T Singer
- Published: 31 May 2018
- ISBN: 9781473524538
- Imprint: Vintage Digital
- Format: EBook
- Pages: 272
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.
Paris Review
He’s a kind of surrealistic writer... I think that’s serious literature.
Haruki Murakami
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.
Lydia Davis
His language sparkles with its new old-fashioned elegance.
Karl Ove Knausgaard
In Norway, Solstad is as celebrated as, say, Don DeLillo or Toni Morrison [in the US]... An utterly hypnotic and utterly humane writer.
James Wood
Solstad is a writer of depth.
Peter Handke
Without question Norway's bravest, most intelligent novelist.
Per Petterson
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.
Publishers Weekly
Solstad’s construction of reality is uniquely his own… mad, sad and funny… the behavioural possibilities of the novel are subtly and fundamentally enlarged.
Geoff Dyer, Observer
An idiosyncratic, at times impish writer, whose voice – insinuating yet direct, droll but aghast – is impossible to ‘unhear’ once you’ve encountered it.
The White Review
[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.
Frank Lawton, Literary Review
Solstad is expert in delineating the absurdities of existence… Solstad exposes us to ourselves.
David Mills, Sunday Times
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.
Nathan Kapp, Times Literary Supplement
All of the whispers have been right: Solstad is a vital novelist.
Charles Finch, New York Times
Before Knausgaard, Norway had Solstad, whose pitiless, mesmeric, darkly comic stories of quiet desperation – here it’s a failed librarian – turn banality to sublimity.
The Arts Desk