T Singer

by Dag Solstad, Tiina Nunnally (Translator)

Overview

“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) 

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. 

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780811225960
Publisher:	New Directions Publishing Corporation
Publication date:	05/29/2018
Pages:	232
Product dimensions:	5.10(w) x 7.90(h) x 0.70(d)

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.

Editorial Reviews

03/12/2018
Solstad’s unusual, entertaining novel of restrained humor follows its protagonist, T Singer, over a lifetime of nonengagement. Singer is something of a Bartleby whose neuroses compel him to retreat from life, abandon his hilarious attempts to write the perfect sentence (“one fine day he stood eye to eye with a memorable sight”), and move to the small town of Notodden at age 34 to become the town librarian. The prose repeatedly swerves into digressions about minutiae—did Singer inadvertently make a fool of himself when he talked to K thinking he was talking to B? How can he not interact with library visitors who appreciate him? After a bizarre encounter with a millionaire who gives him a system for making infinite money, Singer settles into a dull marriage with Merete and helps take care of her daughter, Isabella. After the marriage ends, Singer and his stepdaughter move to Oslo and try to start over. As Solstad increases the pace and Singer shrinks more into himself, the reader begins to feel the wonder of his shaky connection with Isabella. The novel brilliantly shows the humor and pain of obsessiveness, and the anxious, analytic Singer emerges as an enduring creation. (May)

Publishers Weekly

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

The Guardian

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

Charles Finch

"Solstad, regarded by Norwegians as arguably their finest and surely their most critically praised and influential contemporary novelist, pairs his deep political engagement with an ever-renewed formal invention. With each new novel, he startles us, his readers, yet again with something unexpected.  I find him, with his spirited intelligence, a delight and an inspiration to read, whether (haltingly!) in Norwegian or, over the past few years, happily, gratefully, in English translation."

Lydia Davis

"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."

Literary Hub - Is This the Year Dag Solstad Becomes A Household Name

"Full of dryly comic, densely existential despair."

The Times Literary Supplement

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

Geoff Dyer

"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? These Actual lives look nothing much like conventional novels. That is the challenge Solstad accepts and rigorously joins."

The New Yorker - James Wood

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

The Independent

"With the simultaneous publication of the novel Armand V, Solstad should finally get the attention he deserves in the U.S...The novel follows Singer from his early twenties to his late forties, and this life, which hardly seems to belong to the man living it, proceeds like a jaunty, unforgettable tune played in a minor key."

Booklist

2018-03-05
Morose but effective character study by esteemed Norwegian novelist Solstad (Professor Anderson's Night, 2011, etc.).Singer isn't much to behold. He can't dance, can't sing, hasn't gotten very far along in his aspirations to be a writer. What's a bookish failure to do, having exhausted the possibilities of his job as a "punctual and conscientious sales clerk in the state liquor store"? Go to library school, from which Singer emerges at the age of 34 with a job in a small city in the mountainous Telemark district. He settles into a "simple, well-ordered life" that is soon disrupted by the attentions of ceramicist Merete Sæthre, who presumably settles for him in turn because there's not a huge smorgasbord of romantic possibilities for a single mother with a 2-year-old child. Solstad breaks the fourth wall to tell us that he's not going to tell us much more about Merete: "She is not the main character in this novel; it's doubtful that she could have been the main character in any novel of a certain quality." Thus, when her discontent with Singer mounts to the point of fracture, it's easy enough, one supposes, to dispose of her, leaving Singer to tend to the young daughter who's his in the eyes of the law only. Singer is, let us say, not adept at coping; as Solstad writes, it's hard to imagine that he, too, "can be the main character in any novel at all, regardless of quality." Still, after he summons up an imaginary friend upon whom to spill his grief, he manages to rise to the occasion, sort of. Suffice it to say that, as the years pass, single fatherhood doesn't do much to improve his mood.Knut Hamsun remains the king of Nordic gloom, but Solstad gives him a run for the money in a story at once traditional and postmodern.

Kirkus Reviews