Contemporary Authors

• Stol og ekstase Cappelen (Oslo, Norway), 2006
• Stol og ekstase Cappelen (Oslo, Norway), 2006
• Draumeskrivar: Noveller Kolon Forlag (Oslo, Norway), 2016
• Undis Brekke: Roman Kolon Forlag (Oslo, Norway), 2014
• Draumeskrivar: Noveller Kolon Forlag (Oslo, Norway), 2016

1. Draumeskrivar : noveller LCCN 2017469453 Type of material Book Personal name Øyehaug, Gunnhild, 1975- author. Main title Draumeskrivar : noveller / Gunnhild Øyehaug. Published/Produced Oslo : Kolon Forlag, [2016] Description 117 pages ; 21 cm ISBN 9788205494077 (hd. bd.) CALL NUMBER PT8952.25.Y44 D73 2016 CABIN BRANCH Copy 1 Request in Jefferson or Adams Building Reading Rooms - STORED OFFSITE 2. Wait, blink : a perfect picture of inner life LCCN 2017047944 Type of material Book Personal name Øyehaug, Gunnhild, 1975- author. Uniform title Vente, blinke. English Main title Wait, blink : a perfect picture of inner life / Gunnhild Øyehaug ; translated from the Norwegian by Kari Dickson. Edition First American edition. Published/Produced New York : Farrar, Straus and Giroux, [2018] Description 277 pages ; 20 cm ISBN 9780374285890 (hardcover) CALL NUMBER PT8952.25.Y44 V4613 2018 Copy 1 Request in Jefferson or Adams Building Reading Rooms 3. Knots : stories LCCN 2016045040 Type of material Book Personal name Øyehaug, Gunnhild, 1975- author. Uniform title Short stories. Selections. English Main title Knots : stories / Gunnhild Øyehaug ; translated from the Norwegian by Kari Dickson. Edition First American edition. Published/Produced New York : Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2017. Description viii, 164 pages ; 20 cm ISBN 9780374181673 (hardcover) CALL NUMBER PT8952.25.Y44 A2 2017 CABIN BRANCH Copy 1 Request in Jefferson or Adams Building Reading Rooms - STORED OFFSITE 4. Undis Brekke : roman LCCN 2015466187 Type of material Book Personal name Øyehaug, Gunnhild, 1975- author. Main title Undis Brekke : roman / Gunnhild Øyehaug. Published/Produced Oslo : Kolon Forlag, [2014]. ©2014. Description 125 pages ; 21 cm ISBN 9788205457706 8205457700 Shelf Location FLS2016 005145 CALL NUMBER PT8952.25.Y44 U53 2014 OVERFLOWJ34 Request in Jefferson or Adams Building Reading Rooms (FLS2) 5. Stol og ekstase LCCN 2007366249 Type of material Book Personal name Øyehaug, Gunnhild, 1975- Main title Stol og ekstase / Gunnhild Øyehaug. Published/Created Oslo : Cappelen, c2006. Description 226 p. ; 20 cm. ISBN 8202258960 9788202258962 CALL NUMBER PT8952.25.Y44 S76 2006 LANDOVR Copy 1 Request in Jefferson or Adams Building Reading Rooms - STORED OFFSITE

• Wikipedia - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gunnhild_%C3%98yehaug

  Gunnhild Øyehaug
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  Gunnhild Øyehaug at Bergen Public Library
  Gunnhild Øyehaug (born 9 January 1975, Volda, Norway) is a Norwegian poet, writer and lecturer.[1]

  Literary career
  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."

  With film director, Yngvild Sve Flikke, she adapted Vente, blinke into a screenplay which was released as Kvinner i for store herreskjorter (t: Women in Oversized Men's Shirts) in 2015.[2][3]

  Bibliography
  Slaven av blåbæret (Poetry, 1998)
  Knutar (Short stories, 2004) (English edition: Knots: Stories, translated by Kari Dickson, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2017)
  Stol og ekstase (Essays and short stories, 2006)
  Vente, blinke (Novel, 2008) (English edition: Wait Blink: A Perfect Picture of Inner Life, translated by Kari Dickson, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2018)
  References
  Gunnhild Øyehaug in Store norske leksikon (in Norwegian)
  Flikke, Yngvild Sve (2015-03-06), Women in Oversized Men's Shirts, Inga Ibsdotter Lilleaas, Henriette Steenstrup, Anne Krigsvoll, retrieved 2018-07-12
  "5 Great Books You May Have Missed in June". Literary Hub. 2018-07-11. Retrieved 2018-07-12.

• The Paris Review - https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/tag/gunnhild-oyehaug/

  Gunnhild Øyehaug has published poetry, essays, and novels, but she’s perhaps best known for her short collection Knots; “Every story [is] a formal surprise, smart and droll,” Lydia Davis wrote of her stories in the Times Literary Supplement. 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 journals Vagant and Kraftsentrum. Øyehaug lives in Bergen, where she teaches creative writing.

• KGB Bar Lit - http://kgbbarlit.com/content/masses-in-balance-a-conversation-with-knots-author-gunnhild-oyehaug

  QUOTE:
  I decided to become a writer when I was quite young. And it was extremely important to me to know that what I had written was completely 100% mine and that I was original, because if not, there wouldn’t be any point, just to repeat what anyone else had written.
  I learned to read when I was four, and I started to write a diary when I was six. And I don’t think I decided when I was six that I was going to be a completely original writer, you know, but I realized quite early that I liked to write—that it gave me joy to write.
  I grew up in the northwest of Norway where there’s a lot of mountains. And I always feel like I’m walking in the mountains when I’m writing. You think, “I can see the top now,” but then you’re looking on and you realize, “Oh no it’s just a hill.” So you keep going, and you think, “I’m here now,” but no, you’re not. Because the mountain you set out to reach is still so far away.

  MASSES IN BALANCE
  A Conversation with Knots Author Gunnhild Øyehaug
  by Michelle Hogmire
  Oct 3, 2017

  Gunnhild Øyehaug has often been compared to Lydia Davis—a tall order, but one that Øyehaug certainly fills. Her short story collection, Knots (FSG, July 2017), originally published in Norway in 2004, marks her English-language debut. Lively and solemn, hilarious and gloomy, Øyehaug’s prose prods at the complexity of human relationships from all angles: a man remains troublingly attached to his mother by umbilical cord through life and death, but still finds great love; beings from another planet struggle to communicate just like people, even though they talk through photographs; characters appear across stories and exchange sexual partners, all while God orchestrates and observes. Sometimes taking the form of stage directions and often featuring real-life figures like Maurice Blanchot and Arthur Rimbaud, Øyehaug’s work always surprises and delights.

  We spoke in person, on a hot summer morning at the lovely Jane Hotel in New York City, and over email, about everything from healthcare to Monty Python, from the importance of prepositions to the practice of walking in the mountains.

  Michelle Hogmire: I’m curious how this book came about, in terms of the translation process. Knots was originally published in 2004. Here we are in 2017, and we finally have the English edition. How did that happen?

  Gunnhild Øyehaug: It’s not very unusual for translated books to come out much later. One of my favorite Norwegian writers, Dag Solstad, who’s been publishing books since 1969, has just recently been translated into English. But still, what happened was that Lydia Davis read my book. I know she has this project of learning the language where she’s being translated, so she can translate something back as a favor. She’s a genius—she learns languages without a dictionary. And she was determined to read Dag Solstad’s book about his ancestors from Telemark, but his book was quite monumental and a tough starting point.

