Professor Andersen’s Night: A Novel by Dag Solstad
Reviews
By Wilson McBee
Last year New Directions released English translations of Dag Solstad’s novels T. Singer and Armand V. I had never heard of Solstad, but one blurb referred to him as the “Norwegian Philip Roth,” so I felt like I had to check him out. And boy, did I not regret it. I inhaled both books across a few long sittings, transported by Solstad’s incantatory prose, after which I found the other two novels by Solstad that have been translated into English (Novel 11, Book Eight and Shyness and Dignity) and devoured them as well. Since then, Solstad has been the first name that comes out of my mouth whenever someone asks if I’ve read anything good lately. And yet, trying to explain what makes Solstad’s novels so compelling is not an easy thing to do. It’s akin to telling someone why you like watching golf on television—another pastime I struggle to justify. He writes about lonely, awkward nebbishes who fall into personal crises entirely of their own making. Nothing really happens, and the endings are usually unresolved. Convinced? Probably sounds about as thrilling as The approach on the seventeenth hole is a real nail-biter.
The first thing one notices about a Solstad book is its unique prose style. Marked by hyper-formal constructions as well as casual asides, it is difficult to sum up, but it might be best described as making an attempt to mirror the circuitous pathways of thought. His short, chapterless novels progress from one lengthy movement, composed mostly of long paragraphs, to another. Seemingly minor details are restated again and again, as with the reappearance of a theme in a musical composition. Take this passage from the opening pages of T. Singer:
Ordinarily, Singer, as seen from the outside, was an affable person, well liked by those around him, though a bit reserved; he tried not to stand out in any way, but those who knew him liked him because he was both open and had a quiet sense of humor, which at times could seem astonishingly pithy, at times downright biting, though that was rare, and afterward he had a peculiar habit of taking off his glasses to polish the lenses. Perhaps he did this, because it was his way of trying to take the sting out of his biting remark, which—if you looked closely at him as he took his glasses and polished the lenses—he personally seemed to enjoy; it was visible in his pleased expression, if you happened to look at his face instead of his hands polishing his glasses, or directly into his eyes, which now squinted nearsightedly without the wall of glass in front of them.
This mode of self-consciously verbose writing is clearly not for everyone. Those few sentences might be enough to dissuade some readers from Solstad altogether. But for us fans of the writer, there’s an undeniable beauty in the way he raises tedious self-reflexivity to the level of music. Notice the way the phrase about polishing the lenses of his glasses keeps recurring. Most writers strain to avoid repeating the same word in the same paragraph or even on the same page—Solstad turns that rule on its head. This image of a fastidious gesture made in the wake of a cutting remark would have bloomed and quickly faded had Solstad followed the conventional writerly preferences for elision and compression. Instead, the image solidifies by virtue of being repeated.
Another way to appreciate Solstad’s books is as novels of manners, even though they are concerned with solitary figures and are meager with dialogue. Each takes place in the same, specific milieu—among the educated elite of late twentieth-century Western Europe—and their plots, such as they are, hinge on scenes of social unease or misunderstanding. If you’ve ever spent the early morning hours in bed agonizing over an innocuous encounter in which you wish you had said something differently, then you will relate to the contortions of self-questioning Solstad’s characters lose themselves in. T. Singer begins, for example, as the title character struggles to reconcile a moment from his boyhood in which he was overheard by an uncle laughing falsely at a friend. In Armand V., the titular diplomat accidentally witnesses his adult son engaging in a form of S&M and is frozen, “rigid with horror.” Solstad uses these instances of heightened self-consciousness to throw his characters into tumults of ethical confusion in which the search for the most acceptable course of action turns suddenly into a pondering of the spookiest existential questions. At the start of Shyness and Dignity, the protagonist, Elias, a secondary school teacher, suffers a public meltdown in response to a faulty umbrella. He embarrasses himself and expects to lose his job. Yet by the end of the book, we have only barely moved past the book’s opening events. Rather Solstad has led the reader deep into Elias’s backstory—describing his friendship with a fellow graduate student, the friend’s sudden disappearance to the United States, and Elias’s subsequent taking up with the friend’s wife and young daughter—in an effort to explicate the meltdown. As these examples show, Solstad’s books deal heavily in melancholy, yet they are far from dark. Even while confining himself to the consciousness of an obscure protagonist mired in suffering, Solstad eschews the brilliant anger often associated with the downtrodden intellectual. Rather, he consistently displays a deep understanding of—and a tender affection for—his subjects, no matter how absurd their predicaments.
