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WORK TITLE: Knots
WORK NOTES: trans by Kari Dickson
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE: 1/9/1975
WEBSITE:
CITY: Bergen
STATE:
COUNTRY: Norway
NATIONALITY: Norwegian
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gunnhild_%C3%98yehaug * http://www.zyzzyva.org/2017/07/14/the-ties-that-bind-knots-by-gunnhild-oyehaug/ * https://www.thecommononline.org/tag/gunnhild-oyehaug/
RESEARCHER NOTES:
PERSONAL
Born January 9, 1975.
EDUCATION:University of Bergen, M.A.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Writer. Creative writing teacher. Kraftsentrum, coeditor. Worked formerly as coeditor of Vagant; as literary critic for Morgenbladet and Klassekampen; and as literary theory teacher at University of Bergen.
WRITINGS
SIDELIGHTS
Gunnhild Oyehaug is a Norwegian poet, essayist, and fiction writer. She attended college at the University of Bergen, where she received a master’s degree in comparative literature. Oyehaug has worked as a coeditor of Norwegian literary journal, Vagant, and has worked as a literary critic for the newspapers Morgenbladet and Klassekampen. She has also has taught literary theory at University of Bergen.
Oyehaug lives in Bergen, where she teaches creative writing and is the coeditor of Kraftsentrum.
Described by a contributor to Kirkus Reviews as “formally playful, poignant, understated, and often acutely funny,” Knots: Stories, Oyehaug’s book of short stories examines the various relationships we tie, or ‘knot’ ourselves into. The stories, translated into English by Kari Dickson, tell tales of commonplace relationships, such as first loves and familial tensions, as well as more bizarre entanglements, such as that of a woman’s longing for more UFO sightings or a son who is literally tied to his mother by an permanent umbilical cord.
James Wood in The New Yorker wrote that the stories “produce stabs of emotion, unexpected ghost notes of feeling.” The book opens with “Nice and Mild,” a story of a man going to IKEA to buy blinds for his son’s room. The story becomes complicated as the intense mental state of the man is revealed. He is plagued by crippling anxiety, but as he walks across the parking lot into the store, he has hope, seeing the day as the beginning of a positive change in his life that he so desires. In “Gold Pattern” two lovers experience contrasting desires. One seeks true love, the other merely lust.
Other stories address more fantastical relationships, such as “Small Knot,” in which a boy is tied forever to his mother through his umbilical cord. The story hints at the unbreakable ties between parents and children, which sometimes result in a child never fully blossoming into an adult. Oyehaug also plays with style and form, as seen in “Transcend” and “An Entire Family Disappears,” which are both written as stage directions, and “The Deer at the Edge of the Forest,” which presents the perspective of a deer.
Libbie Katsev in ZYZZYVA wrote “the stories, no matter how surreal they may become, feel genuine and earnest.” While the subject matter ranges from the everyday to the unusual, the emotional content of the stories is what moves them along. The stories combine a “crisp minimalism with endearingly offbeat conceits,” wrote a contributor to Publishers Weekly.
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Kirkus Reviews, May 1, 2017, review of Knots: Stories.
Publishers Weekly, May 1, 2017, review of Knots, p. 33.
ONLINE
AV Aux, https://aux.avclub.com/ (July 18, 2017), Ignatiy Vishnevetsky, review of Knots.
New Yorker, https://www.newyorker.com/ (August 28, 2017), James Wood, review of Knots.
Washington Independent Review of Books, http://www.washingtonindependentreviewofbooks.com/ (September 29, 2017), Rafael Alvarez, review of Knots.
ZYZZYVA, http://www.zyzzyva.org/ (July 14, 2017), Libbie Katsev, review of Knots.*
Novels
Wait, Blink (2018)
thumb
Collections
Knots (2017) (with Kari Dickson - translator)
Gunnhild Øyehaug
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Gunnhild Øyehaug at Bergen Public Library
Gunnhild Øyehaug (born 9 January 1975, Volda, Norway) is a Norwegian poet, writer and lecturer.[1]
Literary career[edit]
She made her literary debut in 1998 with a collection of poems "Slaven av blåbæret" (t: Slave of the Blueberry).