  Frode Saugestad, who initiated the Norwegian American Festival in Oslo and New York, invited Lydia Davis to Norway several times. He gave her some books by Norwegian writers that he appreciated, including Knots, and when she was going on a trip, she decided to bring my short stories. I suppose that was the starting point. She liked them, Saugestad told me in an email, which for me was quite absurd because I’m a very big fan of hers. My husband said it’s like if you were a guitarist, and then Keith Richards suddenly called and said, “I like your guitar playing.” It felt very wonderful.

  MH: That’s a crazy story.

  GØ: It is a crazy story! In a great, surreal way.

  MH: What was it like working with a translator?

  GØ: My translator, Kari Dickson, is very good and welcoming. She sent me the stories as she finished them, and I read through to see if anything felt off, and commented here and there, and she’d revise them, always improving my suggestions. For instance, I love the way she translated a particular sentence about a lonely deer who wants to break free from being a deer—my original sentence reads something like, translated clumsily word by word, “I feel trapped in a deer pattern.” She translated this into “I’m trapped in deerness.” I just love that. It’s so in tune with the book’s tone.

  MH: That’s a good transition into talking about tone in the book. One of the things that impressed me, and that I enjoyed the most, was how your stories use language to explore the feeling of anxiety. Could you talk about that? Maybe it’s our current political moment, but when I was reading, I felt like you captured an anxious character’s thoughts incredibly well, what it’s like to be in that state.

  GØ: And now we’re in that anxious state all the time. What does it feel like, being American these days? I’m very curious about that.

  MH: I have friends who tell people they’re from Canada when they go abroad, because they just don’t want to acknowledge they’re from the US. I have a strange relationship with being American, because I’m living in the city now, but I’m from the South. I’m from a place that was a very Trump-supporting area. It’s funny, I was coming up with questions for you and I thought, “Oh, what’s it like to live somewhere where you have free health care?”

  GØ: It strikes me as very different. The welfare system—free medical—is something that most Norwegians take for granted. And I pay my taxes happily, knowing what it provides. From my perspective, it’s crazy that you have to pay if you’re hospitalized with an injury, or if you’re going to give birth.

  MH: I agree. And this plays back into my anxiety question, but what is the sense about the Trump administration where you are? What is the feeling?

  GØ: Well, I think we feel the same as you guys do. I was very shocked, of course. But at the same time, I don’t see it as an isolated moment in history. We had the same thing in Norway four years ago, when our strong rightwing party went into government. I think that was, to many people, terrible for the Norwegian sense of self. And you see the same things happening around Europe. It’s a tense situation.

  MH: How do you find the motivation to write through that? I feel like now in America, the question for writers involves the necessity of addressing this in some way in your work. Or writers are having difficulty working through it.

  GØ: That’s hard to answer, really. I think it’s necessary for writers to be concerned politically, one way or another, but you can do that in so many ways. It takes time to reflect. For instance, we had the terror attacks at Utoya in 2011, which was a very devastating moment in Norwegian history. And then writers also thought, how can we continue to write after this? In some way, you feel like there’s no way you can keep writing without touching on the subject. But how can you do it through fiction?

  Fiction feels, in the face of the event, like the wrong answer. But now, six years after, it’s becoming a theme in both poetry and novels, and I think several writers have really shown the way here, for how to treat such a theme in literature. But it takes time, I think, to find a way to write about it. I don’t really have an answer to that question, but it’s important to ask. And, as a writer, to ask yourself.

  MH: I guess for me it’s a weird question because sometimes when I read work that’s too directly politically critical, it feels too moralistic in a sense. But I don’t want to say, “Moral lessons aren’t the point of fiction.”

  GØ: All the same, I don’t think we have to just fall down into gloominess and desperation and fear and anxiety. Literature and fiction are also places where you can see complexity, beauty, and hope. Those will be my last words. (laughs)

  MH: That’s true, even about your collection. Because so many of the stories in Knots have an element of darkness, but there’s also light.

  GØ: I hope so. I’ve been asked many times: how do you use humor? And I don’t know. It’s not something I’m deliberate about.

  MH: But some of it is so funny!

  GØ: Thank you! But it’s not something I decide, like “Oh it’s too gloomy now, I have to put in some humorous element here.” It’s just a way of thinking and a way of writing, and it’s also a play of dynamics. If it’s very dark, you have to have some light. If not, the story is drowned in darkness to me. And if it’s very light, the story will fly away because there’s nothing to it, really. But I don’t like to talk about humor as a tool, because I do feel it’s inherent in something else, springs out of something else, and into something else.

  To try to wind back to your original question, on how I use language to explore the state of anxiety, I would say that humor is one of the ways. I’m not sure the characters themselves would agree that their situation is particularly amusing, for instance the man going to IKEA in a state of desperation to buy blinds for his son, or the deer wanting to be seen. It’s a matter of getting into the material of the character’s mind or even the material of the point of view, but at the same time keeping a distance—to see from the inside out and from the outside in at the same time.

  The dynamic between light and dark is also important in how I edit the texts, in terms of what’s going to follow. I put a lot of weight on getting the balance right. I’ve always been fascinated by a passage from To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf, when the artist Lily Briscoe talks about composing her pictures. She says that shadow here needs light there, and she realizes in a sudden insight that she has to put the tree in the painting further to the middle. And that’s been my guideline, really, for how to compose: I have to put the masses in the correct balance, and there has to be a center.

  The humor is also there to relieve pain, I think. I’ve always been interested in tragic comedy. And I like slapstick humor, so I have nothing against that! I love Monty Python, and have probably been more influenced by their “And now for something completely different” than I can grasp fully.

  MH: In the book there are a lot of people falling down or tripping and knocking things over. And it’s simultaneously funny, but also sad. A repeating theme that I loved involves a couple. One person in the couple thinks their partner wants to be with someone else, or suspects their partner is always thinking about someone else. That felt like such a real dynamic in a relationship, where two people are together, but there’s always anxiety about what the relationship means or concern about another person intruding. Is that other person in the room? Or outside the window? That felt like a good representation of anxiety.

  GØ: Thank you, that’s a good observation. I do think of some of the stories as variations of one another. It’s the same couple with different faces, really. My initial idea, which doesn’t show in the book because I took it away, was to write one short story for each preposition, like under, over, etc. I was fascinated by how prepositions convey movement.

  There’s a wonderful Danish writer, Inger Christensen, who wrote about prepositions. She said that, as a writer, you have to love prepositions because they keep your mind in the same movement as the world. And I felt like that was exactly what I was trying to do. I wanted to try to capture that movement you were talking about, between relationships. You want to stretch out and reach another person, and then that person reaches out to somebody else. In the story called “Oh, Life,” sex is described like musical chairs, or as a sort of relay where you’re switching partners. As if God arranges things so that you have to have sex all the time, you just push away one partner for another. That’s of course the most extreme version of the theme of human beings as entities in motion, in the physical dimension.

  But then the idea of prepositions became too formal. I had to remove it because it was too stressful to continue; too constraining. But the notion of that movement was very important, both in terms of identity and the search for another human being, and also how the texts relate to one another.

  MH: Another thing you mentioned was the focus on the physical body in your work, which I also loved. Your characters always felt like they were solidly in their bodies. They’re feeling awkward with their bodies, with physicality, or they’re falling or constantly being sexual. And the bodily movements felt mechanical, in and out. I guess that’s prepositions!