The latest English edition of Solstad to be released by New Directions is Professor Andersen’s Night (the book was previously available in the UK and Australia). The opening pages introduce a different sort of predicament for what is an otherwise typical Solstad protagonist, the lonely literature professor of the book’s title. After finishing a solitary meal on Christmas Eve, the slightly tipsy Professor Andersen peers out the window of his Oslo apartment to gaze at the holiday revelries happening in the buildings around him. And then, in a shocking turn of events given what we have come to expect from Solstad’s understated plots, Andersen witnesses a murder—a man across the street strangles a woman in his apartment, then drags her body out of view. Yet, despite the Rear Window setup, what follows is hardly a standard-issue thriller. Shocked into stillness by what he has seen, Andersen decides not to call the police. His reasoning in the moment is complicated. For one, he’s afraid of not being believed because he’s had a little to drink. He talks himself out of making the call in a classic bit of Solstadian overthinking:
“What shall I say,” he thought, “that I have seen a murder? Yes, that’s what I have to say. And then they will laugh at me, and tell me to go and lie down, and to call back when I have sobered up, because it is a well-known fact,” he added, “that when you have drunk a bit and try to sound sober, you may easily be considered heavily intoxicated, because you get so anxious about sounding slurred that slurring positively takes hold of you. And so beside myself as I am now, it won’t work.”
This kind of excruciating self-analysis continues throughout the duration of the novel, as Andersen goes about various holiday-period activities, including dinner with friends and a visit to Trondheim, a city on Norway’s northern coast. Beyond searching within himself for a justification for his passive behavior, he searches the local news for mention of a missing woman and follows the movements of the murderer living across the street. There’s also a heavy dose of backstory: a flashback to Andersen’s student days includes a digression on Ibsen’s play Hedda Gabler that manages to be compelling even to this Ibsen-ignorant reader—such is the power of Solstad’s prose. Toward the end of the book, as the murder goes unreported and Andersen continues to dither over whether to approach the authorities, he stumbles into a personal epiphany that is more harrowing and spiritually explicit than anything I’ve encountered in Solstad before. In the end Professor Andersen’s Night comes across as far more bleak, and blunt, if no less rewarding, than previous translations of the author’s work. I wonder if part of this has to do with the utterly solitary nature of the main character’s existence—unfortunately for Professor Andersen, he has no Grace Kelly to stir him into action. In contrast, all of the other figures from the Solstad books translated into English experience some intense personal human interaction, whether familial or romantic. Andersen’s ex-wife is little more than a footnote in the book, which may be Solstad’s starkest lesson in the dangers of extreme solitude.
The caveats consistently employed here should have made clear a lingering frustration—English readers have only been exposed to a small slice of Solstad’s late oeuvre. All of the books mentioned above were written between 1992 and 2006; Solstad began writing in the late 1960s and has published over thirty books. Imagine having to make sense of Roth if you had access to American Pastoral and The Human Stain but not Portnoy’s Complaint or Goodbye, Columbus. Apparently Lydia Davis felt so keen a desire for more Solstad that she taught herself Norwegian. Had I even a smidgen of Davis’s facility with language, I might do the same. As it stands, we’re left to pine after, and speculate on, the treasures that might be still to come from this quirky Scandinavian master.
Wilson McBee is a staff writer for SwR.
More Reviews