his masterly best, sketching the turbulent life of a Norwegian diplomat and redefining what a novel can be.

An experimental novel by a Norwegian veteran, who is loved by Karl Ove Knausgaard, Haruki Murakami and Peter Handke… Very unusual – and in the end, very deep.

Solstad is expert in delineating the absurdities of existence… Solstad exposes us to ourselves. [T]he reader is deeply rewarded in the end.

Solstad's novels are full of dryly comic, densely existential despair . . . Death occupies the space between each of the footnotes that make up the corpus of Armand V, but what Solstad ultimately celebrates in it is the freedom of the novelist, and of the novel form.

Solstad describes Armand V as a series of “ongoing but distorted footnotes to an unwritten novel”. That sounds experimental but it soon feels as comfortable as a pair of old suede shoes. After about 30 pages Solstad mentions how, in the composition of a novel, he becomes conscious of the point, sometimes 30 or 40 pages back, when “the whole thing went off the rails”. He then starts over from that point, implicitly to get it back on the rails. It’s an extraordinary claim. I mean, the idea that, for Solstad, a novel needs rails. In his weirdly hypnotic way isn’t this what he is always railing against?

Dag Solstad is one of Norway’s leading and most celebrated contemporary writers. Solstad has won many Norwegian and international awards, most recently the Swedish Academy Nordic Prize in 2017, and is the only author to have won the Norwegian Critics Prize three times. All three of his novels already published in English – Shyness and Dignity, Novel 11, Book 18 and Professor Andersen's Night – have been listed for the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize.

‘Solstad doesn’t write to please other people. Do exactly what you want, that’s my idea…the drama exists in his voice’ Lydia Davis 
 
Armand is a diplomat rising through the ranks of the Norwegian foreign office, but he’s caught between his public duty to support foreign wars in the Middle East and his private disdain of Western intervention. He hides behind his knowing ironic statements about the war, which no one grasps and which change nothing in the real world. Armand’s son joins the Norwegian SAS to fight in the Middle East, despite being specifically warned against such a move by his father, which leads to catastrophic, heartbreaking consequences. 
 
Told exclusively in footnotes to an unwritten novel, this is Solstad's radically unconventional novel about how we experience the passing of time: how it fragments, drifts, quickens, and how single moments can define a life. 
 
Winner of the Brage Prize

Novel 11, Book 18

A highly subversive novel – about gambling with a comfortable existence – from the master of Norwegian literature

In the intriguingly titled Novel 11, Book 18 Norwegian writer Dag Solstad serves up another helping of his wan and wise almost-comedy.

He doesn’t write to please other people. Do exactly what you want, that’s my idea...the drama exists in his voice, in his comments and views, and that works, it helps connect the reader to the story

Unexpectedly moving...a wry, fantastic book

Brilliant and subtle... What matters is Solstad's dedicated application to the mysteries of human conduct and relations that his town treasurer illustrates

The existential novel is alive and well... Solstad has a dry and bleakly comic style

Solstad is a masterful investigator of human thought and behaviour, and, like the inside of anyone’s head, this novel is in turns funny, mournful, quizzical and insightful. And a real pleasure to read.

WINNER OF THE SWEDISH ACADEMY'S NORDIC PRIZE 2017 
 
'He’s a kind of surrealistic writer... I think that’s serious literature' Haruki Murakami 
 
‘An utterly hypnotic and utterly humane writer’ James Wood 
 
'Without question Norway's bravest, most intelligent novelist' Per Petterson 
 
'Dag Solstad serves up another helping of his wan and wise almost-comedy' Geoff Dyer 
 
'He doesn’t write to please other people. Do exactly what you want, that’s my idea...the drama exists in his voice' Lydia Davis 
 
Bjørn Hansen, a respectable town treasurer, has just turned fifty and is horrified by the thought that chance has ruled his life. Eighteen years ago he left his wife and their two-year-old son for his mistress, who persuaded him to start afresh in a small, provincial town and to dabble in amateur dramatics. But as time passes, this relationship begins to wilt and die as well. 
 
After four years of living comfortably alone, Bjørn starts entertaining a dangerous course of action that will change his life beyond recognition. This urge to gamble with his comfortable existence becomes irresistible, taking Bjørn to Vilnius, Lithuania, with Dr Schiøtz his fellow conspirator, where he cannot tell whether he’s tangled up in a game or an absurd new reality.

Professor Andersen's Night

An existential murder story. A master of Norwegian literature critiques contemporary society with wry wit.