  GØ: Yeah, that’s very true. There’s a painting by the Norwegian painter Edvard Munch, of course everyone knows “The Scream,” but there’s another picture that has always haunted me. Which I think was quite important when I wrote Knots. In the painting, you see a mass of people coming toward you, they are walking down a street. There’s just this grayish white mass of people, and their faces are basically variations of “The Scream.” And that to me is anxiety, the idea that people are just bodies, and they don’t have unique singular features. The bodies and faces are abstract.

  MH: Right, your bodies aren’t particularly described. When you take writing classes, your professor always says, “Now remember, your character is always a physical person with a body! Don’t lose sight of that. A character isn’t just thoughts. You have to think of this as an actual person taking up space, existing in space!” But sometimes it gets awkward when writing tips into so much physical description, but your work strikes a balance. It’s always very obvious that the person is in a body.

  GØ: I think what I’m interested in is the body as a principle, maybe, to be very philosophical about it. But, yes, I always get those kinds of comments from my editor. For instance, when I was writing my novel which is coming out at FSG next year, Wait, Blink, I gave him the first draft, and I had decided that I would not have any bodies—they were just going to be minds and thoughts for the first half of the novel, and then gradually, in the second half, become physical entities with heads and hair and eyes and the normal stuff people are made of. He said, “Where are they?” And I said, “I don’t want them to be anywhere!” But then slowly I realized and accepted that it didn’t work the way I’d planned, and I had to transform that. The process was very funny, because I was kind of hitting my way through when I was writing, “Here you go, here’s her childhood” and “Here you go, she looks exactly like THIS,” and I actually think that shows in the style.

  I’m not very good with either plot or characterization, but I do acknowledge the need for it. But I do hope there’s a way around it, also. (laughs) Maybe I haven’t found it yet. But in Knots, for instance, in the last short story, “Two by Two,” which is about this triangular relationship, the man reflects and thinks about himself as merely muscles and teeth—a skeleton. He thinks about himself as an x-ray. Maybe that reflects my view of these characters. I’m kind of x-raying them, and they’re appearing as bodies, but what I’m really interested in are their inner bones.

  MH: That is an important question about writing: if you’re resistant to traditional characterization and plotting, how do you get around that?

  GØ: That’s something I like about short stories; it’s easier to get around traditions. I think some of my short stories in this collection are quite classical narrative short stories, and I can recognize them as a genre. But then some of them are very short, in America you call it flash fiction, I’ve learned. They don’t have that short story outline. You’re more bound to plot in a novel. But writing a novel was an interesting learning process for me—figuring out how to move within a set structure without being overwhelmed by it.

  MH: It’s the whole “Learning the rules in order to break them” idea. So why are you resistant to traditional characterizations and plot? I am too, but I don’t know how to answer that question. I think someone else should answer it!

  GØ: Because, truthfully, I think it’s boring. I’m very skeptical. If a text says, “It was raining and she was walking down the street,” then I think, how do we know that? Why should I just accept that? Who am I as a writer to just claim these things? I solved that in my novel by using a “we” narrator, kind of an academic “We,” who just portrays the characters through her own vision, which I felt made it okay.

  I decided to become a writer when I was quite young. And it was extremely important to me to know that what I had written was completely 100% mine and that I was original, because if not, there wouldn’t be any point, just to repeat what anyone else had written.

  MH: That’s a lot of pressure!

  GØ: And then I decided not to read anything, just to make sure that I was 100% original, which is, of course, very stupid. Eventually, I figured out there was no way around reading for me, because I wanted to study literature. So I had to read the classics. After a year of study, I just realized how stupid I’d been. And that everything that I had planned and thought that I would write was already written, because you see I’m a genius so…(laughs) Of course, I’m just kidding, but it was a year of shock and revelation to me.

  I think I’m trying to explain why I hate structures that claim, “You’re supposed to do this or you’re supposed to do that,” and why I have this extreme sense that I want to do something else. There’s maybe a little psychological explanation, too.

  MH: You just touched on this a little bit, discussing how you decided you wanted to be a writer when you were really young. Could you share either a moment or a person or a story—something from your past—that made you want to be a writer? Something that stands out to you in that regard, about realizing that’s what you wanted to do?

  GØ: I think I’m going to have to give two answers to that one. I learned to read when I was four, and I started to write a diary when I was six. And I don’t think I decided when I was six that I was going to be a completely original writer, you know, but I realized quite early that I liked to write—that it gave me joy to write. It’s very funny to read that diary. It’s little short lines. For instance, I wrote, “I can see my uncle. He’s carrying a very heavy box.” Stop. Or “My great-uncle had a pacemaker operation today.” Stop. Or “I’m learning to ride a bicycle. It’s very difficult to get my feet on the peddles.” Stop. That sort of stuff.

  I started writing poetry, also short, and I always ended my poems with a comment: “Nice poem.” Because I had an older cousin who started school one year ahead of me. And I was very envious of her, because when she’d show me her homework, it always said, “Nice work.” So I thought, “OK, I’ll be my own teacher and say, ‘Nice Poem.’” Just applauding myself. That’s probably why I became a writer—because I got so much applause from myself. (laughs)

  I’ve always used language and writing as a way of playing and having fun. But I do remember one particular moment that showed me what a text could be. My younger brother, who is also a writer and a musician, one day he said, “You really have to come here and see this.” And he took me into my parents’ study room and showed me a very thick book written by the poet Jan Erik Vold, who was one of the people who introduced beat poetry to Norwegian readers. I remember reading a poem with my brother and just laughing because we thought it was so pointless and wonderful—wonderful because it was so pointless. Because at that time I was used to reading Ibsen and interpreting symbolism and I was so tired of it. Something like, in translation: “Are there stones in heaven? Yes, there is one. It’s flat. And on it sits Tarjei (which is the name of one of Norway’s most wonderful writers—Tarjei Vesaas). He listens. He smiles. We have to write good poems.” That’s the end of it! The feeling of intense freedom and play was decisive. I’m sure you’ve had one of those moments—when you read something and it liberates you from everything you ever thought a text should be. That was the moment for me.

  MH: How do you maintain that sense of play and enjoyment while writing, as an adult?

  GØ: I don’t think it’s something I maintain. I think it’s the reason why I write. And of course, it’s also by reading new material. For instance, I recently read Joy Williams’s Ninety-nine Stories of God, which was just a revelation.

  MH: This relates to another question I was going to ask, which is what kind of writing excites you now?

  GØ: Well she [Joy Williams] is one and Lydia Davis is another. And J.M. Coetzee’s novels. If there’s a literary Superman, I think it would be him. He can do anything. I love Jenny Offill. And I read poetry. I love Sharon Olds and Anne Carson. I don’t know if there’s a common denominator in all of those, but they’re very good I suppose. (laughs) Brilliant, actually. I think I’m drawn to writers who are, for instance in the case of Lydia Davis, concerned with the sentence itself as a very tiny structure of narration. I like that. And that’s definitely also the case with Joy Williams’s Ninety-nine Stories. And also a couple of Norwegian writers, and Swedish and Danish, the list could go on and on.

  MH: Who would you say your literary heroes are, big figures who influenced you? Whether it’s someone current or an older author who was fundamental?

  GØ: Well, I always feel very embarrassed when I mention my literary heroes because it’s like I’m putting on a badge that says, “I am inspired by Flaubert, and Kafka, and Joyce.” And another badge “Oh, I’m also inspired by Davis.” But I suppose it was crucial to read Madame Bovary because I think I learned about style. I love this sentence that Flaubert wrote in a letter to his mistress. He said, “When will all the farts be written from the point of view of a superior farce, that's to say, as the good God sees them, from on high.” And I love that because it says so much about perspective and trying to write and having that kind of distance, while at the same time trying to be as close to your characters’ feelings of desperation or whatever it is that they’re going through. But at the same time you can zoom out. So that book was very important, and also Virginia Woolf. I think she is probably the goddess in my universe.

