Attempts to Describe the Impenetrable

Arne Gunnar Larsen is a social democrat, an architect and director of planning of a huge housing cooperative. Realising that he has a powerful urge to become part of the people, he leaves his wife and moves from his flat in the poshest part of downtown Oslo to a large housing estate on the city’s outskirts. It is an estate he himself has helped plan, a place where “the architecture was to be a tribute to human company”. However, Larsen’s encounter with the modern housing estate turns into an encounter with the Great Absence, until he strikes up a strange friendship with the neighbouring couple – a friendship that has terrible consequences.

In Attempts to Describe the Impenetrable Solstad borrows tricks from popular genres like the thriller and the melodrama. At the same time, this is a novel that comments its own creation, where Solstad, the author, comments his own project.

Praise for Attempts to Describe the Impenetrable:

“anyone who takes on a project such as Solstad’s, where the impossibility of the task is both its premise and its driving force, has to have a lot of humour. And a writer who introduces his novel by, drunk at Theatercafeen in Oslo roaring at his own main character: “I have absolutely no sense of humour!”, that’s a writer who raises the reader’s curiosity. That kind of promise is tempting to test both for skeptical and naïve readers.”
(Expressen, Sweden)

First published: 1984, Forlaget Oktober
Dag Solstad: Biography and bibliography

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