Hanne Orstavik is a well known, prize winning Norwegian author and I thought this book would fit the bill when I was looking for something different to read. What I found was a hauntingly sad story of a single mother, Vibeke, and her eight year old son, Jon and the separate lives they live together. It’s appropriately dark and cold as the story takes place on a cold, dark night in a small village in Norway. The structure or rather lack of - what Jon is thinking and doing interspersed with paragraphs of what his mother Vibeke is thinking and doing and their respective conversations with the people they are with - is one you have to pay attention to. This makes for such an introspective and intimate book. It’s a short book, just 180 pages but it took me longer than I thought to read because I was almost afraid to know what was going happen as both mother and son go out into the night. Each of them meeting with strangers that had me scared for and questioning both of them. I did not connect with Vibke at all except that she is a big reader. Other than that I didn’t her at all. Jon is only eight and all I could feel for him was heartbreak. Sometimes when I read a translation, I wonder if something gets missed, that nuance, that idiom that doesn’t have a true equivalent. It’s thought provoking in many ways and just so full of loneliness, it gave me pause. Several people have rated this highly but I have to admit that I didn’t love it.


I received an advanced copy of this book from Archipelago through NetGalley.netgalley-94 s Elyse Walters4,010 11.2k

After reading “Love” in one sitting in the middle of the night - (180 pages: Kindle for me), I had already slept from about 7pm to 1am- I stayed awake under the covers of my bed thinking about this novel for a good hour before falling back to sleep for another few hours.

This is my first read by author Scandinavian author Hanne Orstavik. Hopefully not my last! What I especially d was all my own thinking intertwined throughout and then after I finished reading “Love”. I was examining this story from many points of views while being completely captivated by the content presented.

The story itself takes place during the middle of the night - just as my reading was.
It’s a quiet meditative type of read. A few times my own imagination raced ahead and got the better of me. There was one scene where I was scared - really scared — and it was my imagination... but then I had a hard time shaking my fears of ‘what if’.

Jon is 8 years old. He will be 9 tomorrow. He and his mother, Vibeke, live in a small town in northern Norway. They are new to the town, having just recently moved in.
A traveling carnival has come to town. Vibeke was on her way to the library - but they were closed - and ends at the carnival.
Jon also leaves the house to sell lottery tickets for his sports club.
We follow both of them during the night as they take very different journeys.
We meet the people each of come into contact with.

Jon is sure his mother is at home baking a cake for his birthday....with high hopes in getting a train set the next day.

As a single mother, Vibeke hasn’t much money....yet she has a lot of attention on looking good - would to buy a new outfit - “she deserves it, with the move and all”. During a dinner scene — before their separate journeys begin — we see the inside thoughts of Vibeke: she doesn’t think her son’s stories have a point and “Can’t you just go, she thinks to herself. Find something to do, play or something”.

What stood out for me ( without giving this small story away) - is how innocent - vulnerable- pure - a child’s love can be for their parent ....under any circumstances. Yet underneath the surface we feel so many emotions....the loneliness.... sadness...longing: desire to be bathed in love.

I’m very glad I chose to read this book ....I thought it was gorgeously written...with concise compact sentences. I also love the book cover - Lovely

Thank You Netgalley, Archipelago Publishing, and Hanne Orstavik Heba1,135 2,571

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?? ???? ?????? ?????? ?? ?????....closer-to-my-heart favorite65 s Michael655 960

Set in a village on the outskirts of northern Norway, Love tracks the lonesome paths a mother and her young son take over the course of a single winter's night. The novella opens with eight-year-old Jon and his single mother Vibeke together in their house, but a series of misunderstandings soon separates the pair, with each embarking on a different journey just as the sun starts to set. Over the course of the night, both mother and son encounter strange and ominous figures, misinterpret their surroundings, and yearn for affection. The similarity of the two desolate odysseys, though, only accentuates their one glaring difference: Jon obsesses over where Vibeke might be, whereas Vibeke neither thinks of Jon nor realizes that he isn't still at their house. Against the backdrop of Vibeke's neglect, the story becomes increasingly sinister, and Love ends on a note of despair.2018 recs58 s Paltia633 98