He’s a kind of surrealistic writer, very strange novels. I think that’s serious literature

Without question Norway's bravest, most intelligent novelist

Per Petterson, author of Our Stealing Horses

Dag Solstad, Norway's most distinguished living writer, is a clear-eyed moralist who takes an existentialist's interest in the compromises, evasions and accommodations we make to get through life... Wryly humorous and needle-sharp in skewering pretension, Solstad is unlike anyone currently writing in English... A deeply rewarding novel

[An] exquisitely composed novel... Dag Solstad is an unflinching explorer of the plight of educated humankind in the face of the inexplicable whose artistry matches his ambitious theme

At times dark and moving, even, on occasion, unexpectedly funny, Professor Andersen's Night tackles a premise which would prove just as intriguing in a pacey thriller... It is visceral in its investigations into the derailing of one man's life in all its sticky, existential glory

This is a subversive little novel in which morality becomes a football. Whereas Novel 11, Book 18 pivots on a decision that defies everything, Professor Andersen's Night confronts morality, justice and compromise. Dag Solstad, who is frequently compared, with some justification, to Chekhov, has written a moral, almost allegorical novel in which he is far less interested in heroics than he is in humanity

A clever psychological inaction thriller, which uses the witnessing of a crime as the catalyst for a midlife crisis

Solstad has an outstanding ability to portray mental processes accurately; here, the bleakness of Andersen's outlook is offset by the lightness of the prose, nimbly translated by Agnes Scott Langeland, and by the wry at humour at play in it

A penetrating combination of Hitchcock's Rear Window, Camus' existential ennui and Larkin's social embarrassment

At times dark and moving, even on occasion, unexpectedly funny...It is visceral in its investigations into the derailing of one mans life in all its sticky, existential glory.The book’s icy prose and long sentences – which in the wrong hands would feel heavy and laboured – flow with a quickness that hints at the workings of Andersen’s mind, and Solstad has a way of producing at the protagonists bourgeois anxieties desperately sorry for him

Solstad, Norway’s most distinguished living writer, is a clear-eyed moralist who takes an existentialist’s interest in the compromises, evasions and accommodations we make to get though life. Wryly humorous and needle-sharp in skewering pretension, Solstad is unlike anyone currently writing in English

Forget the Scandi crime production line and turn to this sly thriller

A wry moral tale exploring the little evasions and compromises of everyday life. Translator Agnes Scott does justice to Solstad’s measured voice

This short-but-striking novel quickly reveals itself to be…crime fiction, yes, but also a subtle and deeply introspective consideration of the inertia of lonely middle-age, its philosophy existentialist in the manner of Jean Paul Sartre, Ingmar Bergman and certain novels of Georges Simenon. The result is a highly complex and accomplished work

Intriguing tale… Solstad expertly navigates the bizarre mind of a clever but lonely man locked in an existentialist nightmare

This is no straightforward crime novel…an exploration of guilt, inaction and moral quandaries

Dag Solstad is one of Norway's leading contemporary authors. His work has consistently won critical acclaim and he is the only author to have received the Norwegian Literary Critics' Award three times. All three of his novels available in English have been listed for the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize: Shyness and Dignity was shortlisted in 2007 and Novel 11, Book 18 and Professor Andersen's Night were longlisted for the 2009 and 2012 prizes respectively.

It is Christmas Eve, and 55-year-old Professor Pål Andersen is alone, drinking coffee and cognac in his living room. Lost in thought, he looks out of the window and sees a man strangle a woman in the apartment across the street. 
 
Professor Andersen fails to report the crime. The days pass, and he becomes paralysed by indecision. Desperate for respite, the professor sets off to a local sushi bar, only to find himself face to face with the murderer. 
 
Professor Andersen's Night is an unsettling yet highly entertaining novel of apathy, rebellion and morality. In flinty prose, Solstad presents an uncomfortable question: would we, like his cerebral protagonist, do nothing?

Dag Solstad

Sverre Lyngstad

Nothing in Elias' measured life, in his whole career as a teacher of literature, in his marriage to the 'indescribably beautiful' Eva, foreshadowed the events of that apparently ordinary day. He makes sure he has his headache pills and leaves for work as he has done every morning for the past twenty-five years. 
 
He is only too familiar with his pupils' hostile attitude both to his lectures and to himself, but today he feels their impatience, their oafishness, more painfully than ever before and, after their ritually dismissive and bored response to his passionate lecture on Ibsen's The Wild Duck, he reaches a point of crisis. 
 
Elegant, pocket-sized paperbacks, VINTAGE Editions celebrate the audacity and ambition of the written word, transporting readers to wherever in the world literary innovation may be found.

Shyness and Dignity

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