T Singer

“Solstad doesn’t write to please other people. Do exactly what you want, that’s my idea...the drama exists in his voice” (Lydia Davis) 

T Singer begins with thirty-four-year-old Singer graduating from library school and traveling by train from Oslo to the small town of Notodden, located in the mountainous Telemark region of Norway. There he plans to begin a deliberately anonymous life as a librarian. But Singer unexpectedly falls in love with the ceramicist Merete Saethre, who has a young daughter from a previous relationship. After a few years together, the couple is on the verge of separating, when a car accident prompts a dramatic change in Singer’s life.

The narrator of the novel specifically states that this is not a happy story, yet, as in all of Dag Solstad’s works, the prose is marked by an unforgettable combination of humor and darkness. Overall, T Singer marks a departure more explicitly existential than any of Solstad’s previous works. 

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.

Tiina Nunnally is the award-winning translator of more than 70 books from the Scandinavian languages, including Kristin Lavransdatter by Sigrid Undset, Niels Lyhne by Jens Peter Jacobsen, and The Land of Dreams by Vidar Sundstøl. She was appointed Knight of the Royal Norwegian Order of Merit for her contributions to Norwegian literature in the United States.