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brendan_h's review
challenging
reflective
slow-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Loveable characters? No
- Diverse cast of characters? No
- Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated
3.25
ronanmcd's review against another edition
3.0
Quite a nice idea but found it matters a slow (tedious?) read. A life is reduced to a series of defining instances. Not worthy of being novelized it becomes a series of footnotes.
Ther book therefore questions who we are and if we are ultimately just a collection of the facts of our existence? It basically figures as much when the protagonist is shown, as a diplomat, to be considered by his words and actions, which he feels are often the exact opposite of his true feelings & sympathies. It's a complex question and the footnotes approach feels like it's being dissected for investigation, exploding the idea.
Ther book therefore questions who we are and if we are ultimately just a collection of the facts of our existence? It basically figures as much when the protagonist is shown, as a diplomat, to be considered by his words and actions, which he feels are often the exact opposite of his true feelings & sympathies. It's a complex question and the footnotes approach feels like it's being dissected for investigation, exploding the idea.
jornfrostad's review against another edition
3.0
Fotnote-konseptet gjør dette til en litt schizofren bok som på uforutsigbart vis hopper hit og dit i løpet av sine drøyt 200 sider. Men noen av sekvensene skinner like sterkt som det beste Solstad har bedrevet. Jeg tenker da spesielt på den lange noten som tar for seg Armand, Paul Buer og de øvrige studentene de omgir seg med; deres ambisjoner, drømmer og/eller mangel på sådanne. Her trenges det dypt inn i grunnleggende, men vanligvis usynlige idéer omkring status, karriere og «ytre» verdier og presentasjoner på en måte som kan framkalle angst hos alle og enhver som innerst inne kanskje bærer på en fortrengt tanke om at de ikke har etterlevd fullt og helt det evnene deres har kunnet legge til rette for. Det interessante er at man samtidig ender opp med å spørre seg selv om dette egentlig er så ille; fortellingen drar leseren i flere retninger samtidig.
En annen sekvens, hvor hovedpersonen reiser til en ikke navngitt vestlandsby for å besøke en ung flamme, er også magisk. Og boka lander til slutt godt når de siste fotnotene er overstått og alt er forbi. Ikke Solstads beste bok, men svært lesbart og interessant, også som meta-litterært prosjekt, selv om denne boka kanskje ikke har den samme dybden som f.eks. «16.07.41» når det kommer til refleksjoner omkring litteraturen og forfatterrollen som sådan.
En annen sekvens, hvor hovedpersonen reiser til en ikke navngitt vestlandsby for å besøke en ung flamme, er også magisk. Og boka lander til slutt godt når de siste fotnotene er overstått og alt er forbi. Ikke Solstads beste bok, men svært lesbart og interessant, også som meta-litterært prosjekt, selv om denne boka kanskje ikke har den samme dybden som f.eks. «16.07.41» når det kommer til refleksjoner omkring litteraturen og forfatterrollen som sådan.
torjus's review against another edition
challenging
emotional
funny
reflective
sad
fast-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? No
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
4.5
zachwerb's review against another edition
4.0
Read the translation, pretty good, about a 3.7. I quite enjoy his writing and style, but this is the weaker of the two I have read by him.
ieatbooksforbreakfast's review against another edition
adventurous
emotional
lighthearted
reflective
sad
slow-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? It's complicated
- Loveable characters? No
- Diverse cast of characters? No
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
3.75
this 200 page book went on a 60 page side tangent about a friend of the main character's friend group in college and kept me engaged the entire time, this is one of the most impressive literary feats I have ever witnessed with my own two eyes
atticrat's review
dark
reflective
sad
slow-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? No
- Diverse cast of characters? No
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
3.5
cjf's review against another edition
5.0
An extremely unsettling, compelling novel about defeat and complicity. Very very good.
arirang's review against another edition
4.0
The original novel is about the Norwegian diplomat Armand V. I don’t intend to write it down, but I’m making use of it in order to write the footnotes. Yet at times I may write about characters in these footnotes who aren’t found anywhere in the original novel; but of course this doesn’t mean that these characters are any less fictional than those in the actual unwritten novel.
