The Missing Maoist Middle of Dag Solstad

David M. Smith examines the career of the great Norwegian novelist Dag Solstad, and the gaps in English translation of his work.

By David M. SmithAugust 18, 2025

• Fiction

• Memoir & Essay

NOVEL 11, BOOK 18 (1992) was the first of Dag Solstad’s novels to appear in English translation. To an Anglophone audience, the title must come as something of a cipher. The novel itself centers on a fictional Norwegian tax official named Bjørn Hansen who secretly orchestrates a bizarre act of defiance against the life he’s sleepwalked into. The title, however, refers not to Hansen but to the book’s overall place in Solstad’s oeuvre, a vast body of work that only readers of the Norwegian originals can fully access. Perhaps “Translation Number 1” would have made more sense as a label for the author’s English debut.

In any case, what these numeric titles inevitably miss is how, prior to Karl Ove Knausgaard, perhaps no other writer set the postwar literary agenda in Norway more than Solstad. With his death in March, he left behind an authorship at once experimental, political, and deeply committed to unsettling the conventions of both fiction and public life. His earlier works, in particular, are saturated with the radical politics he espoused as a member of the Norwegian Maoist movement, a political fringe that managed to exert considerable cultural force in postwar Norway.

A handful more Solstad novels have appeared in English since Sverre Lyngstad’s 2008 translation of Novel 11, Book 18, but only from the latter half of his career. The novels from Solstad’s 1970s and ’80s Maoist phase—though these are some of his best-known works in Norway—remain untranslated. The result has been a picture of Solstad’s authorship that is piecemeal, incomplete, perhaps even misleading. The verdict of James Wood in The New Yorker is typical, and understandable, given that the later works center upon men (like Bjørn Hansen) who are in the throes of midlife crises, largely uninterested in the great political questions of their day. These characters are a far cry from his protagonists of the 1970s and ’80s who, like Solstad, were members of a movement devoted to toppling Norway’s social-democratic government. But even in the less overtly political later works, Solstad’s polemical perspective never quite went away; it just took on an estranged form, haunted by the unrealized hopes of his radical past, staging its interventions indirectly, belatedly, via absence.

To see this, however, requires the context of the Maoist novels that Anglophone publishers have so far overlooked. Perhaps this has been due to a widespread consensus about Solstad and his fellow Maoists. If at best they were mistaken idealists, or at worst apologists for some of the 20th century’s worst totalitarian excesses, then these novels become easier to write off as historical footnotes, period pieces from a bygone era of freewheeling radicalism. On the contrary, however, the novels contain some of the funniest, strangest, most vital material of Solstad’s career. They deserve to be translated, and they deserve their readership now. Let us hope that the sad news of Solstad’s death will lend this project a new urgency. For his entire oeuvre, from start to finish, dramatizes what happens when belief in a utopia collapses but the urge to resist remains.

One of his best-known works from the Maoist period comes to us with a gargantuan title: Gymnaslærer Pedersens beretning om den store politiske vekkelsen som har hjemsøkt vårt land (“High School Teacher Pedersen’s Account of the Great Political Awakening That Has Haunted Our Country”). When the novel appeared in 1982, Solstad was already one of Norway’s most prominent writers. Moreover, most readers knew of his past affiliation with the AKP (m-l), the Norwegian Maoist movement whose “great political awakening” had failed to materialize. The Maoists’ typical hyperbole, having lost its power as agitprop, here signals a highly ironic reckoning with a generation’s failed revolutionary dreams.

The novel’s protagonist, Knut Pedersen, becomes the ideal avatar for this generational arc, narrating the AKP (m-l)’s heyday with some nostalgia, some melancholy, and also a good deal of passion. The novel follows Pedersen as he moves to the small town of Larvik, where his quiet life as a paterfamilias is upended by the radical fervor of his students. He falls in with the local AKP (m-l) chapter and begins an intense affair with Nina Skåtøy, a well-to-do doctor turned revolutionary, whose stint as a proletarian embodies the movement’s contradictions. Ultimately, the Maoists’ activism fails to catch on among the bewildered residents of Larvik. Pedersen loses both his marriage and the affair with Nina and witnesses the dwindling of the AKP (m-l)’s ranks, but he nevertheless ends the novel by declaring “the inner exultation in which [he has] written this account.” (Unless otherwise indicated, all translations from the Norwegian are my own.)