  MH: What are you working on now, if you want to talk about it?

  GØ: I can say what I’ve just finished! I’ve just published a very small book of essays. It’s called Miniature Readings, which is nineteen small texts, where I read small passages from other work, other books. It came out in June. And I’ve also written a script for a short movie that’s been produced and will premiere in the autumn. But what I’m working on now is something that I really can’t talk about. Because I always feel like I destroy what I’m writing if I talk about it. I only have like 40 pages or so.

  MH: So many people say that.

  GØ: But some people never have that problem! They can tell you what they’re writing about. I’ve read interviews with writers and they’re saying, “Oh I’m writing about nuclear disaster and I’m doing a research trip.” I would never do that. I never know when I’m writing if I’m going to be able to finish it. And I never know if I’m going to stick to my theme or if it’s going to change. In my experience, I feel like I’m…are you used to walking in the mountains?

  MH: Yes, when I was young! I grew up in a rural place.

  GØ: Me too. I grew up in the northwest of Norway where there’s a lot of mountains. And I always feel like I’m walking in the mountains when I’m writing. You think, “I can see the top now,” but then you’re looking on and you realize, “Oh no it’s just a hill.” So you keep going, and you think, “I’m here now,” but no, you’re not. Because the mountain you set out to reach is still so far away. I think there was one writer who said that, I don’t remember his name, whoever he was, but I love what he said about writing a novel: to write a novel is to set a goal and then go there in your sleep. That’s very descriptive of how it is, to me. I know writers who like to have these outlines, but I don’t like to decide what’s going to happen. It takes all the fun out of it. And if I talked about it, I’m afraid I’ll wake up.

  MH: Do you feel like you have to write, in order to figure out what you’re writing about?

  GØ: Yes, very much so. Language is a fascinating tool. Entering into language is entering into a room where you think you know everything, and that you’re in control of, but which turns out to be a room of mirrors. Words come with luggage, and suddenly, put together in a sentence, words will start reflecting other meanings than you had intended, and you’re set off in a different direction. And there is also so much echo in narrating, if you for instance have used the word “flower,” you hear, in the back of your brain “Mrs. Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself” or you hear a poem of Ted Hughes about poppies, or you see a color in a flower painting by Georgia O’ Keefe, or you remember a garden you visited when you were a child, and that, I think, is one of the most wonderful things about writing, when your text makes a surprising loop into a different field just because you’ve used a certain word or a certain phrase.

  I like writing through other people’s language too, for instance in Knots, there is a text about Arthur Rimbaud, and that is inspired by a text I found on the internet on Arseny Tarkovsky, Andrei Tarkovsky’s father. It was called “My hero Arseny Tarkovsky” and was written by a young, Russian schoolboy, and I loved the simple and direct and school-like way of writing. I borrowed his style, so to speak. It was very amusing.

  MH: This is a question I really like, and it’s my second to last question: if you could change anything about publishing, what would it be? My day job is in the publishing industry, and then I have my writing. And for me those are two incredibly different things. So what would you change about the process through which your work comes out into the world?

  GØ: Well, the one thing I’m not so happy about is having to talk about my work, like I’m doing now. Because I think I always destroy it when I try to talk about it. I’m sorry, but that’s just the way I feel!

  MH: No, that’s a good answer!

  GØ: I write because I really don’t like to talk about these things. You know, my Norwegian hero Dag Solstad, he tends to say, “Oh no, but it’s in the book. You can read the book.” It’s a bit rude, but very inspirational.

  MH: Last, a sort of cheesy question: what advice do you have for writers just starting out? What would you say to your students?

  GØ: Read! Don’t do what I did. And also, don’t quit. It takes a little while to get noticed. Be prepared to do several revisions. Don’t be crushed by the response from your editor or your publisher. It’s very tough, and I think it’s like that for anybody who starts to write. So that would be my advice: read and don’t give up.

  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 journals Vagant and Kraftsentrum. Øyehaug lives in Bergen, where she teaches creative writing.

  Michelle Hogmire grew up in West Virginia and has a BA in English/Creative Writing from Marshall University and an MFA in Fiction from Columbia University. Her work has been published or is forthcoming in BOMB, Guernica, Columbia Journal, and Et Cetera. She currently lives and writes in New York City.

  Tagged: Interviews, KGB Bar Lit Mag, Gunnhild Øyehaug, Michelle Hogmire, Knots, KGB Bar

QUOTE:
disappointing
Oyehaug'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.

Print Marked Items
Wait, Blink
Publishers Weekly.
265.19 (May 7, 2018): p46.
COPYRIGHT 2018 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
Wait, Blink
Gunnhild Oyehaug, trans. from the Norwegian by Kari Dickson. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, $25 (256p)
ISBN 978-0-374-28589-0
The disappointing latest from Oyehaug (following Knots), about the intersection of many lives in Norway,
shuttles rapidly from character to character, sometimes for only a page before moving on. Sigrid is a young
literature student hoping to distract herself from a recent breakup by throwing herself headlong into
studying the trope of women who are depicted wearing oversized men's shirts in literary and visual media.
In the opening, she's fixated on an author photo, and the novel transitions, somewhat clumsily, to the subject
of the photo: older male novelist Kare Tryvle, who has just broken up with his girlfriend, Wanda, a bassist
whom he admiringly considers "the ultimate woman." By chance, Sigrid eventually meets Kare, and they
become romantically involved, even though Kare's relationship with Wanda might not be over. Interspersed
with Sigrid's narrative are those of Wanda, indignant and hurt over her and Kare's breakup; Linnea, a young
film director who's ostensibly in Copenhagen to shoot a movie, but is more concerned with chasing the
memory of an older professor with whom she had an affair; and Trine, a feminist artist who finds her art and
her outlook on life changed since the birth of her daughter. As the novel progresses--motivated by pursuit of
love, or at least pursuit of meaningful lives without loneliness--these women's paths intersect and
connections between them are uncovered. Suffused with cultural references, Oyehaug'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. June)
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
"Wait, Blink." Publishers Weekly, 7 May 2018, p. 46. General OneFile,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A538858659/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=ec91d52f.
Accessed 10 Sept. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A538858659

QUOTE:
delicate net of intermingled lives underpins this witty, spirited novel about creating: art, love, selfsufficiency,
and identity.
One
of Oyehaug's many gifts is to induce readers to gently laugh along with her at her characters, helping us, as
we see our own absurdities in them, to gently laugh at ourselves.
If it isn't precisely perfect, it's awfully damn close.

