Professor Andersen's Night - Softcover

Solstad, Dag

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0811228304 ISBN 13: 9780811228305

Publisher: New Directions, 2019

Synopsis

A dark and moving examination of one man’s derailed life, by the Norwegian master who is “without question, Norway’s bravest, most intelligent novelist” (Per Petterson)

In this existential murder mystery, it is Christmas Eve, and fifty-five-year-old professor Pal Andersen is alone, drinking coffee and cognac in his living room. Lost in thought, he looks out the window and sees a man strangle a woman in the apartment across the street. Failing to report the crime, he becomes paralyzed by his indecision. Professor Andersen’s Night is an unsettling yet highly entertaining novel, written in Dag Solstad’s signature concise, dark, and witty prose. "He’s a kind of surrealistic writer, of very strange novels," Haruki Murakami wrote. "I think he is serious literature".

About this title

About the Author

Dag Solstad (b. 1941) has written nearly thirty books, including Armand V and T Singer (both available from New Directions). Admired worldwide by writers as diverse as Lydia Davis, Geoff Dyer, and Peter Handke, Solstad has won the 2006 Brage Prize, the 1989 Nordic Council’s Prize for Literature, and the Norwegian Critic’s Prize in 1969, 1992, and 1999.

Agnes Scott Langeland was born in Scotland and moved to Norway in 1971. Previous translations include poems by Rune Christiansen in The Edinburgh Review and Petter Mejlander's book Pushwagner (Magikon, 2008).

Review

“With sublime restraint and subtle modulation, Solstad conveys an entire age of sorrow and loss.”
- Publishers Weekly

“There’s an undeniable beauty in the way he raises tedious self-reflexivity to the level of music.”
- Wilson McBee, Southwest Review

“I find him an utterly hypnotic and utterly humane writer.”
- James Wood, The New Yorker

“His language sparkles with its new old-fashioned elegance and radiates a unique luster, inimitable and full of elan.”
- Karl Ove Knausgaard

“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

Edition details

• Publisher: New Directions
• Publication date: 2019
• ISBN 10: 0811228304
• ISBN 13: 9780811228305
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 176