Description
Book SynopsisNew Directions proudly introduces two novels in English by the Norwegian master, who is “without question, Norway’s bravest, most intelligent novelist” (Per Petterson)
Trade Review"The thing about
Armand V is that no matter how seemingly irrelevant these tangents are and how miscellaneous is the book’s structure, nothing in it feels unimportant. This, for me, is why
Armand V succeeds so magnificently." -- Veronica Scott Esposito - Literary Hub
"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
"All of the whispers have been right: Solstad is a vital novelist." -- Charles Finch - New York Times Book Review
"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? Actual lives look nothing much like conventional novels. That is the challenge Solstad accepts and rigorously joins." -- James Wood - The New Yorker
"Death occupies the space between each of the footnotes that make up the corpus of
Armand V, but what Solstad ultimately celebrates in it is the freedom of the novelist, and of the novel form, even as the soon-to-be-curtailed lives of his aging protagonists deny freedom’s very existence. It is a grand negation." -- The Times Literary Supplement
"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 Gu¨nter Grass to German writing: an unavoidable voice." -- The Paris Review
"He’s a kind of surrealistic writer—serious literature." -- Haruki Murakami
"His language sparkles with its new old-fashioned elegance, and radiates a unique luster, inimitable and full of e´lan." -- Karl Ove Knausgaard
"Of diplomacy and its discontents: an existentialist-tinged character study by acclaimed Norwegian novelist Solstad." -- Kirkus
"This unique, fascinating novel is composed of footnotes to a larger work that doesn’t exist...Solstad is, as ever, excellent at mingling the personal with the theoretical, embedded in the strange beauty of everyday routine." -- Publishers Weekly (starred)
"The Solstadian long sentence feeds back into itself, meandering with the aimless inevitability of a river heading towards the sea." -- The Guardian
"The novel unfolds against every expectation into something memorable and moving." -- Michael Autrey - Booklist Online
"Already renowned in Scandinavian literature, Solstad once again brilliantly defies categories, this time in English." -- Lanie Tankard - World Literature Today
