Wait, Blink is the first English-language translation of award-winning Norwegian author Gunnhild Øyehaug’s novel of interwoven stories following a group of artistic women pursuing their ambitions despite endless distractions and disappointments.
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.
