Hanne Ørstavik

WINNER OF THE 2019 PEN TRANSLATION PRIZE FINALIST FOR THE NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FOR TRANSLATED LITERATURE A mother and son move to a village in northern Norway, each ensconced in their own world. Their distance has fatal consequences. Love is the story of Vibeke and Jon, a mother and son who have just moved to a small place in the north of Norway. It's the day before Jon's birthday, and a travelling carnival has come to the village. Jon goes out to sell lottery tickets for his sports club, and Vibeke is going to the library. From here on we follow the two individuals on their separate journeys through a cold winter's night - while a sense of uneasiness grows. Love illustrates how language builds its own reality, and thus how mother and son can live in completely separate worlds. This distance is found not only between human beings, but also within each individual. This novel shows how such distance may have fatal consequences.

Love

Hanne Orstavik

When I was much younger and only a little stupider I went with a friend to Tromsø, Norway. I had known nothing about the place and, like a prototypical Scandinavian tourist, was bedazzled by pictures of the Northern Lights online and soon became obsessed with seeing them in person. So I went, blindly, to satisfy that singular quest. It was there, however, in winter, in one of the northernmost cities in the world, I had my most frightening experience with cold in my life. Underdressed for a hike, caught out by the early sunset, and completely unfit for walking, I had gotten cold to the point of numbness: my breathing became laboured, every breath a burn in the lungs, my walking difficult, every step disconnected from the ground, like walking in a dream—life itself had slowed to a crawl. My phone was frozen dead in my pocket. All I desperately wanted to do then was to sit down. When I sat, what I desperately wanted to do was sleep. There is a warmth in coldness, I found, like the sheet that wraps you on a winter’s night; or the warmth of contentedness when, closing your eyes, you are satisfied that the world will continue moving, in your unconscious state, without you.

Like my younger self holidaying in Norway, I had gone into Love by Hanne Ørstavik completely blind. A very simple novella spanning a single day, it tells the story of single mother Vibeke and her eight-year-old son Jon as they go about in their newly rooted life in a small village in northern Norway. My expectation for this novella, that it would be a wholesome, yearning romance, was quickly dashed by the sheer creepiness it hits you with from the outset. Jon has a fear of blinking, going as far as wedging matchsticks in his eyelids to keep them open. Vibeke is introspective to the point of unreachability, concerned much about her impression to the disregard of her son. On the same extremely cold night, the two of them venture out separately, Jon to go out and play, Vibeke to go and borrow books, both believing the other is home. What arises from the very beginning is therefore not wholesomeness, but a dread that is never extinguished. 

It’s a novel about temperature in the sense that it is clear that Ørstavik is preoccupied with these precipices between coldness and warmth, and she brings this to life through her focus on sensory detail—the brush of a dressing gown string down a thigh, scents of leather jackets, deodorant, the deafening volume of TV sets and live music; this coupled with the anatomical detail offered to other characters—backs, arms, teeth, eyeballs—all contribute to building up the characters existing in a physical space and, therefore, vulnerable to real physical danger. And because of this, you feel the transitions between cold and warmth deeply, each warming scene giving us a breath of life, a relief, and thus temperature gains its metaphorical significance without it having to be spelled out for us—the warm describing the life-affirming nature of both romantic and familial love, and the cold being that absence.

The other thing Ørstavik pulls off so effectively is this dreamlike sense of minimalism which is at the same time detached and dizzying. The novella follows both Jon and Vibeke’s perspective from third-person close perspective, and the transition between perspectives is never announced, sometimes changing paragraph to paragraph, despite the two characters being in different places—it can take a moment to reorient oneself. The other dizzying aspect is this dramatic irony that pervades throughout—despite knowing both characters may be in physical peril, we are given the story from their immediate perspective and voice. Vibeke is focused on her own presentation, her sensuality, and inanities such as decoration and her job. Jon’s perspective is naturally of a child, and his sense of confusion and childlike optimism is both beautiful and heartbreaking. Back and forth we go, the reader naturally seeking that rising ‘objective’ sense, only to realise that there is nothing the reader can do to save these characters from their impending fates.

Love and warmth are interchangeable in this story. Vibeke sees warmth in her romantic interest, a fairground worker. Jon sees it in other families, seeing the ‘warmth and softness’ of others. The overall effect is a very touching examination of what we will do for love, what we will sacrifice and what we can lose with its absence. 