Eerie story involving a mother and son. A thin layer, below the surface of the events that transpire, reveals the sense of something being not quite right. A mother who is so very self absorbed imagining and filling in the blanks of her life with how she wants the story to go. Her son, so lost and alone, prefers to leap into life with faith in the belief his mother has shared with him, that there is good in everyone. On the surface things move along during this one bitter cold night. Cold to your soul kind of night. This is such an expressively brilliant very short novel with a nightmarish style. The writer shares details with an up close and wicked hand. You are right there in that frozen night chilled to the end.33 s Hugh1,274 49

Shortlisted for the Republic of Consciousness Prize 2020
Another very impressive book from the RofC list, this short novel is a beautifully controlled piece of storytelling set in a single winter evening in northern Norway.

The two main characters are Vibeke, a lonely single mother who has recently arrived in the small village, and her son Jon, who is looking forward to his ninth birthday the following day. The narrative alternates between them, often several times in the same short chapter, as they each go out separately into the dark snowy night.modern-lit r-of-c-2020 r-of-c-shortlist ...more26 s Gumble's Yard - Golden Reviewer1,917 1,494

“Can’t you just go, she thinks to herself. Find something to do, or play, or something”

I read this book due to its longlisting for the 2020 Republic of Consciousness Prize for UK and Irish small presses - for which it has now been shortlisted.

And Other Stories is a small UK publisher which “publishes some of the best in contemporary writing, including many translations” and aims “to push people’s reading limits and help them discover authors of adventurous and inspiring writing”. They are set up as a not-for-profit Community Interest Company and operate on a subscriber model – with subscribers (of which they now have around 1000 in 40 countries) committing in advance to enable the publication of future books.

Famously and admirably, And Other Stories were the only publisher to respond to Kamilia Shamsie (subsequent winner of the 2018 Women’s Prize)’s 2016 challenge to only publish books by women in 2018 (https://www.theguardian.com/books/201...)).

This book, translated by Martin Aitken (most famously joint translator of the sixth and final volume of Knausgaard’s My Struggle series) and published in 2019, was originally written in 1997 (which is important to the plot as a 21st Century word of smartphones would render the plot even more implausible than it is).

The book ostensibly tells the story of a single Mum, Vibeke and her eight year old child Jon – they have recently moved to a small, remote Norwegian town – Vibeke is an Arts and Culture officer at the local authority.

Set over a single Winter’s night, the evening before Jon’s 9th birthday, and written in the present tense, it cleverly interleaves (without any marked breaks) the simultaneous third-person point-of-view accounts of Jon and Vibeke to create an atmospheric tale with a never-realised undercurrent of menace.

Flush with the success of her first presentation Vibeke decides to go into the village, initially to visit the library but then distracted by a travelling funfair, where she decides to go with one of the workers into the nearby town. Jon, convinced that his Mum is preparing for his birthday, goes for a walk around the village, following an older girl back to her house where the two fall asleep together and then finding the house locked around midnight walking some more.

At the fair, Vibeke meets an eccentric woman selling cuddly toy tombola tickets, and the same woman later picks up the wandering Jon.

Jon’s world is one of habit/obsession (particularly with not blinking) and imagination – many 8 year olds at times he operates in a parallel world of his imaginings.

Vibeke’s world is one of love – but a search for love and the adult companionship that she does not get from Jon, rather than a giver of it. The quote with which I open my review is on page 17 and immediately after (even thought its unspoken) Jon does go out never to return. Vibeke does think about Jon occassionally for another 17 pages but as soon as she goes out he ceases to exist in her thoughts – despite thinking of the day of the week and searching for a newspaper (all I think clues that she knows full well what day it is) she has no idea it’s her only son’s 9th birthday and when she finally returns to the house she does not even think to check on him in bed.