Norwegian writer Dag Solstad's previous novels available in English translation are, by original publication date with the date of the English translation shown in brackets:
1992 Ellevte roman, bok atten (2008 Novel 11, Book 18 IFFP longlisted)
1994 Genanse og verdighet (2007 Shyness and Dignity IFFP shortlisted)
My review: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/1247296453
1996 Professor Andersens natt (2012 Professor Andersen's Night IFFP longlisted) - (1996)
My review: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/1130709930
1999 T Singer (2018 T Singer)
My review https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/2496012975
When he finished this series of novels he declared, that he was finished as a writer, having perfected, in T Singer, the form as far as he was able. E.g. he told Publishers Weekly this year: As a working hypothesis, I consider T. Singer to be the conclusion of my authorship. After I finished writing T. Singer, I didn't know what to do from that point on. I believed, and maybe I still believe, that I was incapable of writing a better novel than that, and here I was only 57 years old and not wanting to repeat myself for the next 20 years, perhaps getting worse and worse with each book.
Yet he also noted that while I was writing those books which definitely did define my authorship, I was also always playing around with other forms of expressing myself without really developing them. I had a suspicion that there were all these fascinating opportunities laying around in the midst of that chaos, within me, undeveloped, in embryo and in a Paris Review interview he then noted: Declaring that I was finished made me feel like I could do whatever I damn well pleased, which again opened up entirely new ways of thinking.
One of these new ways of thinking was to lead to the 2006 novel Armand V. Fotnoter til en uutgravd roman, now available in English in 2018 translated by Stephen T. Murray, as Armand V: Footnotes to an Unexcavated Novel. It begins:
1 ] This footnote, the very first, suffers from having a displaced time perspective. It originates from a specific event that has to do with Armand’s youth; however, it does not deal with Armand’s youth but with his son’s youth, as viewed by Armand, a man in his sixties. This footnote is a commentary on something that took place in a completely different time, and at a completely different place, and with characters who are altogether different, such as Armand, or those who aren’t even included here in this text at this time (such as Armand’s son, who wasn’t born yet); this was a time almost twenty years before Armand would meet the woman who’d later become his son’s mother, and yet the son is a central figure in this footnote, in this scene that illuminates his father’s youth.
The plot, insofar as there is one, revolves around Armand, a Norwegian diplomat, but one who started with radical anti-establishment beliefs, particularly as regards Norway’s friendly relationships with the United States. And perhaps unusually, particularly in his chosen profession, has retained those beliefs into his 60s, despite his career requiring him to represent the opposite viewpoint:
In other words, the young radical had done well. The paradox had enjoyed a meteoric career. And what’s interesting about this is: he’d done it without in any way changing his fundamental attitude towards the political game or the role of his own country in said game. The forty- two- year- old newly appointed Norwegian ambassador to Jordan had precisely the same attitude towards the United States as when he’d applied to the foreign service, and the now ageing diplomat continues to maintain these same attitudes, carrying them, strictly speaking, inside his own heart, even though the game is no longer the same.
And this dual identity, Armand’s real views versus those he diplomatically represents, tempered only by the occasional ironic aside in suitable company, are at the heart of the novel:
Had he ever had a secret desire to upset the game? Had he dreamt of the moment when he could cast aside the mask and show his true face? No. If he’d had such a wish, he wouldn’t have dared make a career within the foreign service. He wore a mask, but he’d never felt an urge to cast it aside, in one dreadful moment, so as to show his true face.
He has three children from three marriages, two daughters and a son. And, in a crucial moment, his son, coming to the end of his compulsory military service suggests he is thinking of signing up for the Norwegian special services, where he would undertake missions with the US troops in the Middle East and Asia. Armand’s reaction is the opposite of his normal diplomatic self and far from talk his son out of it, as he knows full well he could have done, he actually drives his son to turn a vague intention into a firm action, one that ends with tragic consequences.
His father scorned the new warriors as cowardly dogs, and this included of course, and above all, his own son if he should make good on his fatal desire to join this system as an enlisted soldier whose exclusive task was to drown others in blood, as a warning against any attempt to change the structures of this system, to replace the free with the unfree, the just with the unjust, the good with the bad, the holy with the unholy, or the insane.
So far – in my review at least, so conventional - but as mentioned, and as the opening quote suggests, this is an unusual novel told in footnotes.
