Abstract

Abstract:

Norwegian author Dag Solstad's second novel, Arild Asnes, 1970 (1971), chronicles the political growing pains of a young writer. Arild Asnes is twenty-eight years old. He has written books and essays, and he longs to do more for the socialist cause. Returning home to Norway, one of the world's foremost social democratic welfare states, after a trip abroad, he initially finds the task impossible. He sees in everyone and everything only an insidious inertia. Asnes succumbs to it, too. "He lived in a capitalist society. He was a socialist. He was free," Solstad writes. "That attached something absurd to him. This absurdity undermined everything he said, everything he wrote."

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