39 Books: 2018

In spite of what I said yesterday about the decline in the number of novels I read each year, this year was packed with a variety: Australian, Korean, Austrian, Egyptian, German, Argentinian and, today's choice, Norwegian; that is, if variety depends on the country of origin. But they are all one thing, novels; diversity funnelling into an abyss of prose. No doubt we maintain such distinctions to avoid funnelling ourselves. 

And yet what I said yesterday remains true, as I don't recall anything, or at least very little, about these novels, as if I'd never read them, or that they were read without memory. Neither remembering nor forgetting, this may be the pleasure of reading novels.

Translated by Tiina Nunnally

T Singer is this pleasure entirely. His first name is never given, so the reader remains at a formal distance, his inner life and daily routine reported carefully, without judgement or apparent purpose. His life is without apparent purpose. He daydreams of being an author but cannot get beyond the first sentence. Elaborating on its simplicity, turning it into a story, opens too many questions of truth and necessity. Aged 34, with the story stalled, he becomes a librarian in a town called Notodden, hoping to remove himself from this life: "the feeling of being present in purely routine operations fascinated him". This is our fascination with the novel: disappearance, routine, another life. Even the town's name embodies the novel we're reading, and so all novels, conflating the English No and the German Tod, Notodden, the negative of death. And without death, no life either. This is why T Singer is a peculiar pleasure and curiously similar in effect to the first volume of Knausgaard's My Struggle in that nothing happens, or at least not what we assume must happen, so in effect nothing happens, but in that nothing happening what impends demands the turning of the page. It is both boring and exhilarating, unfunny and hilarious, horrifying and uplifting. Perhaps Norwegian novels are set apart.