The narrator (who can safely be identified with Solstad who has expressed the same intention in interviews) had planned at one stage to write a book as footnotes to a famous novel Brodsky’s Watermark or Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice.
But another of his concerns was to investigate: Is a novel something that has already been written, and is the author merely the one who finds it, laboriously digging it out? I have to admit that with each passing year I have come to realise more and more clearly that I am enveloped in such a notion. But who wrote the novel originally, if I’m simply the one who discovered and excavated it?
The two intentions combined here, where the story of Armand is presented as footnotes to an another unwritten, or unexcavated, novel about Armand, the ‘book above’ as the narrator tells it. Solstad told Publishers Weekly:
I have never in detail excavated the unexcavated novel. And I fortunately haven’t really imagined it either, because that would require imagining a whole series of boring scenes that it’s best to spare myself, and not the least my reader. However, I did work quite a bit with the correspondence between the footnotes and what they were building upon, that is, the unexcavated novel.
And the narrator explains:
Of course I could have delved into the novel above and written it down. It would have taken a lot of work to lay it out, and in the end it would have been composed just as it was from the very beginning. Can I say that? Then what about the fact that all my novels have turned out differently from how I thought they would when I first set out? In other words, a novel comes together little by little, but does that contradict the fact that it has been there all along, from the beginning? Hidden. Slumbering. Buried. No matter how much I repudiate the notion that the novel has been there from the beginning, I can’t escape the possibility, at any rate, that it might be true after all. In fact, the more I contradict myself, the more convinced I am that I’m not contradicting myself, but that writing a novel means not inventing it, but uncovering it.
...
One thing is certain, however: wishing to write a novel about the Norwegian diplomat Armand V., I’ve decided the best way to realise this is not by writing a novel about him, but by allowing him instead to appear in an outpouring of footnotes to this novel. The sum of these footnotes, therefore, is the novel about Armand V. Linked to these footnotes are also the author’s comments about what he’s doing, something that is also linked to the sum of these footnotes; which, taken as a whole, constitute the novel about Armand V.; I’m now in the process of writing a series of these footnotes and for the second time. That’s why I call them footnotes about the relationship between the unwritten novel and the footnotes to this novel.
Now one small criticism of the novel would be that, as Solstad admits is true, I didn’t really find myself believing that the novel above actually existed, and at times the footnotes don’t really read as footnotes, but simply an alternative take on a story.
In a sense though one could see this book more as a shadow or a sister or a twin novel to the unexcavated one. Indeed Solstad himself follows this line of reasoning, when he has Armand’s first wife and mother of his first child, a daughter, as N, a fellow University student, who plays a key role in the novel above. But in the book we are reading, Footnote 8 tells us:
Here I must point out that N, who appears at this stage in the novel, and who plays the role of an utterly decisive woman in Armand’s life, is not included here, in the footnotes, at the same time. Here we find her twin sister.
This book reveals that the twin sister of N (who is here referred to often as the twin sister’s twin sister) was actually, secretly, his true life long love, from before and long after he divorced her sister.
Another counterpoint is provided by the lengthy, and rather Kunderaesque, story of Paul Buer, Armand’s childhood best friend:
In the mid- 1960s, Paul Buer and his best friend Armand arrived in Oslo to study at the university at Blindern. Paul ended up among the physical scientists, known as the ‘realists’, while Armand settled down with the ‘humanists’.
The different circles meant they went their different ways at University but here, but seemingly not in the novel above, the narrator devotes a lot of pages to Buer’s own story. Indeed he tells us that:
I also knew Paul Buer; for a time we belonged to the same circle, a group of students, and we shared a background, having grown up in the same town on the west side of the Oslo Fjord. Actually, it was Paul Buer that I was interested in for a literary project. And that’s not so strange, considering his tragic end. But it turned out to be Armand instead, maybe because of the indecipherable nature of his life, seen from my point of view.
And again in interviews, while Solstad doesn’t claim to have known the fictional Paul Buer and Armand V, he does say that the Paul Buer section was lifted from a draft novel he had started but failed to complete some years earlier.