Through Pedersen, Solstad walks us through some of the Maoists’ more esoteric practices. These include “kadervurderinger” (cadre assessments), self-criticism sessions where members were expected to publicly confess any latent “bourgeois” tendencies before the group, and “selvproletarisering” (self-proletarization), a practice wherein they would abandon their white-collar professions to take up work on the factory floors, where they hoped to spread the message of revolution. Almost single-handedly, the novel added these terms to Norway’s cultural lexicon, as well as one of Solstad’s own invention, “biking on the water.” Now a popular idiom to refer to the Maoists’ unrealistically utopian ambitions, this comes from a dreamlike scene in which Solstad permits his characters to ride bicycles over a lake in the Swedish woods.

Some critics have taken Solstad to task for moments like this, condemning them as a barely disguised attempt at revisionism, calibrated to render the Maoists’ shenanigans as harmless, even fun. More than a collection of cute moments, however, the novel dramatizes a very real sense of dissatisfaction that animated the radicalism of Solstad’s generation. For many of them, the postwar consensus that produced one of the world’s most advanced social democracies was less a triumph than a trap. What their parents accepted as security and prosperity was, for them, a recipe for stagnation and conformity. As Pedersen puts it:

We lived in a society that was the best of all imaginable societies, where progress advanced without end. There was little appeal in helping to steer this development, in helping to manage this society, it was a matter for experts, politicians. Few aspired to those roles, indeed why would they want to, what sort of job was that, directing a society which more or less ran itself, on its path toward greater and greater prosperity, better and better conditions for each individual?

Pedersen exemplifies this tendency to be dissatisfied with one’s options in a society where, ironically, the wide amount of freedom to choose one’s life path leads to greater and greater dissatisfaction, a greater sense of claustrophobia.

Because of its cast of characters, wry sense of humor, and depiction of the general cultural mood both during and after the Maoists’ heyday, High School Teacher Pedersen remains probably the best introduction to the Maoist phase of Solstad’s authorship. The novels coming before and after, however, are no less essential. This includes his first major novel written under the sway of Maoism, Arild Asnes, 1970, published in 1971.

A political bildungsroman of sorts, the novel traces the developing social consciousness of the title character—like Solstad, a young, fresh-faced Norwegian novelist near the beginning of his career. At the outset, Arild Asnes is paralyzed by the paradox of his freedom; as a free intellectual in a capitalist society, his every critique only reinforces the very system he opposes: “Is there any better proof that this society is free than the fact that one author […] after the other stands up to say that this freedom is illusory?” As a supposedly “free” artist, Asnes is supposed to be the creator of myths, but instead he is yoked with being the myth itself, the one figure held up as incontrovertible proof of his society’s benevolent freedom. Ultimately, he finds he can only use his “freedom” to write two terse sentences about his predicament: “Anyway, it’s impossible. I have to get away from here.” But to where?

One event in particular is pivotal to Arild Asnes’s conversion to Maoism. Midway through the novel, Asnes encounters an article by Chao Ching-chuan, a Chinese postal worker who explains how Mao Zedong Thought transformed his approach to the problem of delivering undeliverable mail. As it happens, this is a real-life text, published in several languages by the CCP’s international propaganda arm around 1970. With his characteristic move of injecting a bit of reality into his fiction, Solstad has his protagonist discover Chao’s article. And Asnes is transfixed. Comparing Chao’s decisive, collective-oriented praxis to his own paralyzed intellectualism, Asnes senses the possibility of contextualized social meaning. Whereas Asnes feels adrift in abstraction and irony, Chao’s postal work is purposeful, situated, and clear.

The episode stands out as a moment where Asnes sees a model—however distant—of revolutionary purpose actually lived. It sets him on a course to the book’s final scene, which sees Asnes preparing to sell the communist newspaper Klassekampen door-to-door. He examines the faces of fellow passengers on the Oslo Metro and is seized by doubt: how could these ordinary people ever join a revolution? Yet the novel insists: “He had to be able to imagine it.” Asnes arrives, knocks on his first door; it opens; and the novel ends on a note of unresolved yet hopeful anticipation: “Arild Asnes opened his mouth. He began to speak.” With that, at least, Asnes has moved from his earlier, noncommittal disaffection to a form of concrete action.