When I eventually got up from my rest in Norway and returned to the warmth of indoors, the whole event seemed like a passing dream. It was only on reflection that I realised what danger I was actually in. And so with Love, with the events of the novella being so distant yet vivid, I'm left with this same kind of dream vapour. That despite the novella’s length I'm going to constantly think back on its events with a kind of shudder. I absolutely recommend this novel. Especially if you'd like the reverse of a warm hug.

shain

When I was much younger and only a little stupider I went with a friend to Tromsø, Norway. I had known nothing about the place and, like a prototypical Scandinavian tourist, was bedazzled by pictures of the Northern Lights online and soon became obsessed with seeing them in person. So I went, blindly, to satisfy that singular quest. It was there, however, in winter, in one of the northernmost cities in the world, I had my most frightening experience with cold in my life. Underdressed for a hike, caught out by the early sunset, and completely unfit for walking, I had gotten cold to the point of numbness: my breathing became laboured, every breath a burn in the lungs, my walking difficult, every step disconnected from the ground, like walking in a dream—life itself had slowed to a crawl. My phone was frozen dead in my pocket. All I desperately wanted to do then was to sit down. When I sat, what I desperately wanted to do was sleep. There is a warmth in coldness, I found, like the sheet that wraps you on a winter’s night; or the warmth of contentedness when, closing your eyes, you are satisfied that the world will continue moving, in your unconscious state, without you.

Like my younger self holidaying in Norway, I had gone into Love by Hanne Ørstavik completely blind. A very simple novella spanning a single day, it tells the story of single mother Vibeke and her eight-year-old son Jon as they go about in their newly rooted life in a small village in northern Norway. My expectation for this novella, that it would be a wholesome, yearning romance, was quickly dashed by the sheer creepiness it hits you with from the outset. Jon has a fear of blinking, going as far as wedging matchsticks in his eyelids to keep them open. Vibeke is introspective to the point of unreachability, concerned much about her impression to the disregard of her son. On the same extremely cold night, the two of them venture out separately, Jon to go out and play, Vibeke to go and borrow books, both believing the other is home. What arises from the very beginning is therefore not wholesomeness, but a dread that is never extinguished. 

It’s a novel about temperature in the sense that it is clear that Ørstavik is preoccupied with these precipices between coldness and warmth, and she brings this to life through her focus on sensory detail—the brush of a dressing gown string down a thigh, scents of leather jackets, deodorant, the deafening volume of TV sets and live music; this coupled with the anatomical detail offered to other characters—backs, arms, teeth, eyeballs—all contribute to building up the characters existing in a physical space and, therefore, vulnerable to real physical danger. And because of this, you feel the transitions between cold and warmth deeply, each warming scene giving us a breath of life, a relief, and thus temperature gains its metaphorical significance without it having to be spelled out for us—the warm describing the life-affirming nature of both romantic and familial love, and the cold being that absence.

The other thing Ørstavik pulls off so effectively is this dreamlike sense of minimalism which is at the same time detached and dizzying. The novella follows both Jon and Vibeke’s perspective from third-person close perspective, and the transition between perspectives is never announced, sometimes changing paragraph to paragraph, despite the two characters being in different places—it can take a moment to reorient oneself. The other dizzying aspect is this dramatic irony that pervades throughout—despite knowing both characters may be in physical peril, we are given the story from their immediate perspective and voice. Vibeke is focused on her own presentation, her sensuality, and inanities such as decoration and her job. Jon’s perspective is naturally of a child, and his sense of confusion and childlike optimism is both beautiful and heartbreaking. Back and forth we go, the reader naturally seeking that rising ‘objective’ sense, only to realise that there is nothing the reader can do to save these characters from their impending fates.

Love and warmth are interchangeable in this story. Vibeke sees warmth in her romantic interest, a fairground worker. Jon sees it in other families, seeing the ‘warmth and softness’ of others. The overall effect is a very touching examination of what we will do for love, what we will sacrifice and what we can lose with its absence. 

When I eventually got up from my rest in Norway and returned to the warmth of indoors, the whole event seemed like a passing dream. It was only on reflection that I realised what danger I was actually in. And so with Love, with the events of the novella being so distant yet vivid, I'm left with this same kind of dream vapour. That despite the novella’s length I'm going to constantly think back on its events with a kind of shudder. I absolutely recommend this novel. Especially if you'd like the reverse of a warm hug.

Love

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