Armand V

Reviews / Votes

An experimental novel by a Norwegian veteran, who is loved by Karl Ove Knausgaard, Haruki Murakami and Peter Handke... Very unusual - and in the end, very deep. * Evening Standard * Solstad is expert in delineating the absurdities of existence... Solstad exposes us to ourselves. [T]he reader is deeply rewarded in the end. -- David Mills * Sunday Times * Solstad's novels are full of dryly comic, densely existential despair . . . Death occupies the space between each of the footnotes that make up the corpus of Armand V, but what Solstad ultimately celebrates in it is the freedom of the novelist, and of the novel form. -- Nathan Kapp * Times Literary Supplement * Solstad describes Armand V as a series of "ongoing but distorted footnotes to an unwritten novel". That sounds experimental but it soon feels as comfortable as a pair of old suede shoes. After about 30 pages Solstad mentions how, in the composition of a novel, he becomes conscious of the point, sometimes 30 or 40 pages back, when "the whole thing went off the rails". He then starts over from that point, implicitly to get it back on the rails. It's an extraordinary claim. I mean, the idea that, for Solstad, a novel needs rails. In his weirdly hypnotic way isn't this what he is always railing against? -- Geoff Dyer * Observer * All of the whispers have been right: Solstad is a vital novelist. -- Charles Finch * New York Times * He's a kind of surrealistic writer... I think that's serious literature. -- Haruki Murakami His language sparkles with its new old-fashioned elegance. -- Karl Ove Knausgaard He doesn't write to please other people... Do exactly what you want, that's my idea... the drama exists in his voice, in his comments and views, and that works, it helps connect the reader to the story. -- Lydia Davis In Norway, Solstad is as celebrated as, say, Don DeLillo or Toni Morrison [in the US]... An utterly hypnotic and utterly humane writer. -- James Wood * New Yorker * Without question Norway's bravest, most intelligent novelist. -- Per Petterson