Novel 11, Book 18
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- $9.99
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
A brilliant novel by the Norwegian master Dag Solstad
Bjørn Hansen, a respectable town treasurer, has just turned fifty and is horrified by the thought that chance has ruled his life. Eighteen years ago he left his wife and their two-year-old son for his mistress, who persuaded him to start afresh in a small, provincial town and to devote himself to an amateur theater.In time that relationship also faded, and after four years of living alone Bjørn contemplates an extraordinary course of action that will change his life forever.
He finds a fellow conspirator in Dr. Schiøtz, who has a secret of his own and offers to help Bjørn carry his preposterous plan through to its logical conclusion. But the sudden reappearance of his son both fills Bjørn with new hope and complicates matters. The desire to gamble with his comfortable existence proves irresistible, however, taking him to Vilnius in Lithuania, where very soon he cannot tell whether he’s tangled up in a game or reality.
Dag Solstad won the Norwegian Critics Prize for Literature for Novel 11, Book 18, a concentrated uncompromising existential novel that puts on full display the author’s remarkable gifts and wit.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
A bourgeois man scavenges for meaning in the sly and emotionally rich latest from Solstad (Professor Andersen's Night). Soft-spoken civil servant Bjørn Hansen left his wife and young son, Peter, in Oslo 18 years earlier and moved to a small town. Now, as he approaches his 50th birthday, his quiet life with a new woman, Turid, begins to wear on him. Bjørn leaves Turid to try and start over once again, and with his doctor develops a plan to seize control of his fate ("his great Negation, as he had begun to call it, through an action that would be irrevocable"), the details of which are revealed in the final act. The elaborate scheme, though, is interrupted when Peter, now 20, decides to move in with the father he barely knows. Written with a sharp eye for detail and featuring a winning cast (Turid is particularly vivid, as is the way Bjørn's love for her ebbs as she grows older and becomes less beautiful to him; his contempt for his unpopular son is also sharp), the narrative offers much to admire, even if the second half lacks the keen emotional observation of the first and leaves the repercussions of Bjørn's choices underexplored. Still, Solstad consistently intrigues.
