T Singer - Softcover

Solstad, Dag; Nunnally, Tiina

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0811225968 ISBN 13: 9780811225960

Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company, 2018

Synopsis

T Singer begins with thirty-four-year-old Singer graduating from library school and traveling by train from Oslo to the small town of Notodden, located in the mountainous Telemark region of Norway. There he plans to begin a deliberately anonymous life as a librarian. But Singer unexpectedly falls in love with the ceramicist Merete Saethre, who has a young daughter from a previous relationship. After a few years together, the couple is on the verge of separating, when a car accident prompts a dramatic change in Singer's life.

The narrator of the novel specifically states that this is not a happy story, yet, as in all of Dag Solstad's works, the prose is marked by an unforgettable combination of humor and darkness. Overall, T Singer marks a departure more explicitly existential than any of Solstad's previous works.

About this title

Review:

Solstad has a revered role in Norway as the chronicler of his country's changing times.

Dag Solstad serves up another helping of his wan and wise almost-comedy.--Geoff Dyer

A story at once traditional and postmodern.

Solstad's unusual, entertaining novel of restrained humor follows its protagonist, T Singer, over a lifetime of nonengagement....The novel brilliantly shows the humor and pain of obsessiveness, and the anxious, analytic Singer emerges as an enduring creation.-- (03/12/2018)

The Solstadian long sentence feeds back into itself, meandering with the aimless inevitability of a river heading towards the sea.

Full of dryly comic, densely existential despair.

All of the whispers have been right: Solstad is a vital novelist.--Charles Finch (10/22/2018)

Solstad's inventive approach allows him to reflect on the freedom and obligations of the novelist who is tasked with telling someone else's life story. It also inscribes, in the novel's very form, Solstad's way of writing about people who are not quite the protagonists of their own lives...What if a life--even an apparently consequential one, like an ambassador's--had no discernible narrative, no coherent main action? Actual lives look nothing much like conventional novels. That is the challenge Solstad accepts and rigorously joins.-- (10/22/2018)

T Singer goes far beyond the typical, Camus-like portrait of existential alienation that clings to every corner of global literature like the odor of cigarette smoke in a supposedly clean hotel room. Solstad creates a truly singular character whose existence feels like nothing more than the sum of indentations left on him by the world.--Is This the Year Dag Solstad Becomes A Household Name

About the Author:

Dag Solstad (b. 1941) has written nearly thirty books, including Armand V and T Singer (both available from New Directions). Admired worldwide by writers as diverse as Lydia Davis, Geoff Dyer, and Peter Handke, Solstad has won the 2006 Brage Prize, the 1989 Nordic Council's Prize for Literature, and the Norwegian Critic's Prize in 1969, 1992, and 1999.

Tiina Nunnally is the award-winning translator of more than 70 books from the Scandinavian languages, including Kristin Lavransdatter by Sigrid Undset, Niels Lyhne by Jens Peter Jacobsen, and The Land of Dreams by Vidar Sundstøl. She was appointed Knight of the Royal Norwegian Order of Merit for her contributions to Norwegian literature in the United States.

About this edition

• Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
• Publication date: 2018
• ISBN 10: 0811225968
• ISBN 13: 9780811225960
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 232