Her second book, "Knutar" (t: Knots), a collection of short stories, proved very popular in 2004 and was nominated for the Brage Prize of the Norwegian Publisher’s Association.[citation needed]
Øyehaug took her M.A. in Comparative Literature at the University of Bergen. She has been co-editor of "Vagant", the leading literary journal in Norway, and literary critic for the newspapers "Morgenbladet" and »Klassekampen«. She has taught literary theory at University of Bergen and has also worked to promote literature in various ways. She now also co-edits the literary journal "Kraftsentrum."
Bibliography[edit]
Slaven av blåbæret (Poetry, 1998)
Knutar (Short stories, 2004)
Stol og ekstase (Essays and short stories, 2006)
Vente, blinke (Novel, 2008)
Gunnhild Øyehaug is an award-winning Norwegian poet, essayist, and fiction writer. Her novel Wait, Blink was made into the acclaimed film Women in Oversized Men’s Shirts. She has also worked as a coeditor of the literary journal Vagant and Kraftsentrum. Øyehaug lives in Bergen, where she teaches creative writing.
Oyehaug, Gunnhild: KNOTS
(May 1, 2017):
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Oyehaug, Gunnhild KNOTS Farrar, Straus and Giroux (Adult Fiction) $22.00 7, 11 ISBN: 978-0-374-18167-3
Formally playful, poignant, understated, and often acutely funny, Oyehaug's English-language debut teems with humanity.In this collection of short--and short-short--stories, fluidly translated from the Norwegian by Dickson, Oyehaug swipes a deft finger through messy layers of human experience and inspects with a keen and generous eye the everyday tragedies, tender absurdities, and quiet joys of life. In the book's spectacular opener, "Nice and Mild," a man paralyzed by anxiety and indecision heads to IKEA for blinds for his son's room. As he talks himself out of the car, across the parking lot, and into the store, he thinks "this could be the start of a virtuous circle," the first step toward a new proactive self, the blinds "a lifeline that's been thrown to me from dry land as I flail and flounder in the waves." In "Small Knot," a son is tethered to his mother for life, and beyond, by an uncuttable umbilical cord in a delightfully morbid and literal rendering of familial bonds and their reverberations through the future. In "Deal," a girl's bicycle breaks shortly after she sets out to run away, and she misses the last ferry out of town. Stranded, she strikes a curious deal with a neighbor who has rescued her and is in need of a little rescuing himself. "Gold Pattern" is a melancholy in-coitus account of a vaguely coupled pair with intermittent and unequal passions, a heart-pricking tale of progressive loss and longing. And in "An Entire Family Disappears," a grand-uncle rattles his family at a funeral by telling a tale of how easily they might not have come to exist, told in dramatic form with the story unfolding entirely in stage directions. A near-perfect collection about the knots we tie ourselves into and the countless ways we intertwine in the pursuit of sex, love, compassion, and family.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Oyehaug, Gunnhild: KNOTS." Kirkus Reviews, 1 May 2017. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A491002972/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=3e9bf3ad. Accessed 12 Jan. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A491002972
Knots
264.18 (May 1, 2017): p33.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Knots
Gunnhild Oyehaug, trans, from the Norwegian
by Kari Dickson. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, $22 (160p) ISBN 978-0-374-18167-3
Norwegian writer Oyehaug's newly translated collection charts entanglements of all kinds, from difficult families and first loves to more metaphysical experiments that combine a crisp minimalism with endearingly offbeat conceits. "Small Knot," 'for instance, literalizes a fraught mother-son relationship with an umbilical cord that remains intact well into the son's adult life--and even after the mother's death--while a lonely woman longing for more encounters a UFO in" Vitalie Meets an Officer." The best of Oyehaug's miniatures deal with elusive emotional states, like the confession of love for a terminally ill man in "It's Raining In Love," the jealousy experienced by the friends of a highly successful encyclopedia salesman in "Echo," or the contemplative ecstasy of a woman named Edel whom, in "Two by Two," thinks that "nature has been abandoned and we are to blame, we have focused on language and become complicated." Oyehaug transfigures a trip to IKEA, a late-night bathroom break, the lonely vigil of an egg and prawn vendor. Other stories read like surreal drawing room plays, offering a glimpse at the private lives of Arthur Rimbaud and Maurice Blanchot. "Meanwhile, on Another Planet" concludes "What can we learn from this? That impossible situations can arise on other planets too." This kind of dry, odd, understated humor comes to seem a hallmark of Oyehaug, whose stories are as original as they are joyously delicate and tranquil. (July)
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Knots." Publishers Weekly, 1 May 2017, p. 33. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A491575255/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=85863a58. Accessed 12 Jan. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A491575255
August 28, 2017 Issue
A Norwegian Master of the Short Story
Gunnhild Øyehaug dramatizes the critical consciousness.
