A jolt of elation always strikes when coming across a passage that perfectly captures one’s private thoughts, and with Gunnhild Øyehaug’s novel Wait, Blink: A Perfect Picture of Inner Life...I frequently found myself electrified ... Øyehaug’s characters are as nuanced as her fine-tuned language, which makes the most of its cultural references while radiating the uniqueness of a novel that feels profound, mysterious, and witty all at once.
Wait, Blink feels most organic in...moments of squalor and when its plotlines intersect, an impressive feat given that its narrators revel in serendipity and coincidence. Allusions to Dante and Cervantes clang interestingly against the novel’s lively pop-culture riffs, among them a breakup occasioned by a feminist interpretation of Kill Bill Vol. 2 and a scatological spoof of Sofia Coppola’s Lost in Translation. The form that most influences these pages seems to be the screenplay, and despite her stylish intelligence and sparkplug characters Oyehaug struggles to scratch the narrative’s cinematic veneer.
...a tender, funny puzzle ... Along with her young, literature-loving hero, Øyehaug lures us into the minds of a sundry cast of supporting characters, each of them tangled up in their own questionable enchantments, and all connected with the finest of gossamer threads ... But perhaps the most fascinating characters in Wait, Blink are the narrators. Known simply as "we" for the bulk of the novel, their identities cloaked until the end, Øyehaug's all-knowing storytellers steer readers from episode to episode, confiding secrets, tossing off multiple allusions, and referring to the novel itself in a fitting postmodern move that Sigrid would happily inform us dates back to Don Quixote ... In Wait, Blink, it's the wonderfully confounding riddles we happen upon that become the draw.
A delicate net of intermingled lives underpins this witty, spirited novel about creating: art, love, self-sufficiency, and identity ... If it isn’t precisely perfect, it’s awfully damn close.
The disappointing latest from Øyehaug...shuttles rapidly from character to character, sometimes for only a page before moving on ... Øyehaug’s novel has intriguing characters and sharp moments, though these are let down by trite themes and uneven prose, and the book as a whole tends to blend together.
From the beginning of the novel, each short chapter presents us with new figures in what initially seems a dizzyingly large cast of characters. After a while, however, a plot as tightly woven as a Hollywood romantic comedy reveals itself. Øyehaug is a prolific writer ... There is some distance separating Wait, Blink from the short minimalist stories found in Knots, the kind that made Øyehaug’s writing resonate with a writer like Lydia Davis ... the novel will still seem familiar to readers acquainted with the kind of thinking about the large through the small that Davis has made her trademark ... the romantic storylines take unexpected turns, and the questions of interpretation, meaning, connection and communication become dazzlingly complex, making two people discussing a Tarantino movie read like a crash course in language philosophy ... In Øyehaug’s novel, women created as male fantasies take on a life of their own—and an agency infused with humor and a playful attitude ... a thoroughly enjoyable novel...in a form of storytelling so seemingly mild and pleasant it could almost be considered beach reading.