If High School Teacher Pedersen is the “sequel” of sorts to Arild Asnes, 1970, then we know what became of Asnes’s revolutionary dream. Or is it actually that simple? Enter Roman 1987 (“Novel 1987,” released in the titular year), Solstad’s longest work, as well as his most ambitious formal experiment. Novel 1987 opens with a plea to the reader that he or she “try to listen, to take in this narrative, before judging me—Make an effort! Try, for once!” Our narrator, Fjord (we never learn his first name), introduces himself as a cultivated Norwegian, a former historian and “self-proletarized” factory worker, shaped by the political turbulence of the postwar decades. He is defensive from the outset, aware of how easily his story might be misunderstood by a posterity that no longer possesses the conditions to receive it on its own terms.

Therein lies the book’s difference from Solstad’s previous work. Whereas High School Teacher Pedersen had turned toward a Maoist past that was more or less available for analysis, Novel 1987 takes the very availability of the past as its problem. To do this, it mounts a severe test of the reader’s patience. Over 100 pages are devoted to Fjord’s first job as a journalist in Lillehammer, with the kinds of articles he wrote described in punishingly close detail: match-by-match accounts of the local soccer team’s season, fruit prices at the outdoor market, weather patterns, school board meetings, the “Miss Gudbrandsdal” beauty pageant, and so on. Later, Fjord devotes 30 more pages to his MA thesis in history, which traces spiritual and worldly authority in 16th-century Norway. The apparent insignificance of these details, and their almost parodic overrepresentation, adds up to a kind of anti-drama. If Fjord’s account is an apologia pro vita sua, then it is one in which the apology seems constantly undermined by the inertia of the prose itself.

This strain on the reader is deliberate. Solstad called Novel 1987 “an inhospitable book,” one that refuses to meet the reader halfway. Its glut of detail is not immersive but resistant, its realism not consoling but estranging. What it adds up to is a deep skepticism about our ability to dwell in the historical past. The story dramatizes how the past is not a comfortable place to return to but a terrain made strange by our own distance from it. Fjord’s thesis on Absalon Pederssøn Beyer, the 16th-century Norwegian scholar and theologian, becomes an extended meditation on the limits of historical understanding. “What seems comprehensible to us in Master Absalon,” he writes, “is nowhere in what he actually wrote.” Solstad’s point is not simply that we misunderstand the past but that much of what once mattered has been irretrievably lost. And this same inaccessibility applies to Fjord’s own past as well.

Like the article by Chao Ching-chuan, much of the documentary material in Novel 1987 is real: Solstad borrowed heavily from old issues of the Dagningen newspaper, citing its articles nearly verbatim and presenting them as the work of his fictional creation, Fjord. But what interests him is not just what was written—it’s also what had to be left out. As Fjord learns the conventions of reporting, for instance, he realizes that his damning-with-faint-praise write-ups of Lillehammer’s soccer team are not appreciated among the fan base. He begins to internalize the unwritten rules of sportswriting in his day, trimming out commentary that might upset subscribers. Similarly, the MA thesis he actually wanted to write—driven by personal anxiety about his own place in history—remains unwritten. Instead, his thesis reproduces the prevailing academic tone and scholarly conventions of the 1960s. In both cases, Solstad dramatizes how the ideological structures of any given time govern what can and cannot be said. Novel 1987, then, becomes a novel of these ghostly traces, of everything that might have been written but wasn’t, bringing out the afterimage of the not-written on the basis of the written text.

Above all, Novel 1987 insists that the past must remain opaque, and that the act of writing—whether as journalist, historian, or novelist—is always entangled with forms of compromise and forgetting. Solstad’s resistance to readerly comfort is thus no flaw to be smoothed over; rather, it is the whole point. And it is why the book still matters: because it stages, in its very form, the difficulty of retrieving what history leaves behind.

In the shift to Solstad’s later work—centering not on intellectual Maoist revolutionaries but on everyday, politically detached Norwegian citizens—this difficulty remains, but in an understated, alienated form. One important link between Solstad’s Maoist phase and his later work comes in 1990’s Medaljens forside (“The Front of the Medal”), a curious outlier in his career. Rather than focusing on a fictional protagonist, this nonfiction novel traces the history of the real-life Norwegian corporation Aker, from its 19th-century founding to the present day. Stranger still is the fact that Aker commissioned Solstad—the former Maoist!—to write its story.

In an essay titled “The Commissioned Novel,” Solstad explains why he accepted this unlikely assignment. He turns to the tradition of Spanish court painters like Francisco Goya and Diego Velázquez, who served emperors and popes, men of power, while at the same time subtly undermining them. Goya’s Charles IV of Spain and His Family (1801) is, in Solstad’s words, “an unusually nasty portrait,” and Velázquez’s paintings—though made at the height of Spanish imperial power—reveal, to posterity, a society already in decline.