By James Wood
Gunnhild Øyehaug loves to blend light with shade, wit with torment.Illustration by Jun Cen
Translation can be a sluggish triumph. It has taken thirteen years for Gunnhild Øyehaug’s collection of stories, “Knots,” which first appeared in Norwegian, to arrive in an English version (Farrar, Straus & Giroux; translated by Kari Dickson); Øyehaug is forty-two, but the book represents her début in this country. Contemporary Norwegian fiction is astonishingly vital and various. If some of that vitality is gradually becoming apparent to non-Norwegians, it’s partly because of the success of Karl Ove Knausgaard’s “My Struggle,” which may have the effect of shortening the literary struggles of a number of his peers. Anglophone readers can encounter fiction by Per Petterson, Linn Ullmann, Dag Solstad (three of his novels, jewels from a hoard of nearly thirty books, have been translated into English; more are promised), Roy Jacobsen, Tor Ulven, Jon Fosse, and Carl Frode Tiller, among others.
Gunnhild Øyehaug joins that group at a slight angle—as a female (I just enlisted a platoon of men, apart from Ullmann), a short-story writer and poet as well as a novelist, and a writer committed to literary experiment. Her work is playful, often surreal, intellectually rigorous, and brief. She sometimes resembles Lydia Davis, who has read her in both Norwegian and English, and has written admiringly about her work. Like Davis, she moves easily from the theoretical to the humanely engaged. (There is a piece in this collection, entitled “The Object Assumes an Exalted Place in the Discourse,” that is a sparkling riff on a phrase of Roland Barthes’s.) And, like Davis, she can produce stabs of emotion, unexpected ghost notes of feeling, from pieces so short and offbeat that they seem at first like aborted arias. “Vitalie Meets an Officer,” for instance, is about a woman, Anna Bae, who likes reading biographies. Actually, I’ve made the story sound more expansive than it is. It is about a woman who comes across a sentence, in a biography of Arthur Rimbaud, about the poet’s mother, who was named Vitalie: “Although Vitalie’s social life was confined to the church, shopping, and occasional games of whist, she somehow managed to meet a French army officer in 1852.” The rest of the story is about Anna’s delighted response to this single sentence. “somehow she managed it!” Anna thinks, and the story continues:
Sometimes when you read, it’s like certain sentences strike home and knock you flat. It’s as if they say everything you have tried to say, or tried to do, or everything you are. As a rule, what you are is one simmering, endless longing. And that was how this sentence struck Anna Bae’s consciousness, like a quivering arrow of truth. That said: it’s possible. To meet a French army officer. Or simply to manage whatever it is you are longing for. That seems impossible to manage. That blankets you like destiny.
Anna imagines how Vitalie might have met her officer. She thinks of a song by Nick Cave “(Are You) The One That I’ve Been Waiting For,” then of Vitalie’s longing, and how it lay “like a well-hidden egg in her chest and purred unseen with glorious, secret dreams.” Anna pictures this egg, and then the officer, and then a woman at a window. The story ends with the arrival of a U.F.O.—which, on closer inspection (Anna goes out into the fields to look at it), might just be the green sofa she has been sitting on. The piece convincingly combines realism and an ethereal surrealism; it flies up but stays tethered to that first ingenuous burst of delight: “somehow she managed it!”