Oyehaug, Gunnhild: WAIT, BLINK
Kirkus Reviews.
(Apr. 1, 2018):
COPYRIGHT 2018 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Full Text:
Oyehaug, Gunnhild WAIT, BLINK Farrar, Straus and Giroux (Adult Fiction) $25.00 6, 5 ISBN: 978-0-374-
28589-0
A delicate net of intermingled lives underpins this witty, spirited novel about creating: art, love, selfsufficiency,
and identity.
Oyehaug's (Knots, 2017) first novel translated into English, by Dickson in able and deceptively
straightforward prose, follows a clutch of loosely connected women pursuing their artistic visions and
contending with distraction, most notably the lack, presence, or loss of love. There's Sigrid--a literature
student, "the kind...who has photographs of literary theorists on her wall"--who's beset by all three. Earnest
and lonely, Sigrid has just discovered the poetry of Kare, whose author photo she longingly rubs her cheek
against just before chancing upon Kare himself while on a walk. Caught in the reflected glare of Kare's
fantasies, Sigrid is blinded to her work and their incompatibilities, not least among them Kare's absorption
in his ex-girlfriend Wanda, a bassist who hides her insecurity behind a badass exterior. Next there's Linnea,
a young film director scouting locations and wistfully hoping to reunite with a past lover, whose primary
connection to the others seems to be through Sigrid's essay in progress about the prevalence in film of
women in oversized men's shirts. There's Wanda's friend Trine, a provocative performance artist and new
mother who suddenly finds her methods and very drive for creation called into question. And finally, there's
Elida, the fishmonger's daughter, also a literature student, who may be enmeshed in a fairy tale coming true.
Rich with literary references and knowing authorial winks, is this "a perfect picture of inner life," our
fractured, contradictory desires, our cinematic fantasies, our melodrama and unassuageable aloneness? One
of Oyehaug's many gifts is to induce readers to gently laugh along with her at her characters, helping us, as
we see our own absurdities in them, to gently laugh at ourselves.
If it isn't precisely perfect, it's awfully damn close.
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
"Oyehaug, Gunnhild: WAIT, BLINK." Kirkus Reviews, 1 Apr. 2018. General OneFile,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A532700590/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=7324dce6.
Accessed 10 Sept. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A532700590

QUOTE:
Formally playful, poignant, understated, and often acutely funny
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.

Oyehaug, Gunnhild: KNOTS
Kirkus Reviews.
(May 1, 2017):
COPYRIGHT 2017 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Full Text:
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 incoitus
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 10 Sept. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A491002972

QUOTE:
dry, odd, understated humor comes to
seem a hallmark of Oyehaug, whose stories are as original as they are joyously delicate and tranquil.

Knots
Publishers Weekly.
264.18 (May 1, 2017): p33.
COPYRIGHT 2017 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
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 10 Sept. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A491575255

"Wait, Blink." Publishers Weekly, 7 May 2018, p. 46. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A538858659/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF. Accessed 10 Sept. 2018. "Oyehaug, Gunnhild: WAIT, BLINK." Kirkus Reviews, 1 Apr. 2018. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A532700590/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF. Accessed 10 Sept. 2018. "Oyehaug, Gunnhild: KNOTS." Kirkus Reviews, 1 May 2017. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A491002972/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF. Accessed 10 Sept. 2018. "Knots." Publishers Weekly, 1 May 2017, p. 33. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A491575255/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF. Accessed 10 Sept. 2018.

• The New Yorker
  https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/08/28/a-norwegian-master-of-the-short-story
  Word count: 2450

  QUOTE:
  Øyehaug is intensely interested in consciousness, and in the pictures consciousness makes; this emphasis constantly humanizes her experiments in abstraction and the fantastical.
  Øyehaug succeeds, more often than not, by staying focussed on the object of her inquiry. Having established her thought experiment, her area of study she presses down on the exquisite dilemma, and fearlessly follows the logic of the form she has chosen. yehaug 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.)

  Books
  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.

  VIDEO FROM THE NEW YORKER
  Lies and Truth in the Era of Trump

  “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. ♦

• The AV Club
  https://aux.avclub.com/the-short-story-collection-knots-is-lit-fiction-hackwor-1798191767
  Word count: 817

  QUOTE:
  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.

  REVIEWS
  The short story collection Knots is lit-fiction hackwork

  Ignatiy Vishnevetsky
  7/18/17 12:00amFiled to: BOOKS
  67
  Save

  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.)

  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.

• ZYZZYVA
  http://www.zyzzyva.org/2017/07/14/the-ties-that-bind-knots-by-gunnhild-oyehaug/
  Word count: 589

  QUOTE:
  eccentric collection of short stories. Emotional and mental knots are as binding and problematic as physical ones in these surreal and memorable stories,

  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.

• The Common Online
  https://www.thecommononline.org/review-knots/
  Word count: 1711

  QUOTE:
  fresh and avant-garde. The stories stand well on their own; a few have overlapping characters and storylines; read together, they give a sense of a strange community. I imagine a small town under a lot of snow, a bruised umbilical cord twisting through the streets, each inhabitant tied to it with an unbreakable knot.

  Review: Knots
  August 12, 2017 Reviews
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  Book by GUNNHILD ØYEHAUG (TRANSLATED BY KARI DICKSON)

  Reviewed by OLGA ZILBERBOURG
  "Knots" book cover

  It felt foreordained to open this short story collection by the Norwegian writer Gunnhild Øyehaug and find IKEA on the first page, as in: “…park the car outside IKEA.” IKEA, now based in the Netherlands, originated in Sweden, but to many foreigners, it personifies Scandinavia—pleasant and unthreatening. “Blah, how boring,” was my first thought. Then, trying to stave off disappointment at being welcomed by the all-too-familiar global brand, I told myself, “Well, I guess IKEA did start somewhere nearby. Perhaps, Scandinavians have a particular attachment to clean lines.” (Nervous laughter.) I know that stereotyping is a form of blindness; in practice, my desire for novelty trips me up and leads to overly broad generalizations. Like a tourist, I had to remind myself to check my expectations at the airport.

  Gunnhild Øyehaug’s Norway begins, indeed, with the comfortably familiar. But the ground soon shifts to create a physical and emotional landscape that I had to work to understand. Its comforts are deceptive, and each reveal forces the reader to examine her premises. “Nice and Mild,” which opens on the IKEA parking lot, is a domestic tale. The protagonist is a family man whose all-too-capable wife provokes his intense social anxiety. The story is narrated from deep within the man’s point of view. For weeks, he has been unable to leave his couch. His trip to IKEA is a nearly impossible feat. As he advances through the parking lot to the doors of the store, he tries several mental strategies to overcome his anxiety, from imagining himself on the court with the tennis player Anna Kournikova to transposing his inner monologue from descriptive first person to second-person command mode: “You just have to concentrate on simple tasks, that you’re here to buy blinds.”

  The narrator has a son, who needs the blinds for the window of his room, and a wife, who, he thinks, is smothering him and so aggravates his anxiety. This is the beginning of the twenty-first century and, though the narrator is tempted to blame his wife for his failures, we understand that his anxiety is related to his brain and body chemistry. The autumn day is nice and mild, as the title highlights. The day’s niceness might be what enables him to get inside the store. Approaching the window treatments department, he sees his wife buying the blinds. She smiles at him. The narrator repeats, “She actually smiles”—the story ends there. We look for meaning in that smile, we ask ourselves, what does this smile say about their marital relationship? Is his wife happy to see him? Is she gloating? Does she think she won by getting to the store before him? In Øyehaug’s world, the answer is immaterial. The narrator can’t see his wife as an independent agent, a person with her own agenda and interiority. Her very presence at the store comes across as a physical manifestation of his anxiety.

  Øyehaug has submerged us so deeply within the narrator’s psyche that on the first read, I was convinced that the narrator had imagined his wife there, and I reread the story, looking for clues to support this theory. There’s no reason to suspect the narrator’s reliability. His wife did come to IKEA, but how or why remains outside the narrator’s perspective. To him, his wife is at IKEA because he’s afraid that she would be there.

