Book review: Professor Andersen’s Night

Dag Solstad poses this question in Professor Andersen’s Night, a tidy little novella which examines how one man’s failure to react the way he might have expected leads to a spiral of self analysis and a very academic mid-life crisis.

It’s Christmas Eve, and 55-year-old Professor Pal Andersen is spending the night alone in his Oslo apartment. He is content to do so, preparing himself a meal, fussing over the tree, changing into his good clothes. His life is heavy with both routine and solitude. A professor of literature, he has friends and colleagues with whom he swaps ideas, but he shares very little of himself.

As he sits down to his meal he watches families in the apartments opposite his enjoying the festivities together. Without warning and without ceremony, through, a lit window he observes a young man murdering a young woman. The act is sudden and the description of it so spare as to leave the reader wondering if it actually took place.

Andersen’s immediate reaction is to go through the motions of what he “should” do. He recoils in horror, naturally, and picks up the phone to report the murder, but watches himself quickly replacing the receiver. Why does he find himself rendered unable to do the “right thing” and report the incident?

In the two months which follow, the vile act he witnessed becomes a tool for assessing both his situation and his own morality. He is almost entirely detached from the horrors of the crime itself, instead becoming consumed with self-questioning, until one day he finds himself, quite unexpectedly, dining with the murderer at a local sushi bar.

The scene is amusing, surreal in its mundanity, but it jolts Andersen into another bout of excruciating analysis, one which threatens to take him to the brink of his own sanity. His life’s work comes into question, and an idea he once nurtured; that one might achieve something close to immortality by leaving behind great works of literature begins to feel farcical.

At times dark and moving, even, on occasion, unexpectedly funny, Professor Andersen’s Night tackles a premise which would prove just as intriguing in a pacey thriller. However, murder, its motives and its mess are given little space here. Instead, it is visceral in its investigations into the derailing of one man’s life in all its sticky, existential glory.

The book’s icy prose and long sentences – which in the wrong hands would feel heavy and laboured – flow with a quickness that hints at the workings of Andersen’s mind, and Solstad has a way of prodding at the protagonist’s bourgeois anxieties while leaving us feeling desperately sorry for him.

As Andersen begins to understand why he might have reacted in the way he did, his conclusions are darkly convincing, at once sensible and borderline psychopathic. Certainly they’re reasonable enough to prompt the reader to sympathise with his position, something seemingly unfathomable at the offset.

Professor Andersen’s Night

Dag Solstad

Harvill Secker, £15.99