Øyehaug is intensely interested in consciousness, and in the pictures consciousness makes; this emphasis constantly humanizes her experiments in abstraction and the fantastical. Her riff on the line from Barthes—“the object in discourse assumes an exalted place,” from his “Writing Degree Zero”—could easily have been precious or tedious, or otherwise annoying. But Øyehaug proceeds with a simplicity and a frankness that quickly charm. “We carefully study a sentence we love,” she writes, and then goes on to quote Barthes’s own words. But what is “the object”? Her narrator insists on visualizing it. She imagines a sailing green prism, and thinks of “Blade Runner” and “the small flying cars that Harrison Ford uses”: “It is absolutely no surprise that at this point we have the picture of a luminous green prism sailing in through the dark and taking an exalted place on our retina, a bit like when you’ve been staring too hard at a lamp on the ceiling and then close your eyes! How strange, we think, that a sentence that was written to explain an aspect of modern poetry can have roughly the same effect on our imagination as science fiction.” “The Object Assumes an Exalted Place in the Discourse” is compact, just over two pages, and perfect: it makes gentle fun of French theory’s more sublime pretensions while simultaneously paying Barthes’s lyrical work the lyrical tribute it deserves. It is circular and self-reflexively postmodern—Øyehaug’s text enacts what Barthes theorizes, exalting an “object” that is itself just a sentence—while also registering some brief flash of consciousness, some small explosion of longing, that, like Anna Bae’s discovery in Rimbaud’s biography, seems true to our own experience of passionate reading: jouissance, to be precise.
Øyehaug succeeds, more often than not, by staying focussed on the object of her inquiry. Having established her thought experiment, her area of study—a woman reading a biography, an actor about to walk onto the stage for a one-man avant-garde play (“Compulsion”), a man buying blinds at ikea (“Nice and Mild”), a girl trying to avoid playing the piano for her oppressively doting grandfather (“Overtures”)—she presses down on the exquisite dilemma, and fearlessly follows the logic of the form she has chosen. The best example of this fearlessness might be “The Deer at the Edge of the Forest,” a page-long paragraph that daringly inhabits an animal’s consciousness. Again, the literary dangers are obvious enough—whimsy, sentimentality, grating eccentricity—and again they are short-circuited by Øyehaug’s appealing, vigorous simplicity:
The deer stood at the edge of the forest and was miserable. He felt like there was no point in anything, like he might as well give up. I walk around here, day in and day out, the deer thought, and there’s no one who sees me. Am I invisible, or what? He didn’t think so. I walk around here and could change people’s lives if they could only see me, but no one sees me. Here I am, a hart, and no one cares. The whole point is that I am supposed to be difficult to see, I know that, I am supposed to roam around in the forest and not be seen. But it’s the very premise of my life that is now making me miserable. I want to be seen. So here I am at the edge of the forest. I am open to being seen, to being shot. If someone doesn’t see me soon, I’m going to do something drastic, I mean it. Right now it feels like I’m trapped in deerness. Oh, I would love to change everything, be someone else, something completely different.
This might be a sly commentary on Rilke’s poem “Archaic Torso of Apollo,” in which the poet tries to enter an alien, inaccessible consciousness, and concludes, “You must change your life.” What Rilke makes explicit is here kept beautifully implicit: do we treat this as a deer thinking, or as a person merely projecting her troubled thoughts onto the deer?
Lovely as these brief texts are, Øyehaug is at her most captivating in her longer, slightly more conventional pieces, where she uses a kind of tightly controlled, repetitive dramatic monologue to animate a character’s inner torments. “Nice and Mild” and “Two by Two,” the stories that begin and end this collection, are like sparks thrown off by a furious wheel of suffering. In both pieces, we are in the midst of domestic anguish, as experienced by a troubled protagonist, and must do our best to catch up. In “Nice and Mild,” an unnamed male narrator has come to ikea to buy blinds for his son’s bedroom. It soon becomes clear that this is an arduous project, one that has been deferred for at least six months. Something is wrong with this obsessive and astoundingly unconfident man. A clue may be found in a particular detail: at home, the DVR is recording a tennis match between Serena Williams and Anna Kournikova, and the man thinks, “The very fact that I’m recording the match and not watching it live is the start of the virtuous circle that buying the blinds was going to start, and what’s more, I’ve come here and no one—that’s to say, my wife—knows that I’m here.” The narrator clings to this detail, returning to it in the way that Thomas Bernhard’s narrators (or, closer to home, Knut Hamsun’s) roll the same tormenting phrases back and forth, like stress balls that have morphed into stress grenades. When, a few pages later, we trip across another mention of that “virtuous circle,” we have a fairly good idea that this man’s circle is vicious rather than virtuous. Some kind of depressive stasis has befallen him; he imagines his wife, standing at home, crying, “because she thinks that I can’t breathe, that she is smothering me, which is why I can’t face doing anything, why I sit on the sofa for most of the day and watch TV and feel that I’m turning into an old man and that life, in short, is over.”
