PositiveMusic & LiteratureSolstad’s style in T Singer favors rigorous exposition over plot or scene. Dialogue and action are exceedingly rare, and often interrupted by the narrator’s arguments and digressions ... scenes rely on a recursive logic that mimics Singer’s psychic life, wherein his thoughts and the sentences that frame them anxiously circle some missing center. The novel’s peculiar free indirect style seeks to trace this sense of disquiet—the \'nakedness\'—that the lonely man would prefer remain hidden. We are the unintended observer, and the novel’s style mirrors the movement of Singer’s subconscious. T Singer’s formal chassis—in which the scaffolding of the psychological novel reveals itself sentence by sentence—is nowhere more apparent than in the narration. From the very start, the narrator attempts to shape our perception of reading Singer’s story, a copy of the novel held in our hands ... the sentences and style start and stop with Singer. As with much of Solstad’s best work, the author is present in the text, is bound to his text, and meets his evocative limit precisely at the limit of his literary creation.
Dag Solstad, Trans. by Steven T. Murray
PositiveMusic & LiteratureArmand V’s stylistic tension comes from the absence of its source text. After setting the introductory scenes, our narrator admits that the text to which the footnotes refer \'is invisible for the author in the sense that he is unable to write it.\' The story then lurches along at a disjointed pace; each footnote arrives after a gap in \'the text up there,\' as the narrator terms the unwritten novel, drawing surprise from omission ... The \'unknown and unwritten\' source text is simply a feint; the novel’s real surface—\'the text up there\'—is an authorial confession ... For a moment, the narration crosses the threshold of fiction into political culpability; and then, just as quickly as it dissolved, we are back in Armand’s life, the author’s reflection concealed now by the diplomat’s visit to London. Fiction, for Solstad, is a mirror that can be held up and hidden in the same motion, his image flashing by with the movement of his prose.