I think there are different ways to view the book – either as a rather unbelievable tale : not just in Vibeke’s behaviour, but in that of others who interact with Jon (the girl who takes an 8 year old back to her room and then falls asleep, her parents who think nothing of an 8 year old being in their house late at night and don’t think to ask after his parents, and who then allow him to walk out into the cold night not long before midnight). The only person who does seem to realise the oddness of an 8 year old wandering around is the funfair-lady, herself a clear eccentric and also a rather unbelievable character as she works out who Jon’s mother is and then seemingly goes looking for Jon. And there seems to be a clue to the incongruity of this interaction when Jon (an 8 year old as a reminder) takes his first drag on a cigarette and does not cough. All of which I think leads to the more obvious conclusion – that the book is more of a fantasy and that perhaps Jon does not exist as a character, a theory which is also supported by the over-heavy use of perfectly remembered dream sequences in the book (which is never a literary device that I enjoy).

Despite my reservations, this is an absorbing novella and one what has already won several award nominations in the US and I can see it making the RoC shortlist.2020 2020-republic-of-consciousness-long 2020-republic-of-consciousness-shrt26 s Aitor CastrilloAuthor 2 books1,041

Trenzas y frío. Mucho frío.

Novela cortita que narra una gélida noche de una madre y su hijo en un pueblo de Noruega. Entramos en la cabeza de Vibeke para conocer sus pensamientos e inquietudes y saltamos a la cabeza de Jon, que está ilusionado porque mañana su madre le va a preparar una fiesta por su noveno cumpleaños.

En este libro no hay capítulos y los párrafos dedicados a la madre y al hijo van alternándose como trenzas aunque ambos personajes estén en diferentes lugares. Este recurso de mezclar escenas continuamente podría generar cierta confusión, pero en mi caso me ha hecho estar aún más metido en la historia al forzarme a estar pendiente de cada palabra.

La noche avanza y aunque todo transcurre con lentitud, cada vez siento más frío porque la distancia entre Vibeke y Jon es mucho mayor de lo que inicialmente imaginaba. Y me van calando la soledad, la tristeza, el desencanto. Y los párrafos y los diálogos se siguen trenzando... y llega la angustia, la pena, el dolor.

Lo termino a las 23:51 y un par de horas después sigo sin poder dormir. Quiero muchísimo más que muchísimo a mis dos “Jones”.

Amor es una bella rareza en cuanto a su voz narrativa. Me ha dejado el corazón congelado ??.
26 s Shawn Mooney (Shawn The Book Maniac)688 677

Verbeke, a single mom, and Jon, her eight-year-old, have recently moved to a new town in Norway, and are feeling their way into new lives. In luscious, often hypnotic prose—the translation by Martin Aitken is superb—Hanne Ørstavik narrates the events of the day before Jon‘s ninth birthday: a thrilling, heart-rending tale of trust, neglect and heartbreak.

Verbeke and Jon are two ships passing in the night. She is in her own little world most of the time, barely aware of her son’s presence except to take care of his basic needs. She is preoccupied by her new job, finding a man, finding clothes that fit sexily. When she thinks her son is home, he’s usually out; when she thinks he’s out, he’s usually not; his sense of her whereabouts is just as off.

They each go off into that night; they each meet new people. The reader is on the edge of her seat, feeling a vague sense of dread: is this or that person a threat, or not? Where is—what is—the danger that permeates this fateful night in the lives of Verbeke and Jon? The echoes reverberating between their points of view skew the unease into a rich, ominous blur.


My BookTube video review: https://youtu.be/xPownS5MuQo

I received this book from NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.read-in-201825 s Paula Bardell-Hedley148 95

Winters are bitingly cold in northern Norway, with an average temperature of around -17°C. Yet it is to a bleak little village in this region that Vibeke moves with her eight-year-old son, Jon, in order to make a fresh start. The story begins as the circus arrives, on the eve of his birthday.

Both mother and son are intense, cerebral individuals, who lose themselves in daydreams, and struggle to communicate their thoughts and feelings to others - she chain-smokes, he continually blinks. Even so, they are overly trusting of strangers and have oddly naïve personalities. The greatest void, however, is between the two of them, and they seem to view each other from opposite sides of a wide crevasse. There is love (adoration on his part), but it is ill-defined, unfocused.

“She gets through three books a week, often four or five. She wishes she could read all the time, sitting in bed with the duvet pulled up, with coffee, lots of cigarettes, and a warm nightdress on.”