The story is delicate because the drama of the man’s entrapment, despite his repetitive, educated verbosity, seems to allow for only very limited self-knowledge. As he enters ikea, he trips and falls on the stairs, and is seen by two laughing teen-age girls. In a distinctly Øyehaugean touch, we get a reflection on Baudelaire’s theory of laughter: namely, that it is never the person who falls in the street who laughs but the person who witnesses the accident—unless, she writes, “the person who falls is a philosopher and able to reflect on his fall, able to see himself from the outside. You laugh a little. You reflect on your fall, and laugh a little.” It is characteristic of Øyehaug’s nice sense of irony and human complexity that our protagonist is at once something of a philosopher and not philosopher enough: he can see himself from outside, but only at this moment; he opens one door just to find another, this one apparently locked.
“Two by Two” is written in the third person, but it occupies its protagonist’s mind so intently that it resembles a fierce dramatic monologue. Edel, a bookseller in a rural community, is waiting up for her husband to return. It is almost one in the morning, and snowing. Edel is furious, because she thinks that her husband, Alvin, who should have been home forty minutes ago, is visiting his mistress. (She’s right.) Full of rage and revenge, she gathers up their sleeping son and sets out in her car to confront the errant spouse. All this is familiar enough, the ground rail for a lot of conventional fictional traffic. But Øyehaug, as ever, does fresh things with convention. Edel has been taking courses in English literature at a local college and, in particular, has been enjoying “Symbolism in Literature,” which has convinced her that modern readers are too quick to disdain symbolism as “antiquated, romantic thought.” On the contrary, “she believed that something could stand for something else, a rose for love, an ocean for life, a cross for death.” Now, however, as she drives toward the place where she assumes her husband is, she’s irritated by some vulgarly obvious symbolism: only her side of the road has been cleared of snow, and she immediately thinks, “Is that how it is, is that what this means, is his path closed, will he not come back?”
Øyehaug loves to mix her elements: she is always dabbing light onto shade, blending wit with torment, driving together bookishness and life. (Her work is itself highly bookish, but also intensely life-filled.) So she has some fun with Edel and her ambivalence toward literary symbolism, even as she refuses to turn away from Edel’s acute pain. And she has another joke in store. Alvin, on his guilt-racked way back to his wife, pulls off the road, leaves the car, and lies in the snow. This is where Edel eventually finds him, and as she berates him in the expected ways—“You little shit . . . we’re finished”—Alvin cuts in with an excuse: his car has broken down, and that’s why he is so late; he’s been stuck here for nearly an hour. It’s an obvious lie, but the car really won’t start. Alvin may have saved his bacon; the marriage may live another day; against all ethical odds, the lie worked. Or: an invention, a fiction, mysteriously became “true,” and did so because Øyehaug wittily decided to disable the car and thus spare her characters the divorce furnace. The symbol, now appearing as authorial sleight of hand, determines the rest of the story. Trust the teller, not the tale. ♦
This article appears in the print edition of the August 28, 2017, issue, with the headline “Entanglement Theory.”
James Wood has been a staff writer and book critic at The New Yorker since 2007.Read more »
Knots: Stories
By Gunnhild Øyehaug; translated by Kari Dickson Farrar, Straus and Giroux 176 pp.
Reviewed by Rafael Alvarez
September 29, 2017
This collection of micro tales may leave readers wanting more.
Writers I respect (a few of whom I even know a bit) have lavishly praised this book of quick hits, flashes of now-you-see-the-denouement-now-you-don’t, and more than a few ill-advised infatuations preceding great but ill-advised sex.
“Unpredictability and wonder pervades the book,” says Stuart Dybek in a blurb. “Only a rare writer is capable of such sustained surprise.”
My personal preference is for stories with a bit more window dressing; deep into middle-age, I have become fond of digressions that meander back to their source. And yet, even though these 26 very short stories strike me as Dippin’ Dots and not a banana split, Norwegian author Gunnhild Øyehaug has mastered the art of planting seeds that foreshadow the unwritten flowers-to-be.
