Armand V

Armand V

Summary

‘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

Reviews

  • 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.
    Evening Standard

About the author

Dag Solstad

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.
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