Voted the sixth best Norwegian book of the last 25 years, Love, by Hanne Ørstavik (originally published as Kjærlighet in 1997), has been translated into English by Martin Aitken, and is due for release in February 2018. It is an existential novel, with narratives drifting back and forth between Vibeke and Jon - they all but merge when either one or both of them become anxious. As the story develops, Ørstavik skilfully effects a feeling of dread - an unpleasant, tense, vaguely sinister sensation of impending catastrophe pervades the icy air.

Has anything significant been lost in translation? I think there probably has, but as an inveterate unilingual English-speaker I simply cannot judge. Nevertheless, I am able to say with certainty that Love is an intelligent, thoughtful, if melancholy tale, which demonstrates what can happen if we become too internalised and fail to be mindful of those we love.literary-fiction netgalley translated-literature19 s Paul FulcherAuthor 2 books1,470

Jon stands in the doorway looking at her. He tries not to blink. He wants to ask her something about his birthday, tomorrow he’ll be nine. He tells himself it can wait, she’s asleep now. A book in her lap. He’s used to seeing her that. A book, the bright light of the floor lamp.

Often, she’ll have lit a cigarette and his eyes will follow the smoke as it curls toward the ceiling. Her long, dark hair fans out over the back of the chair, trembling almost imperceptibly. Stroke my hair, Jon.
 
Kjærlighet by Hanne Ørstavik was published in Norway in 1997. The English translation, Love, by Martin Aitken came out in 2018 in the US via Archipelago and has already obtained significant prize success, the book a Finalist (i.e. shortlisted) in the National Book Awards for Translated Literature and Aitken winning 2019 PEN Translation Prize. It has now been published in the UK by another excellent independent publisher, And Other Stories and shortlisted for the 2020 Republic of Consciousness Prize.
 
Aitken translates from both Danish and Norwegian.  This is the fourth translation of his I've read, and all highly distinctive: Bjørn Rasmussen's The Skin Is the Elastic Covering That Encases the Entire Body, Kim Leine's Prophets of Eternal Fjord, and most notably half of the final volume of Karl Ove Knausgård monumental My Struggle.  He has also translated, amongst others, Peter Høeg, Dorthe Nors and Pia Juul. 
 
He has described translation as interpreting a piano piece on violin, requiring a creative space far beyond formal dictation ("som at tolke et klaverstykke på violin eller omvendt – det kreative råderum, det kræver, rækker så langt ud over det formelles diktat." - https://norla.no/nb/nyheter/nyheter-f... - my google assisted translation!) . The judge's citaton for the PEN Translation Prize sums up Aitken's achievement here perfectly:The judges are proud to honor Martin Aitken for his luminous translation of Hanne Ørstavik’s haunting novel Love, which follows the distant, orbiting lives of a mother and son a telescope through one cold winter’s night. In a mere 125 pages, Ørstavik distills a tremendous sense of emptiness, loneliness, and yearning from Vibeke and her son Jon, and in Aitken’s elegant translation, the prose crackles the icy environs of Norway itself. Ørstavik’s narrative shifts without warning between the voices and visions of her two protagonists, and the finesse of Aitken’s focus allows these transitions to take place with equal parts artistry and subtlety. What we have, in the end, with Love, is an extraordinary translation of an uncannily singular novel, one which the judges will be savoring for many years to come.Love is a short but highly atmospheric novel. It opens introducing us to both Vibeke and her 8, turning 9, year old son Jon:
 
She gets through three books a week, often four or five.  She wishes she could read all the time, sitting in bed with the duvet pulled up, with coffee, lots of cigarettes, and a warm nightdress on. She could have done without the TV too, I never watch it, she tells herself, but Jon would have minded.
 
She gives a wide berth to an old woman waddling along pulling a gray trolley behind her on the icy road. It’s dark, the snow banked up at the roadsides blocking out the light, Vibeke thinks to herself. Then she realizes she’s forgotten to turn the headlights on and has driven
nearly all the way home in an unlit car. She turns them on.
 
Jon tries not to blink. It’s hard for him not to. It’s the muscles around his eyes that go into spasm. He kneels on his bed and peers through the window. Everything is still.

