A feather with two wings: Dag Solstad

It's hard to doubt that translation is one of the most civilizing and peacemaking tasks in this turbulent world, and proof that not everything is upside down if you can be reading, at two in the morning on a fourth-floor balcony in the subtropics, a novelist from the other side of the planet, the Norwegian Dag Solstad (1941-2025). A malicious person might say that the exaggerated fame of his compatriots Knausgaard and Nobel Prize winner Jon Fosse —both admirers of his—may have brought forward his recent departure. It's reasonable that there are gaps—years or decades—between the publication of a work and its eventual translations, but it seemed less logical that the Swedish Academy missed the opportunity in 2023 to do justice to Solstad by crowning his neighbor Fosse.

Solstad's The Night of Professor Andersen was printed in Oslo in 1996 and in Spain in 2023. A literature teacher spends Christmas Eve alone and, from his window, thinks he detects a crime in a building across the street. He finds himself unable to report the murderer. (In Solstad , the narrator's voice is always well-positioned: loose, unaffected, sharp, equidistant. The author doesn't blend in with it, but he covers its back, and the disillusioned perspective doesn't become cynical; on the contrary, it acquires a certain ethical force that's never pontificating.) It's another of Solstad's figures, absorbed, meditative, engaged in a confrontation with herself, surrounded at a distance by a small group of friends, scathingly portrayed (especially their shifts in time).

Solstad opts for long sentences to express everything in every instance, exhausting the twists and turns of each subject or digression, in a vital and still relevant capture of contemporary society. Skilled at developing logical arguments, great syntactical transparency is required to write like him. This devotee of Hamsun, Proust, and Mann excels at honestly recounting the obscurities that surround us and at gauging the difficulty of reconciling the intimate and the social. His mastery shines through in his almost imperceptible maneuvers.

Perhaps a reader won't know exactly what guarantees, values, evocations, or consolations it provides, but they are operative and tangible. As in Modesty and Dignity (1994), the shadow of Ibsen looms, whom Solstad read—in another legitimate reading gap —at 50. Both fictions move from the teaching of literature to life; that is their arc: how to teach literature, to whom, and for what. They doubt this instruction and literature in general (while the novel itself takes care of refuting and erasing this suspicion). The students intentionally stumble upon Ibsen's text, and the extremely subtle Solstad uses a stylus to x-ray current pedagogy and, although his irony is never arrogant, unleashes invectives of lethal grace. But tone and rhythm remain gentle as he glosses over the end of an era (which, seen from today, enjoyed a miraculous survival).

Novel Eleven, Play Eighteen —it's clear from the titles that this isn't a concessionary author—revisits the failed staging of an Ibsen play. Once again, Solstad shifts the focus of the story without any rude gestures. The infatuation with a woman; the phases of falling in love. Exceptional for the learned and pedestrian analysis of a couple, Solstad moves completely into the story.

His fictions are clearly defined and etched in the reader's mind, isolated from the rest. He presents his narrative clearly, without overwhelming, and incorporates everything with the ease with which he twists the script. Putting his sense of proportion at risk, in Novela once... he poses an absurd U-turn—a simulation of disability—and sows a greater mystery than he had previously managed to create in his protagonist (and in the latter's bond with his son).

What Dag Solstad is capable of achieving with a tiny psychological detail in an insignificant scene is also evident in T. Singer . This novel—another fine line between what happens and what doesn't—confirms that he is an old hand at dealing with minuscule, resonant enigmas; misunderstandings and foolish decisions. His protagonists know not to do what most people would do under the same circumstances. Solstad tells things—and in a way—that no other novelist tells. (Further elaborated, if possible, in the excellent Spanish translations.)

He turns the arbitrary into a lesson in elegance, and insistence creates hilarity. The challenge is total without sacrificing perfect readability. In these narratives, as in Armand V. , woven with seductive footnotes from an unknown novel, the reader establishes a special intimacy with a respectfully intrusive author who establishes a tense and natural connection with his characters.

His feat: achieving heartbreaking sweetness without falling into pathos. Dag Solstad needed only a few elements to create works that evoke Richard Wollheim's phrase about Adrian Stokes: "On the verge of tears when he smiled." In prehistoric times, extinction came more quickly to the dinosaur microraptor. It had four wings; it was better to have two.

The Night of Professor Andersen , by Dag Solstad. Trans. Kirsti Baggethun and Asunción Lorenzo. Nórdica Libros, 160 pp.

Modesty and dignity , Dag Solstad. Translated Kirsti Baggethun and Asunción Lorenzo. Rag Tongue, 144 pages.

Novel eleven, work eighteen , Dag Solstad. Translated Kirsti Baggethun and Asunción Lorenzo. Rag Tongue, 208 pages.