Without Lifting A Finger

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

Both before and after this he remains the same, the man who reels off those smart lines, one of which has acquired an immortal status in Norwegian literature: “If you take the life-lie away from an average person, you take away his happiness as well.” * The main problem with such a job was that they were incapable of receiving what he was supposed to give them. * He had even been amused at the thought that his teaching bored the pupils, thinking, Well, such is life, that’s the way it is, and must be, to teach in high school in a civilized country. The very thought of the contrary situation sufficed to make one quickly understand how impossible it would have been if it had not been the way it, as a matter of fact, was. Just try to imagine what things would be like if the cultural heritage awakened an enormous enthusiasm among the coming generation, so that they devoured it greedily because it had both the questions and the answers to what they had secretly been preoccupied w...

Dag Solstad (born 16 July 1941) is a Norwegian novelist, short-story writer, and dramatist whose work has been translated into several languages . [1] He has written nearly 30 books and is the only author to have received the Norwegian Literary Critics' Award three times. His works have been translated into 20 languages. His awards include the Mads Wiel Nygaards Endowment in 1969, the Nordic Council's Literature Prize in 1989, for Roman 1987 and the Brage Prize in 2006 for Armand V . Solstad is among Norway's top-ranked authors of his generation. His early books were considered somewhat controversial, due to their political emphasis (leaning towards the Marxist–Leninist side of the political spectrum). Dag Solstad lives part-time in Berlin and part-time in Oslo . [From Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dag_Solstad ]