In many respects Buer is closer to the self-effacing subjects of the conventional novels that Solstad wrote culminating with T Singer, indeed the timing suggests the Buer novel is one of those that he abandoned realising he had nowhere left to take the form. Of Buer the narrator writes:
But usually you kept quiet and good- naturedly played along with this superficial diminishing of the ‘I’ that you experienced from the inside. In spite of everything, this was an attempt by the others to pigeonhole you, a type of deep delving into your very existence, and hence this exaggerated one- sidedness and superficiality functioned as a means of protecting your own ‘I’, your true ‘I’, which had absolutely no wish to be exposed to the spotlight. Use of ‘typical’, as applied to yourself, and not just to the others, protected the sense of reserve which, through all the noise and commotion, was a fundamental trait shared by this group of science students, a contributing factor which lent their personalities such a strong aura of anonymity.
And in the footnote novel, Armand meets Buer again, after many years, much later in his life. Buer is obsessed by a political and scientific scandal (he discovered results of experiments used to determine where an airport should be build had been falsified, but when he tried to expose this the scandal was politically hushed up) and shortly after they meet, with Armand failing to engage with Buer’s concerns, Buer commits suicide. Armand realises this defines how different to the two are:
The reality of the wronged individual went against the grain for Armand. He couldn’t share in the situation of the wronged individual, even though that person was right and represented Truth and the order that needed to be restored. Armand was too bound to his own position as a diplomat. He liked the ways of diplomacy, which were as far from Buer’s ways as they could possibly be.
And at the novel’s close Armand is left wondering what is left of his identity and what he is aiming to achieve:
Serve his God? Armand was an atheist, or rather an agnostic. Serve his country? Armand, in his heart, had been a disloyal servant to his country, although not outwardly. Serve his society? Armand feared he was a hanger- on, regardless of how that was viewed. Now he was going to pick up his son, whom he had not prevented from becoming a professional soldier in a special unit that had fought the war to which Armand himself was strongly opposed, and who had returned from that war disabled. Yet the claim is made here, once again, that if Armand cannot be connected with a noble life, then he quite simply does not exist.
4.5 stars – perhaps my favourite Solstad to date.
Norwegian writer Dag Solstad's previous novels available in English translation are, by original publication date with the date of the English translation shown in brackets:
1992 Ellevte roman, bok atten (2008 Novel 11, Book 18 IFFP longlisted)
1994 Genanse og verdighet (2007 Shyness and Dignity IFFP shortlisted)
My review: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/1247296453
1996 Professor Andersens natt (2012 Professor Andersen's Night IFFP longlisted) - (1996)
My review: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/1130709930
1999 T Singer (2018 T Singer)
My review https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/2496012975
When he finished this series of novels he declared, that he was finished as a writer, having perfected, in T Singer, the form as far as he was able. E.g. he told Publishers Weekly this year: As a working hypothesis, I consider T. Singer to be the conclusion of my authorship. After I finished writing T. Singer, I didn't know what to do from that point on. I believed, and maybe I still believe, that I was incapable of writing a better novel than that, and here I was only 57 years old and not wanting to repeat myself for the next 20 years, perhaps getting worse and worse with each book.
Yet he also noted that while I was writing those books which definitely did define my authorship, I was also always playing around with other forms of expressing myself without really developing them. I had a suspicion that there were all these fascinating opportunities laying around in the midst of that chaos, within me, undeveloped, in embryo and in a Paris Review interview he then noted: Declaring that I was finished made me feel like I could do whatever I damn well pleased, which again opened up entirely new ways of thinking.
One of these new ways of thinking was to lead to the 2006 novel Armand V. Fotnoter til en uutgravd roman, now available in English in 2018 translated by Stephen T. Murray, as Armand V: Footnotes to an Unexcavated Novel. It begins:
1 ] This footnote, the very first, suffers from having a displaced time perspective. It originates from a specific event that has to do with Armand’s youth; however, it does not deal with Armand’s youth but with his son’s youth, as viewed by Armand, a man in his sixties. This footnote is a commentary on something that took place in a completely different time, and at a completely different place, and with characters who are altogether different, such as Armand, or those who aren’t even included here in this text at this time (such as Armand’s son, who wasn’t born yet); this was a time almost twenty years before Armand would meet the woman who’d later become his son’s mother, and yet the son is a central figure in this footnote, in this scene that illuminates his father’s youth.