He’s waiting for Vibeke to come home. He tries to keep his eyes open and calm, fixed on the same
spot outside the window.  There must be at least a meter of snow. Under the snow live the mice. They have pathways and tunnels. They visit each other, Jon imagines, maybe they bring each other food.
 
The sound of the car. When he’s waiting he can never quite recall it. I’ve forgotten, he tells himself. But then it comes back to him, often in pauses between the waiting, after he??s stopped thinking about it. And then she comes, and he recognizes the sound in an instant; he hears it with his tummy, it’s my tummy that remembers the sound, not me, he thinks to himself. And no sooner has he heard the car than he sees it too, from the corner of the window, her blue car coming around the bend behind the banks of snow, and she turns in at the house and drives up the little slope to the front door.
 
This abrupt cutting between the narration from Vibeke's perspective and that of Jon is a feature throughout the novel. Their two lives, both searching for love, seem to run in parallel, close but never quite converging. Jon is lonely, constantly thinking of his mother, daydreaming and trying to control his blinking habit. But Vibeke is also lonely - we learn she recently divorced from her husband and moved with Jon to this remote Norwegian village 4 months earlier - thinking more about companionship than her son. For example this scene:
 
She reaches out and smoothes her hand over his head.

"Have you made any friends yet?"

His hair is fine and soft.

"Jon," she says. "Dearest Jon."

She repeats the movement while studying her hand. Her nail polish is pale and sandy with just a hint of pink. She s to be discreet at work. She remembers the new set that must still be in her bag, plum, or was it wine; a dark, sensual lipstick and nail polish the same shade. To go with a dark, brown-eyed man, she thinks with a little smile.

The novel unfolds over just one extended evening. Jon, assuming his mother will be preoccupied with preparations for his birthday goes out for a walk: his mother also goes out, but not in search, as Jon assumes, of eggs for a birthday cake.

Both end up falling in with strangers - a travelling fair is in town - and there is a brooding sense of something sinister always about to materalise on the next page, but which never quite does so. There is a great review here by enricocioni which contrasts the parent child relationship to two other wonderful translated novels, Die by Love and Fever Dream.

https://strangebookfellowsblog.wordpr...

And an interview with the author:
https://www.bookaholic.ro/freedom-mea...
 
An excellent novel, with a heartbreaking ending, and surely a strong Booker International contender. 4.5 stars.

As a bonus, Vibeke is a keen reader and has some excellent asides on the topic:

Her preferred reading habit and frequency:
She gets through three books a week, often four or five.  She wishes she could read all the time, sitting in bed with the duvet pulled up.

On returning books to the library, out of hours:
She drops the books through the return slot. It almost hurts to let go, the way they splay out in the a heap on the floor.  It’s leaving some people of whom she’s grown fond.  
 
Her taste in books (seeing a book someone else is reading):
She doesn’t recognise the title but the author is an American man.  The category is one she tends to avoid.  2020 republic-of-consciousness-202022 s Jenny (Reading Envy)3,876 3,490

For such a short work, this is a challenge to read. The story of a mother and son in the coldest time of year in the coldest region of Norway, the narrative moves between Vibeke and Jon, even though they are not in the same location as the story goes on. My reading process went something read two-three paragraphs, then backtrack one to pick up the alternate character to figure out what is going on. I'm not sure I always understood where I was. Is this translation or in the original work? That is uncertain.

There are elements of deep foreboding and danger, but because of the strange (unique?) writing style, sometimes I couldn't tell if what I thought I was understanding were really going on. For instance at one point I'm pretty sure Jon is in the trailer? home? of a couple who are child sexual predators but then he's not kept there. And he gets in the car with a stranger.

Part of my other confusion is the beginning of the novel, when Jon is at home waiting for Vibeke to come home, I read him as an older man, possibly her father or someone she worked for as a nurse or aide, that I was pretty confused when I understood him to be eight.

There's a night circus (does this really happen in the cold or was this another imagined thing?) and Vibeke herself is making some bad choices by going off alone with what we here in the USA would negatively call a carny. She also ends up in possible danger, but her attitude doesn't make it seem so. She is smoking, and smiling, and seems up for whatever, forgetting that she has a child at home. So is this night a binging of singleness amidst the stress of parenting a child alone? Or is it something else entirely.