In “Gold Pattern,” which would qualify as drugstore porn if Eisenhower were president (and wouldn’t that be nice?), an unnamed couple decides they no longer like each other but really like doing that good thing.
So, they bicycle to the deserted house of the woman’s dead grandmother every other week or so and go at it with gusto on a chair in the kitchen. She wants a boyfriend; he only wants — like the rope on the flag post outside of Grandma’s house — “to slap against the pole in a hollow…rhythm.”
The key word, of course, being hollow.
He never looks at her when he comes, always spinning her around at the last moment. She believes that it is in this moment that the truth can be revealed — that if she can look into his eyes the very moment the band launches into “Stars and Stripes Forever,” she will know if he loves her. Even if he doesn’t know it himself.
Determined to find out, she tries to twist back around — their custom is to play the swivel game on the chair — and miscalculates. The teeth of the sprocket lose the perforations in the celluloid, and the film unspools all over her.
Still, for all of Øyehaug’s skill (the author’s description of the wind rustling by the abandoned house reminds me of Terrence Malick’s “Badlands,” delivered with all the passion missing from the sex), this collection isn’t my cup of tea. A fine cup, but not mine.
Turning the last page of the slim volume of slimmer stories, it seemed like so much titillation, a tease by a writer known primarily as a poet. So far, Øyehaug has published a volume of poetry and Knots. Perhaps this progression will continue: lyrics to very short stories to something on this side of her countryman Karl Ove Knausgaard’s verbosity.
For now, one reader’s satisfaction with a string of finely wrought prologues is just someone else’s premature ejaculation.
Rafael Alvarez is the author of Basilio Boullosa Stars in the Fountain of Highlandtown. He can be reached via orlo.leini@gmail.com.
The short story collection Knots is lit-fiction hackwork
Ignatiy Vishnevetsky
7/18/17 12:00amFiled to: BOOKS
68
Image: Jane Harrison
BOOK REVIEW
Lead
C-
Knots: Stories
AUTHOR
Gunnhild Øyehaug
PUBLISHER
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Knots is an excellent title for a collection of short stories. Otherwise, the most that can be said for Gunnhild Øyehaug’s slim book, which was first published in Norwegian in 2004, is that it must lose some charm in translation. Her stories are corny and high-minded, written in a repetitive and runny prose, full of dinkuses and exclamation marks and clumsy name-checks of Charles Baudelaire, Arvo Pärt, Andrei Tarkovsky, Roland Barthes, and Ted Hughes. But they can be conceptually interesting. Take, for example, “Small Knot,” whose protagonist, Kåre, remains connected to his mother by an umbilical cord into adulthood; the opening story, “Nice And Mild,” in which thoughts race through the narrator’s head as he enters an Ikea to buy some blinds for his son’s bedroom; “Overtures,” about a young pianist who really needs to pee (one of the better stories, actually); or “Transcend” and “An Entire Family Disappears,” both of which are written as stage directions. Øyehaug’s stories are short (there are 26 in Knots’ 164 pages), most of them chopped up into elliptical sections a paragraph or so long, and her willful banality, brevity, and experimentation-for-experimentation’s-sake sometimes brings to mind Lydia Davis—who it, turns out, likes Øyehaug’s prose enough to be blurbed on the back cover. (So is Stuart Dybek.)
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But she lacks Davis’ obsessiveness, and beyond a few small exceptions—say, the page-long “The Deer At The Edge Of The Forest,” which ends in a pithy punchline—can’t seem to fulfill an idea. Read together, the stories in Knots retreat into repeated motifs: racket sports; characters (often men) frozen by personal crises; allusions to the life of the poet Arthur Rimbaud; college-curriculum references that illuminate nothing except the writer’s own limited tastes; and touches of surrealism and slapstick mixed with attempts at depicting middle-class family life that come across as hokey and bogus, as though written by someone who had only seen wedding receptions or parent-child relationships on TV. As rendered by Kari Dickson, who is best known for her translations of Norwegian crime writers, Øyehaug’s prose style reads like lit-fiction hackwork. The template holds from story to story: She writes in short, flat sentences in an attempt to mimic either the mundane or the fabulistic, but whenever she has to simulate some kind of feeling, adopts a waterfall-of-commas approach of the “rain dribbles on the windshield, and Jørn imagines himself crashing into the next car, and death, and remembers what Rimbaud wrote, or maybe it wasn’t Rimbaud” variety. (Note: This is not an actual quote, but you get the picture.)