The plot, insofar as there is one, revolves around Armand, a Norwegian diplomat, but one who started with radical anti-establishment beliefs, particularly as regards Norway’s friendly relationships with the United States. And perhaps unusually, particularly in his chosen profession, has retained those beliefs into his 60s, despite his career requiring him to represent the opposite viewpoint:
In other words, the young radical had done well. The paradox had enjoyed a meteoric career. And what’s interesting about this is: he’d done it without in any way changing his fundamental attitude towards the political game or the role of his own country in said game. The forty- two- year- old newly appointed Norwegian ambassador to Jordan had precisely the same attitude towards the United States as when he’d applied to the foreign service, and the now ageing diplomat continues to maintain these same attitudes, carrying them, strictly speaking, inside his own heart, even though the game is no longer the same.
And this dual identity, Armand’s real views versus those he diplomatically represents, tempered only by the occasional ironic aside in suitable company, are at the heart of the novel:
Had he ever had a secret desire to upset the game? Had he dreamt of the moment when he could cast aside the mask and show his true face? No. If he’d had such a wish, he wouldn’t have dared make a career within the foreign service. He wore a mask, but he’d never felt an urge to cast it aside, in one dreadful moment, so as to show his true face.
He has three children from three marriages, two daughters and a son. And, in a crucial moment, his son, coming to the end of his compulsory military service suggests he is thinking of signing up for the Norwegian special services, where he would undertake missions with the US troops in the Middle East and Asia. Armand’s reaction is the opposite of his normal diplomatic self and far from talk his son out of it, as he knows full well he could have done, he actually drives his son to turn a vague intention into a firm action, one that ends with tragic consequences.
His father scorned the new warriors as cowardly dogs, and this included of course, and above all, his own son if he should make good on his fatal desire to join this system as an enlisted soldier whose exclusive task was to drown others in blood, as a warning against any attempt to change the structures of this system, to replace the free with the unfree, the just with the unjust, the good with the bad, the holy with the unholy, or the insane.
So far – in my review at least, so conventional - but as mentioned, and as the opening quote suggests, this is an unusual novel told in footnotes.
The narrator (who can safely be identified with Solstad who has expressed the same intention in interviews) had planned at one stage to write a book as footnotes to a famous novel Brodsky’s Watermark or Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice.
But another of his concerns was to investigate: Is a novel something that has already been written, and is the author merely the one who finds it, laboriously digging it out? I have to admit that with each passing year I have come to realise more and more clearly that I am enveloped in such a notion. But who wrote the novel originally, if I’m simply the one who discovered and excavated it?
The two intentions combined here, where the story of Armand is presented as footnotes to an another unwritten, or unexcavated, novel about Armand, the ‘book above’ as the narrator tells it. Solstad told Publishers Weekly:
I have never in detail excavated the unexcavated novel. And I fortunately haven’t really imagined it either, because that would require imagining a whole series of boring scenes that it’s best to spare myself, and not the least my reader. However, I did work quite a bit with the correspondence between the footnotes and what they were building upon, that is, the unexcavated novel.
And the narrator explains:
Of course I could have delved into the novel above and written it down. It would have taken a lot of work to lay it out, and in the end it would have been composed just as it was from the very beginning. Can I say that? Then what about the fact that all my novels have turned out differently from how I thought they would when I first set out? In other words, a novel comes together little by little, but does that contradict the fact that it has been there all along, from the beginning? Hidden. Slumbering. Buried. No matter how much I repudiate the notion that the novel has been there from the beginning, I can’t escape the possibility, at any rate, that it might be true after all. In fact, the more I contradict myself, the more convinced I am that I’m not contradicting myself, but that writing a novel means not inventing it, but uncovering it.
...
One thing is certain, however: wishing to write a novel about the Norwegian diplomat Armand V., I’ve decided the best way to realise this is not by writing a novel about him, but by allowing him instead to appear in an outpouring of footnotes to this novel. The sum of these footnotes, therefore, is the novel about Armand V. Linked to these footnotes are also the author’s comments about what he’s doing, something that is also linked to the sum of these footnotes; which, taken as a whole, constitute the novel about Armand V.; I’m now in the process of writing a series of these footnotes and for the second time. That’s why I call them footnotes about the relationship between the unwritten novel and the footnotes to this novel.
