‘Novel 11, Book 18’ by Dag Solstad    (2001) – 161 pages             Translated from the Norwegian by Sverre Hyngstad

‘Novel 11, Book 18’ is a novel that I wound up feeling deeply ambivalent about. First I will explain the situation depicted in the novel since its title gives the reader no clue as to what is going on.

Norwegian Bjorn Hansen is about 50 years old. Eighteen years ago Bjorn left his wife and his two-year old son because he was strongly attracted to the young woman Turid Lammers. He left his management position in Oslo and moved to the small town of Kongsburg about 50 miles from Oslo. There he runs the office of the County Treasurer.

For several years, the woman Turid Lammers becomes the dazzling focal point, the center of things, in Bjorn’s life. They both become involved in the Kongsburg Theater Society, a group that puts on amateur operettas which are crowd-pleasers. Up until he met Turid, Bjorn considered himself a slow, introverted, and not very spontaneous person.

“Art and literature were not proper subjects to him, they were interests one could cultivate in one’s spare time, not means whereby to acquire a position, which he, with a genuine assuming matter-of-factness, saw as the end of academic study.”

However after living with Turid for twelve years, Bjorn becomes disenchanted.

“Because Turid Lammers had faded. She had turned forty-four, and it had long been clear that the ravages of the years had left their mark on her face and body. Her face had become sharp, scraped, hard. How he missed the softness of it! But that was gone forever, and along with it many of the ideas on which Bjorn Hansen had built his whole way of life.”

After this brusque assessment of Turid, he eventually moves out of her house into an apartment in Kongsburg.

Later his son Peter who Bjorn abandoned 18 years ago moves into the apartment with him in order to attend college in Kongsburg. Bjorn discovers that he really does not like his son very much.

“He couldn’t endure his son’s preachy and boastful manner.”

I guess the reason that kept me fascinated with this novel for much of the way was Bjorn’s blunt honesty about himself and those around him. Here we have a man leaving a woman because she has aged and her looks have hardened. This might be despicable, but it does happen. Then we have this same man who finds out that he doesn’t like his grown child very much. These are natural emotions, but they are rarely discussed in books because they are difficult to deal with.

However ultimately, despite it’s quite fascinating early situations, I must downgrade my opinion of ‘Novel 11, Book 18’ for Bjorn Hansen’s final self-imposed plan which struck me as entirely incomprehensible and senseless.

In the last third of the novel Bjorn Hansen travels to Vilnius, Lithuania and subjects himself to an incomprehensible future (I won’t give away this denouement) which strained this reader’s and I would imagine most readers’ credibility. Because I could not believe that anyone would constrain himself in this way, this severely detracted from my appreciation of this novel.

Grade:   B-