Reading: Dag Solstad's "T Singer"

Finished one new Solstad (i.e., newly translated) and started on another: T Singer.

Good stuff.

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Clip:

He didn’t know what sort of music she played, even though he could hear it clearly, though faintly, through the closed door, and he didn’t recognize the music, he made no connections to it, which isn’t especially strange since it was music for teenagers. A couple of times he did ask, in an attempt to be friendly, about the tune she was playing, and she always told him, both the name of the singer, whether it was a specific solo act or a group, and the name of the song, and she spoke this solo act or the band’s name, and the title of the song with obvious respect. But Singer had a bad habit of forgetting quite quickly both who was singing and what the title was, so that the next time he happened to ask her about the music he heard playing, it occurred to him as he asked, that this tune sounded exactly like what he’d heard the last time he had asked, not even a week ago, and he would abruptly stop and begin talking about something completely different, a topic pulled out of the blue, such as: oh, now it’s about to rain, and there’ll be thunder because it’s so sultry, pointing to the open veranda door where some heavy, threatening clouds had appeared in the sky, almost black in color, about to splinter the sunlight on that all-too-sultry May day. Because he did not really want to demonstrate in this way, so clearly and directly, his lack of interest in what she, and her girlfriends, found so immeasurably fascinating. When it came right down to it, he didn’t want to have that sort of attitude toward what she found so fascinating, even if, as was now apparent, it was actually true that he felt completely indifferent to what sort of music she and her peers listened to. He couldn’t very well start taking an interest in that type of music just because his fifteen-year-old stepdaughter was so fascinated by it, could he? Even though this might have been opportune, he felt such a strong resistance to the very idea of pretending to take an interest, for her sake, that it upset him greatly, and it continued to upset him for weeks afterward, every time he thought about it, for example as he sat in his metaphorical circumstances in the basement of the Deichman Library.