  The word “knots” has several definitions, but in this collection, they are physical manifestations of psychic states. In “Small Knots,” Kåre is born with an umbilical cord that nobody can cut, and he remains attached to his mother Marianne. When Kåre marries, Marianne sleeps in the bed nearby, behind a curtain. The arrangement troubles Kåre’s bride, and she leaves. Marianne dies—and still Kåre’s doctors are unable to cut the cord. They help him tie a small knot in it “to stop her death from feeding into you.” He has a gravestone-sized house built on top of Marianne’s grave, a house he can never leave. Even under such constraints, he remains open to romance and eventually meets a girl who frequents funerals because she suffers from loneliness and finds people at funerals welcoming. She moves in with Kåre, despite his umbilical attachment to his dead mother, her side of it now black. Together they plan to have a child.

  This story’s fantastical element, so obviously a metaphor for the attachment between mother and son, is too familiar to hold the reader’s attention for very long. It makes us aware of what we demand of a story: tension. The reader expects the umbilical cord that ties Kåre and Marianne to break. It must break. When? How? Finally it dawned on me that it would not break. Why should it? This is the age of attachment parenting. The bond between a mother and son doesn’t need to weaken, nor does its strength need to threaten the son’s adult relationships. Right?

  Though Kåre’s bride’s inability to contend with this bond would strike many readers as normal, Øyehaug asks us to question this. Before she leaves, she bites the cord “with all her might,” hurting Kåre and Marianne. The mother’s death puts a kink in the bond but doesn’t break it. Kåre finds a much better match in the girl who likes funerals. Their life is extremely limited by the confines of Kåre’s tiny abode on top of Marianne’s grave, but the girl is happy. When she wishes to have a baby, he warns her, “You might get a child with a umbilical cord like mine,” and she says, “I don’t want anything else!” To her, the unbreakable bond is a gift. Who’s the balanced one in this situation? I was caught off guard by this twist—attachment theory taken to an absurd extreme—which felt deeply unsettling.

  Øyehaug’s background includes a graduate degree in Comparative Literature from the University of Bergen—mine is from San Francisco State University, so I appreciate the ways that a background in different national languages and literatures alters one’s imagination. One story, “A Renowned Engineer,”— subtitled “Norwegian Essay”— features the French symbolist poet Arthur Rimbaud as a protagonist. I thought I was following the narrative until the end, when Rimbaud dreams about having an engineer son “who would get on in the world and do well in life.” I have a general sense that this piece has to do with the vocation of an artist, sexuality, bourgeois morality—but the subtitle makes me wonder. Is Øyehaug satirizing something peculiar to Norway? A particular style of essay-writing? Is she suggesting that Norwegian character is formed by an odd mix of poetry and engineering? Why did the author chose Rimbaud to embody this line of inquiry? Perhaps if I were better informed about Rimbaud or Norway or how Norwegians view Rimbaud, I would understand the story better. But it seems a lot to ask of the reader.

  Øyehaug has been publishing books since 1998, and her oeuvre includes a collection of poetry and two novels. She has won prestigious prizes, and one of her novels was made into a feature film in Norway. “Knots” was her second book, originally published in 2004. Translator Kari Dickson has also translated popular and literary fiction, including children’s books and crime novels. She delivers the pieces in measured, contemporary language which can be shocking when the narration is at its most distant: “Frank has a nice cock, Eva thinks. His cock goes in and out of her and she thinks it’s very nice.”

  In 2010, I read a story by Øyehaug in McSweeney’s Issue 35. Published within a section dedicated to Norwegian writers, the piece stood out. “Two by Two” deals with adultery without taking sides. Alvin is cheating on Edel with Susanne, and they all try to keep appearances for the sake of Edel’s and Alvin’s son Thomas. In one remarkable passage, Øyehaug conflates the perspectives of all four characters, forcing us to hold them all at the same time. “Thomas is dreaming about a big crocodile egg in a nest, while Edel [picturing Alvin screwing Susanne] storms through the sitting room . . . Alvin comes all over Susanne’s buttocks. In the crocodile nest, the first baby crocodile breaks through the hard shell of the egg.” The horror of this situation cannot be resolved, and yet Øyehaug manages to find a surprising ending when the child’s dream seeps into reality. The dimensions of the possible expand—though, perhaps, this expansion is a signal of the psychological disturbance Thomas is taking on.

  Seven years later, I recalled this passage in “Two by Two” vividly. Rereading the story, the last in the collection, I was struck anew by the understated fierceness in Øyehaug’s voice. It was a particular pleasure to see this story supported by others in the book, similarly fresh and avant-garde. The stories stand well on their own; a few have overlapping characters and storylines; read together, they give a sense of a strange community. I imagine a small town under a lot of snow, a bruised umbilical cord twisting through the streets, each inhabitant tied to it with an unbreakable knot.

  Olga Zilberbourg’s fiction has appeared in and is forthcoming from Feminist Studies, Epiphany, Narrative Magazine, Hobart, B O D Y, Santa Monica Review, J Journal, and other print and online publications.

• Mary Whipple Reviews
  http://marywhipplereviews.com/gunnhild-oyehaug-wait-blink/
  Word count: 1509

  Gunnhild Oyehaug–WAIT, BLINK
  Jul 8th, 2018 by mary

  “I’ve allowed myself to love someone, what a mistake,” what a clichéd sentence, what a cliché of an experience, what a cliché that he should say that, it sounded like a script, the end of a film, which he then followed up with an email that said, “This won’t work. I’m a crater, and you are too. And crater plus crater doesn’t work.” What a cliché, what a cliché! [but] she’d hoped he would turn up all the same….”—Trine, an artist.

  cover wait blinkIn her debut novel, just translated and published in English, Norwegian author Gunnhild Oyehaug explores many facets of love among three different women and their lovers, a novel which led in her own country to her involvement with the acclaimed film “Women in Oversized Men’s Shirts” in 2015, based on a repeating image throughout this novel. Here men believe that women in oversized men’s shirts – and little else – are inherently attractive, and most of the female characters find themselves in oversize men’s shirts or pajama tops at some point in the novel as they search for the perfect love. The primary character, Sigrid, a literature graduate, has an inner life that “seems luminous, only not many people have seen it, her secret, sparkling life.” For certain, her present love, Magnus, an older man, does not recognize it. Just recently, twenty-three-year-old Sigrid was wandering around the city, and rather than face going into a café alone, she decided instead to go to a bookshop, where she randomly chose a book with the “life-affirming” title An Empty Chair, and when she looked at the picture of the author on the back, “she met the eyes of the author, Kare Tryvle. Yes, that was exactly what happened she felt that he met her eyes…[and] it was as if they saw deep inside her…saw her infinite loneliness [that] had been there in the bookshelf. Eyes that seemed to say: hello you.”

  Author Gunnhild Oyehaug
  Author Gunnhild Oyehaug

  Kare, the author to whom Sigrid is instantly attracted, is forty-three, and he has just broken up with Wanda, his girlfriend of the past three years. Speaking as the “entertainment” at a business conference in Bergen, where Sigrid lives, Kare appears wearing worn jeans, a hoodie, and new blue Adidas, and he makes his audience of “suits” laugh with his statement that everyone has the perfect golf swing inside – you just need to find it – and it is not always simple (not exactly a new idea). He then picks up a book that he has written himself and starts to read to his audience, mentally questioning the authenticity of his observations, even as he keeps reading. At the same time and in another place, film director Linnea, age twenty-seven, is wearing an oversized man’s shirt belonging to Goran Faltberg, professor of comparative literature at Uppsala University, standing in front of a window of a hotel in Copenhagen, though Goran is not with her. Instead, shy Robert, her producer, appears at her door, while Goran, at this moment is home in bed with his wife.

