T Singer by Dag Solstad
My rating: 3 of 5 stars
I spent the first twenty pages trying to understand why anyone would want to write, much less read, a novel like T Singer. Having finished it, I’m not certain I know why Solstad set out to write a book like this, but I feel more enthusiastic about the reasons for reading it.
Singer is a man beset by anxiety, constantly reviewing his motivations and decisions. His chief ambition seems to be avoiding attention, and in pursuit of anonymity he takes a job as a librarian in small Notodden. For a time, he achieves his goal, but then he happens to fall in love, bringing to an end his days of solitude and anonymity. But his relationship creates ever more complex chains of motivations and consequences, through which Singer must learn to navigate.
Granted, it’s not a fast-paced story (though I was surprised by the occasional appearance of characters like Adam Eyde, Ingemann, and others, who manage to lift the story out of its sluggish pace), but Singer’s anxiety is contagious and soon I found myself thinking about moments from my life where I’d said or done things that I regretted now. In his own peculiar way, Singer manages to elicit both sympathy and enmity, and becomes a kind of regrettable (or regretting?) everyman that looks a little too much like myself.