T Singer

Reviews / Votes

Solstad's construction of reality is uniquely his own... mad, sad and funny... the behavioural possibilities of the novel are subtly and fundamentally enlarged. -- Geoff Dyer * Observer * All of the whispers have been right: Solstad is a vital novelist. -- Charles Finch * New York Times * Solstad is expert in delineating the absurdities of existence... Solstad exposes us to ourselves. -- David Mills * Sunday 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 Solstad's novels are full of dryly comic, densely existential despair . . . reminiscent of Witold Gombrowicz, with his keen sense of the absurd. Both translators Tiina Nunnally and Steven T. Murray have rendered Solstad's rhythms into wonderfully idiosyncratic English. -- Nathan Kapp * Times Literary Supplement * [Solstad] is a wonderful stylist whose prose gives the impression of not being stylised at all... The prose is distracted and persistent, compelling and compelled. -- Frank Lawton * Literary Review * Before Knausgaard, Norway had Solstad, whose pitiless, mesmeric, darkly comic stories of quiet desperation - here it's a failed librarian - turn banality to sublimity. * The Arts Desk * An idiosyncratic, at times impish writer, whose voice - insinuating yet direct, droll but aghast - is impossible to 'unhear' once you've encountered it. * The White Review *