  Hotel Norge in Bergen, Norway, where Kare is holding forth about literature to a group of "suits" in the early pages of the novel
  Hotel Norge in Bergen, Norway, where Kare is holding forth about literature to a group of “suits” in the early pages of the novel.

  Trine, age thirty-two, is an artist in Oslo, someone who has thrown her whole self into her life and art, with no regrets. Seventeen months ago she had seduced Knut, whom she believed she loved, but now thinks was a mistake, noting, as she thinks, that this is a clichéd sentence. In the same time frame, she had attended an exhibition “where she’d been part of the opening, with her performance ‘half naked, half dressed,’ out in the foyer wearing a straitjacket on top and a G-string below. Now, by contrast with those days, she drinks practically nothing, does not smoke, and doesn’t kiss anyone, nor has she ever done so since she found out she was pregnant seventeen months ago.

  CANNES, FRANCE - MAY 16: Director Sophia Coppola attends 'The Bling Ring' premiere during The 66th Annual Cannes Film Festival at the Palais des Festivals on May 16, 2013 in Cannes, France. (Photo by Ian Gavan/Getty Images)
  Sofia Coppola, author of the Best Original Screenplay for LOST IN TRANSLATION in 2003. (Photo by Ian Gavan/Getty Images)

  A change of time period to ten years previously, in 1998, also introduces yet another new character in Viggo, who lost a gold tooth when he had an accident while cycling to his grandmother’s funeral. The tooth went down a drain, where it was gobbled by a salmon on the way to Greenland. Ten years later it would be discovered when the salmon was caught. With little transition, the action returns to the present with Sigrid, the literary grad student, who is working with Sofia Coppola in the film “Lost in Translation,” which features Charlotte, a woman walking around in an oversized man’s shirt, played by Scarlett Johansson. Within the next few pages, Kare, Linnea, Robert, Goran, Viggo, Sigrid, Kare’s ex Wanda, and Trine all have vignettes, independent of each other, in sometimes different times, places, and circumstances, which do not overlap.

  Paul de Man, mentioned several times throughout the novel, was a Belgian literary critic famed for including philosophy and the “epistemological difficulties inherent in any textual, literary, or critical activity."
  Paul de Man, mentioned several times throughout the novel, was a Belgian literary critic famed for including philosophy and the “epistemological difficulties inherent in any textual, literary, or critical activity.”

  What these vignettes do have in common is a tendency for the characters to be supremely self-conscious, self-absorbed, and even “cute,” as they try to connect their own thoughts to those of important people in literature. Dante’s Divine Comedy with its quotation on the Gates of Hell appears several times in vignettes by different characters, as do many references to Franz Kafka’s The Castle. Virgil’s Aeneid and Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway occupy space with poems by Olav H. Hauge and Richard Brautigan. One character gives a lecture on Don Quixote as the first novel ever written. Paul De Man, a Belgian literary critic famed for including philosophy and the “epistemological difficulties inherent in any textual, literary, or critical activity” are mentioned several times by various characters. “Absurdity carried to extremes even for absurdity” is discussed by some characters at the same time that other characters are intensely over-analyzing subjects like love, or entering dream worlds and experiencing “a sudden revelation as to the inner being of stars.” And one writer, particularly fond of George W. Bush, is determined to include scenes of him and his father on a golf course as part of a serious writing project.

  One character is determined to include George W.Bush and his father in a serious writing project.
  One character is determined to include George W.Bush and his father in a serious writing project.

  As can be seen in these examples, Gunnhild Oyehaug does not lack for imagination, literary credentials, or intelligence. The book is great fun as often as it is annoying for its extreme self-consciousness. Ironies abound, even including what constitutes a cliché, as seen in the opening quotation of this review and some of the events and descriptions which follow. The never-ending and problematic love stories, all involving women between twelve and twenty years younger than their lovers (for reasons not even hinted at by the author) are strangely off kilter much of the time, though these “intellectual” characters take great delight in analyzing them to death. The academic and literary population and those who take them seriously are presented as serious characters here, and it was only when I assumed the novel to be “absurdity carried to extremes even for absurdity” that I was able to work my way through it to the end.

  Photos. The author’s photo appears on https://alchetron.com/

  Hotel Norge in Bergen, Norway, where Kare is holding forth about literature to a group of “suits” in the early pages of the novel. https://www.agoda.com

  Sofia Coppola, author of the Best Original Screenplay for LOST IN TRANSLATION in 2003. (Photo by Ian Gavan/Getty Images) http://www.hungertv.com

  Paul de Man, mentioned several times by several characters throughout the novel, was a Belgian literary critic famed for including philosophy and the “epistemological difficulties inherent in any textual, literary, or critical activity.” https://thecharnelhouse.org

  One character is determined to include George W.Bush and his father in a serious writing project. https://www.history.com/

• Complete Review
  http://www.complete-review.com/reviews/norge/oyehaugg.htm
  Word count: 663

  The complete review's Review:

  Wait, Blink's omniscient narrator is not a distant camera lens describing the scenes but rather up-close and very personal; writing in the first person plural, that narrator's 'we' inevitably also suggesting the reader is a closer part of it. Both playfully text-aware -- a riff on quoting a poem includes an explanation about the annoyance of obtaining (legal, copyright) permissions to do so -- and zooming from one intimate view of a character to the next, it is an appealing overview-voice. It's a lot to overview however: in its fairly short chapters, Wait, Blink sweeps both across a large cast of characters as well as quite a bit of time in looking back as well as describing the more current.
  The novel is divided into three main sections -- 'Mornings', 'Middays', and the amalgam 'Dinnertimes / Evenings / Mornings / Middays / Afternoons' -- as well as a postscript in the form of 'Final Comments' (which at first appears to merely be an attributions-list, but is in fact something more). Within each, dozens of chapters shift between numerous (and variously overlapping) characters, often coupling up (though also at various stages of de-coupling). Literature figures prominently -- and several of the characters are or have studied literature (and one keeps a picture of Paul de Man on her wall) --, while specific films -- Sofia Coppola's Lost in Translation and Quentin Tarantino's Kill Bill: Vol. 2 -- are the most significant cultural and personal touchstones for some of the characters.
  Wait, Blink is a sort of relationship(s) novel, following several characters as they seek out or chance upon an other, or try to figure out the nature of their relationships: "Oh, why can't I just love you" one character thinks while traveling with a boyfriend who seems perfect -- except he isn't perfect for her. Age differences crop up repeatedly -- and Øyehaug repeatedly, even insistently, reminds readers of various characters' ages -- with twenty-three-year-old Sigrid drawn to the writer, Kåre, who is twenty years her senior; producer Robert, at fifty-one, so enamored of film director Linnea (27) that he can't bear to break the news to her that he hasn't found the money for her film; and university student Viggo, sharing a moment with twelve-year-old Elida at his grandmother's funeral (a memory that lingers, even as they only find each other again when Elida is a more appropriate age).
  Wait, Blink veers along between these (and more) characters, in detailed scenes that focus on the rapid shifts in feeling and reaction as life -- and the other -- unfolds in front of them; there's an effective element of slow-motion to many of the scenes, as Øyehaug doesn't just throw dialogue back and forth but has conversation and feeling unfold. There's an almost fairy-tale romance to some of the story-lines -- Viggo lost a gold tooth on his way to his grandmother's funeral, and year's later it finds its way to Elida, who keeps it as a talisman -- as well as more visceral scenes from life (such as nursing mother Trine's milking issues).
  Among the times the title words come up is in the summary sentence: "Wait, blink, survive" -- not quite the mantra of the characters, with their often uncertain struggles, but summing up much of the action (as much of life of course also consists of forms of inaction, a puttering on).
  The intriguing narrative voice, with an enjoyable playful side to it and its penetrating interiority, is strong enough to sustain interest in Wait, Blink, and the different storylines are quite well dosed out and kept up; if some of the (inter)action and occurences are unlikely, the novel nevertheless feels 'real', a convincing -- if very busy -- set of character- and relationship-portraits. The subtitle -- promising: A Perfect Picture of Inner Life -- sets the bar rather too high, but there are fine glimpses of several inner lives here.

