Norwegian novelist and short story writer Doug Solstad dies at 83

Dag Solstad, a Norwegian novelist who teases his form and style, creates a world of alienation and disillusionment, and sometimes hampers the perplexity of his fellow countrymen, passed away on March 14th in Oslo. He was 83 years old.

His death in the hospital after a heart attack was announced on Facebook by his publisher, Forlajet October.

Prime Minister Jonas Gar's store told news agency Northsk Telegramvila that Solstad “has made him see Norway and the world in a new way.” His publisher called his death a “great loss to Norwegian literature.”

In putting together his career in 2015, Norwegian leading critic Ane Farsethas was called the “literary provocateur” known for “provoking discussions frequently in both literary experiments and essays.” She admitted that he and his books were largely debated in European and American publications such as Le Monde, The New Yorker, The Paris Review, and The New York Times, but he and his books were debated prominently, but he admitted that he was barely familiar to readers outside Norway. (The headline for the 2018 Times Book Review states, “Does the name Dag Solstad mean anything to you?

Mr. Solstad's dark universe was popular with characters who were easily opposed to themselves and with their surroundings. The story was neither his main interest nor his strongest case. He told Falsetta in a 2016 Paris Review interview that he was “a bit uninterested in storytelling.”

However, the inner life of his hero became engrossed in him. They have difficulty getting out of imprisonment situations, except for self-analysis. The authors themselves often find themselves in the background and give birth to them.

“Looking back, he sees his life being marked primarily by restlessness, gloomy, spineless, sudden abandoned plans,” the narrator coolly comments on the protagonist of his protagonist (1999) in the novel “T Singer” (1999).

In a review of the book's praises – it tells the story of a librarian who recruited the daughter of an estranged wife who moved to a small town and died – New Yorker James Wood called it “probably Solstad's most challenging work.”

Wood pointed out that “boredom achieves a kind of hallucinating force in Solstad's work,” including a lengthy explanation of the Norwegian hydroelectric company.

The style itself mimics these boring inductions. The phrase is repeated, “a stylized, highly recognizable repetition pattern,” Faricesa called it in a review interview in Paris – and the small points are circled infinitely.

The beginning of “T Singer” (we never learn that “T” symbolizes) is marked by a hypnotism paragraph on the recurring page about what the author calls the singer's “embarrassing mistake.”

The singer, like other Solstad characters, wrote a 2001 critic Elena Balzamo, who wrote “an individual floating inside himself, as if he were wearing too big clothes. Like the Gombrowicz character, Solstad's character appears to be self-obsessed, strangers to himself, and in the hands of more powerful and unknown powers.

When he placed him on “Tinger,” his experiments of shapes and preconceived notions with the person who “in some way made them less noticeable” helped put Solstad at the “center of public life” in Norway.

But he was a tougher seller elsewhere. Wood's 2018 review in New Yorker was one of the few sustained critiques that appeared in the English-speaking literary world. The reviews were often respectful, but mysterious.

“Armand V.: Footnotes from a cavated novel” (2006), the story of a denied Norwegian diplomat was told completely through footnotes, critic Adam Mars-Jones wrote in a 2019 review of the London book.

“There are fascinating little sparks in the text, but they are rapidly engraved, and the writer's obsession with the struggle seems to accompany readers' indifference.

With Wood praised “Embarrassment and Dignity” (1994), other works became more “humanitarian” tones. In that novel, the umbrella of a high school teacher cannot be opened, causing public tantrums, and unleashes his life when he leaves his job. Wood wrote that Solstad “is a political search because he is humanly subtle” in exploring the private frustration of a citizen who is externally satisfied in one of Europe's most comfortable societies.

“Novel 11, Book 18” (1992) also explored people who lived anonymously. The Treasurer of the town of Kongsberg welcomes his son, who lives alone and has never seen him in six years, into his home. However, the father replies to his son, and his return home becomes bitter. To escape the monotony of his presence, his father has an accident and makes others believe they have to use a wheelchair.

A quiet life of despair may have seemed like an imaginative leap for a well-known writer in his country's literary pantheon. However, Mr. Solstad told the interviewer that he remained troubled by the fate of his father's abandoned father, and the small town's shopkeeper went bankrupt and died when Mr. Solstad was 11 years old.

Dag Solstad was born on July 16, 1941 in Sandefjord, an old whaling town south of Norway, which was then German occupation. He tried to become the inventor of toys, became the shipyard clerk and the shoe store salesman, Laguna Sophie (Tveitan) Solstad.

DAG attended Sandefjord Municipal High School, where he was taught for several years after graduation, worked as a journalist in 1962, enrolled at the University of Oslo in 1965, graduated in 1968, and graduated in 1965.

In 1966 he became editor of the left-wing literary magazine profile, describing it as an “extreme case of good fortune.”

“I don't know how my writing turned out without it,” he said in a review interview in Paris. “I chose the role of observer.”

His first novel, “Irr! Gront!” (“Green!”), was released in 1969 and compared to Gombrowicz. The following year, fascinated by Mao Zedong, he joined the Norwegian Workers Communist Party.

“Finding your place within such an epic system meant that you were fighting for one of the greatest and most ambitious ideas that humanity has ever produced,” he told a review in Paris. He had not written about communism since 1987, but added that “in any way it might make a comeback.”

He continued to write proudly until the early 2000s, including a trilogy about World War II, and won major literary awards in his country, including three Norwegian Literary Awards. The soccer fan also published five books on the World Cup.

He is survived by his wife, journalist Therese Bjorneboe. three daughters, Gry Asp Solstad, Ellen Melgaard Solstad and Kjersti Solstad; and three grandchildren. The two previous marriages ended with divorce.

Mr. Solstad's interest in socialism was deeply felt, but his work is often not fiction of ideas. He played characters who were alienated from themselves, like from the bourgeois society surrounding them. The first alienation became the second feature. “The protagonist of Solstad's fiction,” Wood wrote to The New Yorker.

One of his most famous works, Solstad wrote: “He wasted life by observing it.

Alain Delaquérière contributed to his research.