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Book Cover for: Armand V, Dag Solstad

Armand V

Dag Solstad

Paperback
Regular price$15.95With free membership trial$7.9750% off your first book+ Free shipping
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Reader Score

74%

74% of readers

recommend this book

Critic Reviews

Good

Based on 10 reviews on

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Armand is a diplomat rising through the ranks of the Norwegian foreign office, but he's caught between his public duty to support foreign wars in the Middle East and his private disdain for Western intervention. He hides behind knowing, ironic statements, which no one grasps and which change nothing. Armand's son joins the Norwegian SAS to fight in the Middle East, despite being specifically warned against such a move by his father, and this leads to catastrophic, heartbreaking consequences.

Told exclusively in footnotes to an unwritten book, this is Solstad's radically unconventional novel about how we experience the passing of time: how it fragments, drifts, quickens, and how single moments can define a life.

Book Details

  • Publisher: New Directions Publishing Corporation
  • Publish Date: May 29th, 2018
  • Pages: 224
  • Language: English
  • Edition: undefined - undefined
  • Dimensions: 7.90in - 5.10in - 0.60in - 0.50lb
  • EAN: 9780811226288
  • Categories: • Literary• War & Military• Political

About the Author

Solstad, Dag: - Dag Solstad (b. 1941) has written nearly thirty books, including Armand V and T Singer (both available from New Directions). Admired worldwide by writers as diverse as Lydia Davis, Geoff Dyer, and Peter Handke, Solstad has won the 2006 Brage Prize, the 1989 Nordic Council's Prize for Literature, and the Norwegian Critic's Prize in 1969, 1992, and 1999.
Murray, Steven T.: - Steven T. Murray (1943-2018) was the former publisher and editor-in-chief of Fjord Press, which specialized in literary translations from northern Europe. He translated numerous books from German, Norwegian, Swedish, and Danish, including novels by Nele Neuhaus, Henning Mankell, Karin Alvtegen, and Jørgen Brekke. Murray is best known for his translations of the Millennium trilogy by Stieg Larsson.

More books by Dag Solstad

Book Cover for: Professor Andersen's Night, Dag Solstad
Book Cover for: Novel 11, Book 18, Dag Solstad
Book Cover for: T Singer, Dag Solstad
Book Cover for: Shyness and Dignity, Dag Solstad

What people are saying

Mentioner image for: Christian TeBordo
Christian TeBordo
@xtebordo
1 year

not relatable

gave in and started reading my last dag solstad ('armand v.'). been allowing myself 30 pages a day, but my supplies will run out tomorrow. somebody needs to translate more quickly.

twitter.com
Mentioner image for: Jake Romm
Jake Romm
@jake_romm
1 year

your pal | writer | associate editor @proteanmag | sometimes gitmo lawyer let me write for you: jakeromm@icloud.com

@__AustinAdams Dag Solstad: Armand V + Novel 11 Modiano: Young Once Aira: Fulgentius

twitter.com
Mentioner image for: Luis Panini
Luis Panini
@TheLuisPanini
2 years

Lector / Escritor / Arquitecto. Reader / Writer / Architect. Major mottoes: "I would prefer not to,” “yes I said yes I will Yes,” “I can’t go on, I’ll go on.”

@Magdarine Ah! I read his Ella Minnow Pea many years ago. I didn’t know about Ibid. Sounds similar to Dag Solstad’s Armand V, although he tells the story through footnotes and not endnotes. Thanks.

twitter.com

Critics’ reviews

Praise for this book

Solstad, regarded by Norwegians as arguably their finest and surely their most critically praised and influential contemporary novelist, pairs his deep political engagement with an ever-renewed formal invention. With each new novel, he startles us, his readers, yet again with something unexpected. I find him, with his spirited intelligence, a delight and an inspiration to read, whether (haltingly!) in Norwegian or, over the past few years, happily, gratefully, in English translation.--Lydia Davis
The thing about Armand V is that no matter how seemingly irrelevant these tangents are and how miscellaneous is the book's structure, nothing in it feels unimportant. This, for me, is why Armand V succeeds so magnificently.--Veronica Scott Esposito "Literary Hub" (3/12/2018 12:00:00 AM)
All of the whispers have been right: Solstad is a vital novelist.--Charles Finch "New York Times Book Review" (10/22/2018 12:00:00 AM)
Solstad's inventive approach allows him to reflect on the freedom and obligations of the novelist who is tasked with telling someone else's life story. It also inscribes, in the novel's very form, Solstad's way of writing about people who are not quite the protagonists of their own lives...What if a life--even an apparently consequential one, like an ambassador's--had no discernible narrative, no coherent main action? Actual lives look nothing much like conventional novels. That is the challenge Solstad accepts and rigorously joins.--James Wood "The New Yorker" (10/22/2018 12:00:00 AM)
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, even as the soon-to-be-curtailed lives of his aging protagonists deny freedom's very existence. It is a grand negation.-- "The Times Literary Supplement" (10/22/2018 12:00:00 AM)
Since he published his first book of stories in 1965, Dag Solstad has been to Scandinavian literature what Philip Roth has been to American letters or Gu]nter Grass to German writing: an unavoidable voice.-- "The Paris Review" (10/22/2018 12:00:00 AM)
He's a kind of surrealistic writer--serious literature.--Haruki Murakami (10/22/2018 12:00:00 AM)
His language sparkles with its new old-fashioned elegance, and radiates a unique luster, inimitable and full of e´lan.--Karl Ove Knausgaard (10/22/2018 12:00:00 AM)
Of diplomacy and its discontents: an existentialist-tinged character study by acclaimed Norwegian novelist Solstad.-- "Kirkus" (10/22/2018 12:00:00 AM)
This unique, fascinating novel is composed of footnotes to a larger work that doesn't exist...Solstad is, as ever, excellent at mingling the personal with the theoretical, embedded in the strange beauty of everyday routine.-- "Publishers Weekly (starred)" (3/12/2018 12:00:00 AM)
The Solstadian long sentence feeds back into itself, meandering with the aimless inevitability of a river heading towards the sea.-- "The Guardian" (3/12/2018 12:00:00 AM)
The novel unfolds against every expectation into something memorable and moving.--Michael Autrey "Booklist Online" (3/12/2018 12:00:00 AM)
Already renowned in Scandinavian literature, Solstad once again brilliantly defies categories, this time in English.--Lanie Tankard "World Literature Today" (3/12/2018 12:00:00 AM)

What people are saying

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