So I end the book completely unsure of what I read or what I got out of it. I didn't mind having to work hard, but I am not sure what the answers are.

Thanks to the publisher, the marvelous Archipelago Press, for providing early access to this title through Edelweiss. It is available 13 February 2018.around-the-world ebooks location-norway ...more21 s Doug2,205 771

A very creepy short novel that does an excellent job of ratcheting up the tension as it goes along; so much of it depends on such atmospherics, since the only true 'danger' is one that comes from the inside (perhaps the titular emotion?), rather than any of the more obvious red herrings the author throws one's way. The unusual structure, in which alternating narratives about a self-absorbed mother and her soon to be nine year old son dovetail, so that the reader is often not aware when one shifts to the other, is quite effective. 21 s Gabriela Pistol506 182

4.5
Ce descoperire! O bijuterie de mic roman perfect scris, niciun cuvânt în plus sau în minus, un ton limpede, subtil, care nu te bombardeaz? cu emo?ii, din care dramatismul pove?tii iese singur ?i f?r? striden?e.
?i o alegere cum nu se poate mai bun? de a pune in paralel - ?i foarte cinematografic - secven?ele cu cei doi protagoni?ti. Fiul care î?i vede mama perfect?, mama care abia î?i vede fiul. Mama pe care o în?elegi ?i în acela?i timp ?i-e greu s? nu o judeci. Fiul pe care ai vrea s?-l protejezi.
Hanne Ørstavik ?i eu ne vom mai întâlni.21 s Kuszma2,404 197

A skandináv minimalizmus olyan, mint a bundáskenyér: egyszer?en jó. Bár - és itt rugalmasan elszakadnék a bundáskenyér-analógiától - a skandináv minimalizmus egyszer?sége igazából látszólagos, a szerkezet és a történetmesélés lecsiszoltsága csak kiemeli azt, ami igazán bonyolult: az emberi kapcsolatok megfejthetetlenségét.

Vibeka és fia, a kis Jon most költöztek egy norvég kisvárosba. Szokványos estének néznek elébe: Vibeka könyvtárba indul, Jon pedig megismerkedik valakivel. Aztán semmi sem úgy alakul, ahogy tervezve lett. Finomra hangszerelt, csendesen feszültségteljes regény két emberr?l, akik egymásra vannak utalva, de életük mégis mintha párhuzamosan suhanna el egymás mellett, akár két idegené. (Amit csak kiemel, hogy Vibeka és Jon történetszálát úgy montírozza egymásra a szerz?, hogy néha meg kell állnunk egy pillanatra, most épp kiét is olvassuk.) És az egész felett ott lebeg csaliként a cím: Vágy. Az olvasó pedig értelmezni próbál, ki is az, aki vágyakozik és mire. Mib?l áll ez a vágy és egyirányú-e. A szöveg persze síkos angolna, kicsúszik az értelmez? kezei közül. Hipotéziseink vannak, nem biztos ítéleteink.

A tragédiák pedig mindig értelmetlenek.19 s Andrei B?dic?392 156

"Via?a e prea scurt?, trebuie s?-?i dai silin?a s? fii frumoas?, se gânde?te ea."17 s Michelle 955 1,620

I decided to read this book because I knew it took place in winter and while we still have snow on the ground here in New England I figured I better get to it. Spring might actually arrive by May!

This is such a strange book. It focuses on a mother & son, Vibeke and Jon over the course of one evening. They have just recently moved to a small northern town in Norway. Jon adores his mother and Vibeke seems a bit distant and cold when it comes to her son. She wants to spend her time reading, shopping, working, fantasizing of men, and making sure she always looks beautiful. She doesn't really think Jon and his stories make any sense and she'd rather he just go play by himself and not bother her. Jon's 9th birthday is tomorrow and he dreams of a brand new train set and his mother to bake him a cake. Vibeke doesn't even remember it's his birthday.

Jon has tickets to sell for his Sports Club and leaves the house unbeknownst to Vibeke. Vibeke meanwhile has decided to get herself all prettied up to head to the library. As she leaves the house she calls out to Jon not waiting for a response and not realizing he isn't even in the house.

