Hanne Ørstavik

Love, Hanne Ørstavik’s acclaimed novella (originally published as Kjurlighet in 1997), tells a haunting and ultimately tragic story of a young mother, Vibeke, and her son, Jon, who have recently moved from a city to a much smaller town in northern Norway. It is late in the day, late in the year and very cold. Jon is anticipating tomorrow, his 9th birthday, and the celebration he is sure his mother is planning. After supper Jon leaves to sell raffle tickets for his school sports club. He wants to be out for a while, to give his mother time to bake the cake and wrap his presents. But the old man at the first house he approaches buys all the tickets. So, Jon returns home, but quickly leaves again, for the same reason as before. In the meantime, Vibeke has taken a shower. She’s pleased with how her new job is going and thinks she deserves a treat, which for her is a trip to the library to return the books she’s read and to borrow new ones. Vibeke lives in her head, reading non-stop, fantasizing romantic encounters. She’s also fixated on her appearance and preoccupied with making a good impression on her new work colleagues. Jon is not her priority. She’s forgotten his birthday, and through inattention and distraction has not seen her son leave the house the second time. When she calls out for him and he doesn’t answer, she thinks, “Most likely he’s doing something in his room.” Vibeke prepares herself, goes out, gets in the car and drives off. The remainder of Ørstavik’s novella is concerned with Jon and Vibeke’s various encounters, which have a random quality about them but movingly demonstrate the emotional distance that exists between mother and son—one self-obsessed and looking for love, the other distracted by expectations and the newness of everything around him—and the vastly different manner in which they approach and perceive the world. Ørstavik’s third-person omniscient narrative flits back and forth between Jon and Vibeke, sometimes from one paragraph to the next, in a way that might be jarring but acts as a constant reminder of the separate worlds that mother and son occupy and, as the evening progresses, the diminishing odds of them reconnecting. Ørstavik’s prose, expertly rendered into English by Martin Aitkin, gleams like the frozen landscape it so capably evokes. Love is an odd and disturbing little book that places a clear-eyed focus on how each of us is confined to a discrete universe of awareness and emotion that sets us apart from everyone else. Writing powerfully and without sentiment, Hanne Ørstavik shows that she is well acquainted with the lonely passion of the human heart.… (more)

Ich Bin Norwegian

Translated from Norwegian by Madeleine Dauer
Read by Madeleine Dauer
Length: 7 hrs and 34 mins

“I stared into the darkness outside the car. So dense it was when there were no reflections of the electric lighting the sky. No stars, no moon. Seen from the moon-glow from my rented German room the sky never got dark at all. Sometimes when sitting up all night I’d go out on the balcony that ran along the front of the building. I’d stand there and listen to the wind in the trees.”

I never really knew where I was in this book, and I don’t mean page number. Being alive in 2024 I am quite aware of time and place shifts in a piece of film or fiction. I like to think it’s part of our expanding creativity, but secretly suspect (and occasionally hope) it’s a literary fad.

Liv, the pastor lives in a small fishing village in far north Norway where she has relocated after losing her best friend Kristiane’s untimely death in Berlin. There, in Norway Liv faces and has ro deal with the trials and tribulations of her congregation.

That’s the plot, though it’s made more complicated by the reader never being quite sure of where she is. Within the course of one short paragraph we may be in Berlin or in Norway. Of course it’s fairly easy to work out, there being no fjords in Berlin, and we usually can see if they are around as Liv is prone to look out windows. But I’m being mean.

The Pastor is actually a fine novel. It’s beautifully written and the Nordic landscape is so delicately described with nuance. I felt that I was in a movie or poem, never a travelog. And though there’s little in the way of suspense, I was compelled to keep reading; in the end not bothering if I was in Berlin or a fishing village. Both places have teenagers with piercings and pastel-colored hair. Early on I thought the facial piercings were a clue as to location, but it seems, like time and place shifts, and so much else in this brave new world, that these too have become global.

I really enjoyed this book.… (more)

This book was a tough one for me. A young woman goes to a remote part of Norway to be an assistant Pastor. It's clear she has ended up there in part to try to escape her demons. A friend/love of hers has committed suicide and she is haunted by it and grieving. But while she is in her new location, she finds people with just as many troubles.

I was so emotionally wrecked by this book that I had to skim parts of it. I suppose that says something positive about the quality of the writing, but I found the story claustrophobic and unrelentingly sad. It was just too much for me.… (more)

This is a slim, 120 page novella about a young divorced mother and her young son who have recently moved to a new town. It's the night before the boy's 9th birthday and they spend the evening into late night apart, out in the town. The mother, Vibeke, has gone out to the library and then meets an attractive man who she stays out with until late at night. Meanwhile the son, Jon has also gone out and has interactions of his own. It's clear that things are moving towards a dramatic conclusion, but I was hopeful that the conclusion would not be sad. I won't say if I was right or not.

The writing style is really interesting. The prose is sparse and to the point and the book shifts between the mother and the son's POV with no warning - no page breaks or anything. So you have to use context sometimes to realize you've shifted to being with a different character.

I really liked this. I have another of Orstavik's books on my shelf, and I'm looking forward to reading it.… (more)