Dag Solstad is among the most respected and influential Norwegian novelists, although his highly literary style and penchant for prosaic characters makes him less well known internationally than some of his peers. I was impressed with his novel Shyness and Dignity, so I browsed Solstad novels in the "Norwegian authors in translation" section of the various bookstores we visited in Norway. I chose T. Singer based on the online critical consensus.
The title character sets aside an aimless youth to take a job as librarian in a small Norwegian town. His explicit goal is to lead an incognito life. He marries a local woman and helps raise her daughter, and eventually moves back to Oslo for a job at a more prestigious library. That's it; that's the whole story. The real action of the book is watching Singer struggle to understand himself and his relationships with others.
The first pages find Singer remembering with shame incidents where people judged him for behaving inauthentically. His fear of judgment leads him to pursue an invisible life. He wants to connect with other people but has anxiety whenever he is the center of attention.
It meant that they were talking about him, discussing him and his relationship with his deceased wife and his stepdaughter, in numerous places when Singer was not personally present, nor was he aware of what they said. Because that's how it is with the person who is the subject of gossip...
In the later stages of the story, Singer worries about his stepdaughter when she appears to have inherited the same reserve.
T. Singer shares many Solstadian trademarks with Shyness and Dignity: a regular-guy protagonist in a low-level intellectual job, meandering passages about the character's feelings, a plot whose details are beside the point, a title that tells you nothing about what to expect. It covers a whole life rather than a single fateful day, which is perhaps why it felt unfocused to me. While I empathize with Singer's warring inclinations, I didn't connect to him.
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