We then follow both Vibeke and Jon as they make their way through the night and the strangers they encounter. Both of them are overly trusting. An atmosphere of dread prevails through out the entire novel.

I'm not so sure what to make of the ending. Which I think was intentional on Ørstavik's part. It allows the reader to draw their own conclusion. Sadly, what I took away from it was truly heartbreaking. I want nothing more than to give my son the biggest hug right now.

Just to note, the way the story is presented can be confusing at first. One paragraph to the next we're either inside Vibeke or Jon's head without anything to distinguish the change which took me a bit to get used to.

Thank you to NetGalley for providing me with a digital ARC in exchange for my honest review. netgalley-arcs17 s Neil1,007 699

Love tells the story of a single evening and follows two characters, Vibeke and her son Jon, on the eve of Jon’s ninth birthday. In a structure that enhances the uncanny atmosphere of the book, Vibeke’s and Jon’s stories are told in parallel as the narrative switches between the two almost on a paragraph by paragraph basis. Sometimes the jump between narrative threads is obvious. At other times, the first sentence or so of a paragraph could belong with the previous one but the reader suddenly becomes aware that we have switched to the other thread.

The tension the book generates comes from two sources. Firstly, everything that happens feels the precursor to something dreadful. As events then repeatedly turn out to NOT be leading to something dreadful, the suspense grows and the reader begins to long for something bad to happen to release the anxiety. Secondly, the author chooses not to explain many of the things that happen, leaving the reader to make their own decisions about people’s motivations. (PS You will have to read the book for yourself to discover what, if, of course, anything resolves the tension).

Jon believes his mother will be busy preparing a cake for his birthday the next day, so he takes a walk in the snow outside. However, where Jon is almost permanently thinking about his mother, Vibeke, on the other hand, rarely gives Jon a thought. She also goes out for the evening. Jon is searching for his mother’s love. His mother is searching elsewhere for love. At the fairground, Vibeke encounters a white-haired lady and then meets Tom whom she stays with for several hours. Meanwhile, the white-haired lady appears in Jon’s narrative.

What makes this book memorable is the continuous sense that something sinister will happen on the next page.

This is a very short book that can easily be read in a single sitting (assuming you have the kind of lifestyle that allows you to set aside periods of time for reading - my Kindle tells me the average time required to read the book is marginally under 2 hours). Vibeke would form an opinion about you based on how long it took you to read the book. As the novel says, ”She thinks the speed at which a person reads says something about the kind of rhythm they possess, the way they are in life”.

With its poignant ending, this is an excellent book that holds the reader’s attention by not telling them many things but giving them enough to set their imagination running.2020 2020-rofc16 s Elena Sala491 84

LOVE (1997) is not a love story. Rather, it is a story about the failure of love, a poignant story of neglect, loneliness, silences and broken connections.

Young Vibeke is an attractive, single mother who has recently moved with her 8-year-old son Jon to a remote town in northern Norway. She pays him little attention and wishes he would “find something to do, play or something” and leave her alone. She comes across as a rather self-absorbed, selfish mother.

After dinner, Vibeke and Jon go on their separate ways. Jon cannot stop thinking about Vibeke. He is happy because tomorrow is his 9th birthday. He is certain his mother is secretly preparing for a big celebration. He expects a homemade cake, of course. And a nice present too. Unfortunately, Vibeke thinks of Jon less and less as her evening progresses. Actually, she is engrossed with thoughts of other men. She travels first to the library with the hope of encountering a man she met at her job, and ends up at a funfair, where she meets an attractive man and spends the evening with him.

