Love, a trim and electrifying novel ... is undergirded by the present tense and made incandescent by Orstavik’s seemingly effortless omniscient perspective, sometimes switching between Jon’s mind and Vibeke’s from sentence to sentence ... Orstavik’s mastery of perspective and clean, crackling sentences prevent sentimentality or sensationalism from trailing this story of a woman and her accidentally untended child ... The primeval darkness of the forest looms, biting as the cold that seems a character throughout this excellent novel of near misses.
It is the radical formal structure of the book — the rapid point of view shifts from one paragraph to the next — that truly dials into something profound about love, about how limited it can be. As if to show the indissoluble bond between Vibeke and [Jon], the way in which they are never truly apart, in spite of the mother’s distance from her son, the author alternates between their points of view, occasionally even within the same paragraph. There is a slice of viewpoint here, a sliver of the other viewpoint there ... in Love, the closeness of the perspectives, the cramming of them together, as if the mother and son are one person, and yet clearly not, feels less about narrative, and more about the limitations of love. We think we know another person, we feel settled in another person, and yet, perhaps every other consciousness is entirely a mystery. That’s the power of this particular book. The tiny emotional and atmospheric shifts are often barely perceptible, and yet they add up to much more. The total transparency of the prose while engaged in this formal structure leaves a lot of room for the reader’s own prejudices and biases to surface. We don’t know for sure anything of what the author intended us to feel about Vibeke; there is not a single judgmental comment. However, it is plain that the novella is contesting any idealization of motherhood ... Despite its brevity, Love, effectively rendered into English by Martin Aitken, demands and deserves total concentration.
Hanne Ørstavik’s utterly memorable, devastating little book was first published in Norway in 1997. Available in English for the first time, in Martin Aitken’s admirably clear translation, it might as well have been written yesterday: it has been preserved in fabular ice. The writing is beautifully precise and packed with meaning, as it toggles between the perspectives of its two main characters, the narrative pas de deux flowing without grammatical interruption from short section to short section so that it’s not always immediately clear whose head we’re in ... Love is an intense tale of selfishness and tenderness...a fairy tale soaked in bathos and fraught with jeopardy. It is driven by a dreamlike logic, mirroring the general sense of torpor in the air (characters keep dozing off, when you don’t expect them to). The final few lines are magnificently ambiguous. Certainly, we have witnessed some form of tragedy. Whether it’s one of transient emotional neglect or something more tangible and terrible is potently unclear.
The book barrels forward by the force of its language. The sentences are driving, like a hammer to a nail, coming one after the other relentlessly. They are decidedly not meditative but hypnotic in their onslaught, drawing us into the continuities and disjunctions in the characters’ thought processes ... Dense and economical, the lines burst with anxious life ... She offers no clear transitions to ease the reader’s passage from one scene to another. If at first the continual change in perspective induces a feeling of whiplash, it quickly becomes seamless ... an elegant warning.
If there is a word that comes to mind while reading Hanne Ørstavik’s Love,, it is cold ... Over the course of the story, Ørstavik builds up a palpable sense of dread ... Ørstavik’s coup de maître is not just to follow the narratives of Vibeke and Jon one after the other. There are many books in which the author shifts the perspective from chapter to chapter, for instance. But Ørstavik changes perspective from paragraph to paragraph and, sometimes, within the same paragraph. On the page, there is therefore an intimacy that is not reflected in the events themselves. This approach renders the contrast between the two and their inner lives more stark. It also raises questions about the nature of love itself ... Ørstavik’s Norwegian is rendered deftly into English by Martin Aitken, who won the PEN Translation Prize for his work and also translated Karl Ove Knausgård’s six-cycle literary sensation, Min Kamp. (It’s perhaps worth noting that Karl Ove Knausgård is among Love’s many admirers.) This is in spite of the brevity of Ørstavik’s novel, which at first glance seems so mundane and yet is profound, thought-provoking and, in short, demands to be read again, and again, and again.
For a short novel that spans only a few hours in time—there is little in the way of back story and no flashbacks to the past – Ørstavik brings us remarkably close to both her characters, shifting effortlessly between them in stark, lucid prose. There is a timeless feel to this novel that is similar to Ghost Wall and West, stories that are universal in nature even as their worlds are wonderfully unique. All three books carry from the opening pages an impending sense of doom that unfolds in tense sequences over the course of the narrative ... Ørstavik’s twinned themes of love and neglect manifest on every page. Her style, brilliantly translated by Martin Aitken, is quiet and mesmeric ... for all the potential dangers of this one night, the book’s achievement is that we come to the end of it seeing a wider picture. The focus is not necessarily on the neglect of one evening, but rather on the miracle of the thousands of preceding days that a mother has managed to keep her son alive.