Now one small criticism of the novel would be that, as Solstad admits is true, I didn’t really find myself believing that the novel above actually existed, and at times the footnotes don’t really read as footnotes, but simply an alternative take on a story.
In a sense though one could see this book more as a shadow or a sister or a twin novel to the unexcavated one. Indeed Solstad himself follows this line of reasoning, when he has Armand’s first wife and mother of his first child, a daughter, as N, a fellow University student, who plays a key role in the novel above. But in the book we are reading, Footnote 8 tells us:
Here I must point out that N, who appears at this stage in the novel, and who plays the role of an utterly decisive woman in Armand’s life, is not included here, in the footnotes, at the same time. Here we find her twin sister.
This book reveals that the twin sister of N (who is here referred to often as the twin sister’s twin sister) was actually, secretly, his true life long love, from before and long after he divorced her sister.
Another counterpoint is provided by the lengthy, and rather Kunderaesque, story of Paul Buer, Armand’s childhood best friend:
In the mid- 1960s, Paul Buer and his best friend Armand arrived in Oslo to study at the university at Blindern. Paul ended up among the physical scientists, known as the ‘realists’, while Armand settled down with the ‘humanists’.
The different circles meant they went their different ways at University but here, but seemingly not in the novel above, the narrator devotes a lot of pages to Buer’s own story. Indeed he tells us that:
I also knew Paul Buer; for a time we belonged to the same circle, a group of students, and we shared a background, having grown up in the same town on the west side of the Oslo Fjord. Actually, it was Paul Buer that I was interested in for a literary project. And that’s not so strange, considering his tragic end. But it turned out to be Armand instead, maybe because of the indecipherable nature of his life, seen from my point of view.
And again in interviews, while Solstad doesn’t claim to have known the fictional Paul Buer and Armand V, he does say that the Paul Buer section was lifted from a draft novel he had started but failed to complete some years earlier.
In many respects Buer is closer to the self-effacing subjects of the conventional novels that Solstad wrote culminating with T Singer, indeed the timing suggests the Buer novel is one of those that he abandoned realising he had nowhere left to take the form. Of Buer the narrator writes:
But usually you kept quiet and good- naturedly played along with this superficial diminishing of the ‘I’ that you experienced from the inside. In spite of everything, this was an attempt by the others to pigeonhole you, a type of deep delving into your very existence, and hence this exaggerated one- sidedness and superficiality functioned as a means of protecting your own ‘I’, your true ‘I’, which had absolutely no wish to be exposed to the spotlight. Use of ‘typical’, as applied to yourself, and not just to the others, protected the sense of reserve which, through all the noise and commotion, was a fundamental trait shared by this group of science students, a contributing factor which lent their personalities such a strong aura of anonymity.
And in the footnote novel, Armand meets Buer again, after many years, much later in his life. Buer is obsessed by a political and scientific scandal (he discovered results of experiments used to determine where an airport should be build had been falsified, but when he tried to expose this the scandal was politically hushed up) and shortly after they meet, with Armand failing to engage with Buer’s concerns, Buer commits suicide. Armand realises this defines how different to the two are:
The reality of the wronged individual went against the grain for Armand. He couldn’t share in the situation of the wronged individual, even though that person was right and represented Truth and the order that needed to be restored. Armand was too bound to his own position as a diplomat. He liked the ways of diplomacy, which were as far from Buer’s ways as they could possibly be.
And at the novel’s close Armand is left wondering what is left of his identity and what he is aiming to achieve:
Serve his God? Armand was an atheist, or rather an agnostic. Serve his country? Armand, in his heart, had been a disloyal servant to his country, although not outwardly. Serve his society? Armand feared he was a hanger- on, regardless of how that was viewed. Now he was going to pick up his son, whom he had not prevented from becoming a professional soldier in a special unit that had fought the war to which Armand himself was strongly opposed, and who had returned from that war disabled. Yet the claim is made here, once again, that if Armand cannot be connected with a noble life, then he quite simply does not exist.
4.5 stars – perhaps my favourite Solstad to date.
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