Occasionally, Øyehaug’s writing tosses out such memorable groaners as “her starting point was Nick Cave’s song ‘(Are You) The One That I’ve Been Waiting For’”; “he knew nothing about Arvo Pärt, he had just decided on impulse to go into the music shop that was open late, and suddenly found himself staring at the light green CD cover with a name on it that appealed to him, without him being able to explain why, ARVO PÄRT,” which one presumes is meant to be read to the tune of Isaac Hayes’ “Theme From Shaft”; and “it was I, Julio Cortázar, who was floating toward him.” (The last two are from the same story, “Blanchot Slips Under A Bridge,” whose protagonist is, yes, the French literary theorist Maurice Blanchot.) All of this is, of course, meant to be postmodern and funny, which it is sometimes. But any reader who looks beyond the conceptual gimmickry and obfuscation will find a writer who can’t connect one paragraph to the next and who closes stories abruptly on notes that are surprising mostly because they’re facile or unexpectedly sappy. Endings matter a lot in short fiction, but all Øyehaug—who has found some success as a poet and prose writer in Norway—has to offer are beginnings. At least it makes for some interesting titles. “The Object Assumes An Exalted Place In The Discourse” is a good one.
The Ties that Bind: ‘Knots’ by Gunnhild Øyehaug
BY LIBBIE KATSEV
POSTED ON JULY 14, 2017
An umbilical cord that cannot be cut –– even after death –– turns out to be less of an impediment than one might think in Knots (176 pages; FSG), Gunnhild Øyehaug’s eccentric collection of short stories. Emotional and mental knots are as binding and problematic as physical ones in these surreal and memorable stories, translated from the Norwegian by Kari Dickson.
Øyehaug’s stories run brief as they oscillate between the bizarre and the everyday. In the opening story “Nice and Mild,” a man suffering from anxiety ventures to IKEA to buy curtains for his son, while in “Grandma is Sleeping,” a woman refuses to let in her family inside her home. And the story “The Object Takes and Exalted Place in the Discourse” reads about as theoretical as it sounds. Knots by Gunnhild Øyehaug
These vignettes are windows not only into the tangled lives of Øyehaug’s characters, but the possibilities of the short story form: some feel like scenes from a play, others contain footnotes that introduce a new character’s perspective. No matter how experimental, the stories benefit from Øyehaug’s skill at creating fully realized characters. She treats these individuals with compassion, humor, and occasional severity—and they in turn ensure the stories in Knots are consistently surprising and memorable.
While most of the stories in Knots are not overtly connected, repeated elements—allusions to Rimbaud, themes of longing and compulsion, and the motif of knots— give the collection a sense of cohesion. At times, plotlines from one story will resume later: “Take Off, Landing” follows protagonist Geir until he watches his acquaintance Asle, stone in hands, jump off a dock—a hundred pages later, the story “Air” picks up from that very moment. “Deal” follows a young runaway as she receives a ride home from a local source of scandal, a man whose story continues in “Two by Two.”
In this way, Øyehaug utilizes the short story form to reveal how some things in life will always remain out of frame and out of focus. Later, Geir’s perspective of Asle cuts away, via footnote, to a “brilliant explanation” for why Asle is carrying a stone—yet we never explicitly learn just why Geir spends his days watching others from a van.
Knots begins with a quote from poet Christophe Tarkos: “One of two things: either the spiral/Or to be sent out into the air,” and Øyehaug fittingly embraces a lack of resolution, oftentimes leaving things unsaid. At the end of several pieces, an authorial voice enters to offer glib asides or lessons. After a conflict unfolds between two aliens in “Meanwhile, on Another Planet,” a clinical voice sums up the story’s moral: “What can we learn from this? That impossible situations can arise on other planets too. We don’t need to think that we’re the only ones who struggle and fight. Another striking feature is that they communicate through pictures.” These rare moments of authorial intrusion are unsettling precisely because the rest of the stories, no matter how surreal they may become, feel genuine and earnest. Even with the presence of floralh-patterned UFOs, the most unexpected surprise in Knots is how moving the stories prove.