Exploring many opposing themes, including hope, disappointment, longing, and unrequited love, the novella tells the story of Vibeke and her young son, Jon, who have recently moved to a secluded town in the northern reaches of Norway ...Their stories unfold breathlessly close together on the page, suggesting the strong link between mother and son that Vibeke’s actions betray ... Though Love is only one hundred and twenty-five pages, its careful craft and beautiful details make it worth savoring—right to its haunting but inevitable conclusion.
Hanne Orstavik’s Love suffers from an unoriginal title but everything else about it is, quite simply, exceptional ... This is a short, suspenseful winter’s tale crafted in beautifully spare and precise prose.
... [a] perfectly poised Norwegian novella ... Ørstavik’s ingenious device is to toggle between their two consciousnesses from one paragraph to the next, so that their narratives run as though on parallel train tracks, never to meet, even as they lie cheek to cheek. Layers of unremarkable everyday intimacy and acres of emotional distance are compressed between the lines. The two strands are connected by gossamer threads – or perhaps only by the reader’s desire to bring them together ... Ørstavik builds a cinematic sense of dread out of the plainest prose, phrase layered on phrase with the hushed implacability of falling snow ... Ørstavik has found fertile territory here in which to dig into the raging solipsism of the inner life ... One of the many uncanny things about this novella is that, though it was published in Norway more than two decades ago, it hasn’t dated at all ... [an] eerie, devastating little book.
[T]here is an inescapable and escalating sense of anxiety as the story unfolds, mostly accomplished through the subtle juxtaposition of images that bring a sense of menace to what should be an ordinary afternoon and evening: a leather dog collar hanging from a chain on a wall, photographs of someone being tortured, a piece of fruit wriggling with maggots ... One of the most interesting elements of the novella, and an ingredient in its final, devastating outcome, is the distance between Vibeke and Jon, who revolve around each other so carefully but with very little actual interaction. In the scenes in which they are together, Jon orbits his mother, watching her, aware of her movements, giving the reader his interpretation of her ... This has the curious effect of infusing a child’s scene with an adult-like sensuality or pushing a note of Jon’s innocence up against a moment of Vibeke’s knowing awareness. It’s destabilizing and keeps the reader alert and wary. Exploited this way, architecturally, this distance can only signal catastrophe.
Love is a novella brimming with darkness, where the point of view shifts from one paragraph to the next, thus mirroring the disjunctions and projections embedded in all human affections ... Ørstavik has written a delicate, fragile tale governed by its own laws of narration. Love’s impeccable English translation by Martin Aitken reflects the economy and self-possession of Nordic prose. Its seamless narration, drawn in counterpoint, reverberates beyond the eerie landscape, lingering in the mind. It might initially frustrate readers who are used to neat chapters and perspectives but if one stays with it despite the difficulties, Love, like love, yields its own gifts.
Hanne Ørstavik’s exquisite Love, so elemental in its materials and technique, embodies a profound recognition – namely that every search for clarity and connection must proceed through the full awareness of what constrains us.
Aitkin’s translation is economic, delicate, and pliant, making the narrative shifts between Vibeke and Jon seem effortless, dreamlike. With Aitkin, Ørstavik’s tale is in good hands ... Aitkin is able to capture the somnolent, lulling quality inherent in the language of the story, even as the tension and potential for danger build ... Ørstavik’s Love is, at its core, about the impossibility of a mother fully loving, reaching, and understanding her child, while remaining aware that children, like Jon, are indeed vulnerable to the behaviors of their parents, however fair and understandable those behaviors may be ... By the end of Love, the reader’s understanding of Jon’s reverie, just as the reader’s understanding of Vibeke and Jon’s relationship, and of love itself, has permanently shifted.
Set during the days of landline telephones and music videos, Ørstavik carefully blends the narratives so the words and actions of one character reflect or bleed into the other, demonstrating on a structural level how close Jon and his mother are emotionally, and at times physically, throughout the long winter’s night. Without spoiling the ending, it’s safe to say the constant reminders of connection – and near misses – make the ending all the more heartbreaking. What could be a simple family story is instead filled with foreboding and anxiety, showcasing the marvels and dangers pulsating just below the surface in our everyday lives. Longing and hopefulness fills these brief pages, leaving readers with a sense of wonder for the average: how a day can be so filled with newness and potential, with menace and tragedy.
Ørstavik shifts from Vibeke to Jon with incredible dexterity, often jumping perspective from one paragraph to the next, and, as their seemingly mundane nights progress, a creeping sense of dread builds. The deceptively simple novel is slow-burning, placing each character into situations associated with horror—entering an unfamiliar house, accepting a ride from a stranger—and the result is a magnificent tale.
A nightmarish sense of impending doom hangs over these carefully detailed, tightly controlled pages ... A short, bleak, capably written book, ironically titled, icy cold to the core.