LOVE is a short novel which takes place in one single night. It is a story of two journeys, cleverly constructed to pull you along in the wake of the two main characters, switching frequently between the two, leaving the reader anxious and filled with dread, while waiting for the two journeys to intersect at some point. The compelling prose drives the narrative forward of this riveting story of botched motherhood, escapism and isolation.archipelago-books european-contemporary scandinavian17 s Gabril823 188

C’è una madre: Vibeke, un figlio di nove anni: Jon. Vivono da qualche parte, nell’estremo nord, in un piccolo paese dove si sono appena trasferiti. Il freddo, la neve.
Lei “legge tre libri alla settimana, spesso quattro, cinque. Le piacerebbe leggere tutto il tempo, seduta a letto sotto la coperta con il caffè, molte sigarette e una camicia da notte calda.”
Lui ha un tic, ogni tanto strizza gli occhi (la mamma dice che gli passerà da grande), elabora i dati del mondo attraverso la fantasia, come tutti i bambini. Immagina storie mentre vive. “Guarda la neve davanti alla finestra, pensa a tutti i fiocchi che ci vogliono per formare un mucchio di neve. Prova a contare quanti sono.”
La situazione è descritta con uno stile piatto, di cronaca: al presente, minuto per minuto, dilatando il tempo del pensiero e della percezione del mondo di ciascun protagonista.
Il dialogo è scarno, ma si capisce l’essenza forte del legame.

Dopo la colazione insieme ciascuno dei due prende la propria strada e a questo punto ogni capitolo contiene le azioni dell’uno e quelle dall’altra, senza soluzione di continuità. Non ci sono spazi per distinguere un vissuto dall’altro. Immagino per rendere l’idea della contemporaneità delle due situazioni.
E così la storia prosegue: Jon, tra una fantasia e l’altra, vende biglietti per la società sportiva(?); Vibeke intanto si fa bella: si fa il bagno, si toglie lo smalto vecchio con l’acetone, si pettina ecc ecc ecc. Fa la pipì. Seduta sul water la vediamo almeno tre volte nel corso del racconto. (Era necessario? Per accentuare l’effetto di realismo? Per dire che anche i personaggi hanno le stesse necessità delle persone? Mah).
Vuole andare in biblioteca ma alla fine va al Luna Park. Conosce un uomo che le piace. Si parlano, lei lo osserva bene (molto bene), costruisce dei pensieri intorno a lui, è attenta alle proprie sensazioni...alla fine vanno in un pub e fanno notte (no, niente altro); intanto Jon va da una sua amica e resta là fino alle undici e mezza: è notte anche per lui. (La madre forse crede che lui sia a letto, ma nessun adulto sembra preoccuparsi troppo di un ragazzino tiratardi).

Non proseguo per non rovinarvi la sorpresa. Anzi, ve la voglio rovinare: non succede proprio niente, sappiatelo. Ma potrebbe piacervi la stranezza della cosa, il minimalismo del linguaggio, l’ambientazione nordica, la notte che si espande, lenta. E magari anche il preponderante non detto che si riferisce, immagino, al titolo: Amore. Visto il costrutto, mi sa che tutto quell’amore bisogna andarselo a cercare da soli. O forse sono soltanto io che non ho capito. Il dramma, in fondo, è proprio dietro l’angolo.
15 s Iloveplacebo384 238

Un libro frío y tranquilo.

Un libro del que esperas que ocurra algo y... nunca pasa nada.
Pero, ¿seguro qué no ocurre nada? Si nos ponemos a pensar en la historia, en esa madre y su hijo, si le damos varias vueltas a lo que hemos leído... Creo que pasan algunas cosas, sí.

Tristeza, esa palabra me viene a la mente después de terminarlo.

Un libro especial y diferente. Una buena lectura.2020 authors-female fiction ...more15 s Erasmia Kritikou295 103

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*??? ???? ??? ??? ???? ?????????? ?? ???? ??? ??????: ????????????? ??? ? ????????? ????? ????????? ??? ?? ????????? ??? ??????? ??? ???? ?????????? ??? ? ???? ??????????? ???? ???? ??? ????????????.
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????? ????? ??? ??????? ??? ??? ???????? ??? ????? ??? ???? ? ???? ??????? ?????????? ??????????? ?? ????????, ????????, ?????????, ?????????????, ????? ???.17 s Raquel Casas287 193

«Muy muy lejos hay un lago.
En el lago hay una isla.
En la isla hay una iglesia.
En la iglesia hay un pozo.
En el pozo nada un pato.
En el pato hay un huevo.
Y en el huevo...
Siente que casi está a punto de echarse a llorar:
—En el huevo está mi corazón.»

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