Solstad hoped to do something similar with The Front of the Medal. His book would fulfill Aker’s commission but also embed a critique that could become apparent only in hindsight. He focused not on workers (as his clients may have preferred, to render their story more palatable to a social-democratic audience) but on managers and bureaucrats, rendering a portrait of capitalist structure through scrupulous, dispassionate detail. The result is an account that appears neutral but whose emphasis betrays its author’s deeper sympathies.

Unlike the works that came before it, The Front of the Medal is not itself a book I would advocate for translation—it remains an occasionally dry corporate history—but its conceptual role in Solstad’s authorship is undeniable. Novel 1987 is suffused with the sense that we live amid forces we don’t understand until long after the fact, and even then, only partially. In The Front of the Medal and “The Commissioned Novel,” Solstad begins to imagine that critique can be embedded in a work without being immediately legible. Like Goya’s painting of the royal family, which seemed to serve power but revealed rot to future generations, Solstad’s late fiction proposes that critique can outlive the conditions that silenced or distorted it at the time of creation. And this is precisely the sort of critique we begin to glimpse in a late-period novel like 1999’s T Singer (translated into English by Tiina Nunnally and published by New Directions in 2018).

The novel’s eponymous protagonist comes to us in a state of passive dependency, depending on luck and circumstance to get him through life. He spends most of his twenties hoping that he will become a great author, but (with shades of Arild Asnes) he is unable to write much beyond one sentence that he keeps working and reworking. Eventually, Singer gives up writing and becomes a librarian, entering the profession thanks to a gender quota. Is Singer appreciative of the opportunities his social-democratic country affords to citizens like himself? Not so much: “Singer pretended to be a social democrat, it was to his advantage to do so because then he was left in peace and could sink into himself when the others discussed politics.” Nor does he imagine himself particularly affected by wider social and historical realities, understanding his job and position in life in terms of his own private metaphor—as the “guardian of the books.”

Singer is no powerful prince, nor is he even very compelling as a personality. And yet, as in the paintings of Goya or Velázquez, where power itself becomes grotesque when depicted faithfully, Solstad’s rendering of Singer becomes its own kind of indictment. His is a quiet picture of rot—not through corruption or excess, but through his passivity in the face of a freedom so total that it becomes inert. And like those old court painters, who often painted themselves off to the side of their main subject, Solstad inserts himself into the book toward the end as the author, addressing the audience in his own voice: “I wish I could have said something that Singer wouldn’t be able to ponder. There’s something I would have said about precisely this point, but I have no words for it. My language ceases when Singer’s pondering ceases. Yet that does not make us identical.”

With this authorial intervention, Solstad provides an important thread tying his early and later work together. Like his Maoist alter egos (Asnes, Pedersen, Fjord), Solstad still runs up against his own limits of language when critiquing the social-democratic mores of his age. But in a figure like Singer—whose historical situatedness Solstad shares, without identifying with the character as such—the critical impulse survives in a kind of observational severity, the revolutionary fire cooled into a quiet, watchful irony. In an era of hegemonic late capitalism, Solstad aims to portray such an individual as objectively as possible, in the hopes that an implicit critique might become evident in a more indirect manner.

To return to High School Teacher Pedersen: in what way does that great political awakening “haunt” the modern, social-democratic Norway? The Norwegian word for haunting—“hjemsøke”—is rich with association: literally meaning “to home-visit,” it can refer to a spirit (like Marx and Engels’s specter of communism) that hangs around your home, brooking no denial, causing all manner of disruption. It can also, however, refer to “visitation” in terms of a divine judgment, as in the biblical formulation about the sins of the father being visited upon the son. In both cases, what we have is a past that continues to make itself felt in the present in unpredictable, unruly ways.

With its not-written traces, its delayed, posterity-facing critiques, Solstad’s authorship was always haunted by his time in the AKP (m-l), a revolutionary past that, if it cannot be openly claimed, nevertheless refuses to be silenced. All his novels show Solstad grappling with the compromises of history, encoding critique in ways that themselves question the very act of decoding it. To be sure, his later works stand on their own and have helped cement Solstad’s status as a major European author of the past half century. At present, however, Arild Asnes, 1970; High School Teacher Pedersen; and Novel 1987 together form a mute, missing center for his English-language readers. It is well past time for translation to remedy this omission.