• Washington Independent
  http://www.washingtonindependentreviewofbooks.com/index.php/bookreview/wait-blink-a-novel
  Word count: 923

  Wait, Blink: A Novel
  By Gunnhild Øyehaug; translated by Kari Dickson Farrar, Straus and Giroux 288 pp.
  Reviewed by Karen Tucker
  June 1, 2018
  A tender, funny puzzle of a tale examining the life, such as it is, of a young literature student

  Early in Gunnhild Øyehaug's novel Wait, Blink, her character Sigrid observes that if she were to make a movie, “It would be exclusively about a girl who sat in her room, and about what happened to her there, what she thought about, and how she went over to the skylight and looked out at the twin spires of Saint Mary's church, and longed for something greater than life itself…”

  Wisely, Øyehaug refuses to let Sigrid have her way in this narrative. Instead, she bundles her protagonist up in armor of mismatched green woolens and scoots her out of the house to a nearby lookout point. This is, of course, where all “desperately sad” 23-year-old literature students end up when they fear they're fated to “wander the earth all alone.”

  It would be embarrassing if it weren't so tender and, yes, funny: Picture dear Sigrid clinging to a flimsy iron railing, eyes closed, recalling lines from Dante's The Divine Comedy (“through me you pass into eternal pain,” no less!).

  But it isn't until we're edging toward writing off altogether this unhappy, quixotic creature that Øyehaug stages a nearly impossible trick of coincidence and reels us back in. From this point on, we're seduced into Sigrid's world –– idealism and romance and terrible poetry and all –– so that when reality coldly presents itself at the end of the novel, we're surprised to find ourselves longing to remain in her sad, ridiculous dream.

  Subtitled “A Perfect Picture of Inner Life,” the novel doesn't just bewitch readers into Sigrid's interiority. 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.

  There is Linnea, a 27-year-old filmmaker who, in an echo of the 1957 movie “An Affair to Remember,” fantasizes about reuniting with an old flame on a scheduled date in the future. In Øyehaug's version, however, it's not the Empire State Building where they plan to rendezvous, but at a local museum's Egyptian collection, where two preserved mummies lie under glass.

  There is Viggo, who loses a gold crown in a bicycle accident as he hurries to his grandmother's funeral. When the tooth falls into a gutter and makes its way out to sea, it's swallowed by a salmon, where it nests in its belly for 10 long years, until at last fish and tooth are caught by a teenage girl on the very day she is reading The Divine Comedy.

  And then we have Trine, a new mother and a performance artist who has grown sick of performing, and who is bored with “her drastic and sarcastic ways of flaunting her sexuality.” One night, when she's scheduled for a masturbation performance with a packet of figs, she discovers she needs to pump her breasts or risk turning her show into pornography. After a disheartening struggle with a store-bought pump, Trine calls the art gallery's curator from the bathroom and tells him to bring the audience to her toilet stall, informing him that her performance will now be held there.

  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.

  Earlier, another move appears to interrogate Sigrid's identity. Here she is gazing into the dim light of her computer screen:

  “She never manages to get out of her head, does she? Oh God. She shakes her head. Shakes, shakes, shakes…She looks at the cursor that's blinking. She identifies with the cursor. She identifies with the cursor! Waiting, blinking, and without any real existence in the world, just on and off between blink and blink. Is this her light in the world?”

  If Øyehaug is acknowledging that Sigrid the character is being written before us, is being conjured both as we read her and as she reads herself –– is that inherently more artificial than the realism we as readers have come to expect from contemporary literary fiction, or is it somehow more real? Øyehaug never presents an answer to this puzzle, or any puzzle really. In Wait, Blink, it's the wonderfully confounding riddles we happen upon that become the draw.

  By the time we discover who these narrators are, we already feel a peculiar sense of intimacy with them, perhaps because of Øyehaug's savvy deployment of that uncanny “we” pronoun, or perhaps because, as with any skillful storyteller, readers develop a kinship with them, despite never having met. Even so, there's a shivery thrill when the discovery is made that these haunting narrators truly are familiar –– though not in the way one might expect.

  Karen Tucker's fiction can be found in the Missouri Review, EPOCH, Tin House Online, and elsewhere. Currently, she's pursuing a Ph.D. in creative writing at Florida State University.

• World Literature Today Online
  https://www.worldliteraturetoday.org/2018/july/wait-blink-perfect-picture-inner-life-gunnhild-oyehaug
  Word count: 509

  QUOTE:
  Wait, Blink is a witty and cerebral braid of events both real and fictional—driven by self-talk, undergirded by literary criticism, and sprinkled with factoids.

  Wait, Blink: A Perfect Picture of Inner Life by Gunnhild Øyehaug
  FICTION
  Author: Gunnhild Øyehaug
  Translator: Kari Dickson
  The cover to Wait, Blink: A Perfect Picture of Inner Life by Gunnhild ØyehaugNew York. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. 2018. 256 pages.

  One January morning, three young women in different Scandinavian cities wake up, and Gunnhild Øyehaug starts examining their inner lives. A 2008 Norwegian publication, Wait, Blink is Øyehaug’s first novel in English (and the basis for a 2015 Norwegian movie, Women in Oversized Men’s Shirts). Translator Kari Dickson also did Øyehaug’s 2004 book, Knots, a short-story collection that appeared in English last year.

  In Wait, Blink, Øyehaug uses oversized men’s shirts as a metaphor to ponder her female trio’s vulnerability. This innovative metafiction explores the creative and romantic lives of Sigrid (literature student and aspiring writer in Bergen), Linnea (would-be film director in Copenhagen), and Trine (performance artist in Oslo). Sigrid has a crush on Magnus (her boss who has a girlfriend) but then falls for a book jacket photo of an author named Kåre, who’s just broken up with Wanda (or thinks he has). Then he meets Sigrid. Linnea still misses married Göran—unaware that her producer, Robert, thinks she’s sublime. Trine wants to avenge Knut, her baby’s father who left. Then there’s the fishmonger’s teenage daughter, Elida, who pines for the older Viggo.

  In an ideal world, people would say what they think. Since they don’t, Øyehaug shares characters’ thoughts as stories advance, loosely intersecting. Interior psychological monologues play as if a neuroscientist exploring the conscious mind had reset a functional fMRI to fictional.

  Øyehaug rotates seamlessly from Viggo making espresso to Sigrid and Kåre eating onion soup at a café. She probes each woman’s artistic medium, looks at motherhood, considers beginnings and endings of relationships. Characters read Dante’s Divine Comedy and Cervantes’s Don Quixote as Øyehaug pursues the theme of one-sided love—employing Beatrice and Dulcinea as “narrators and guides.” A golfing photo of father-son duo George and George W. Bush keeps popping up. We study a seabed off Greenland. Sofia Coppola meanders around. Fulgurites form when lightning strikes sand. Øyehaug dissects dreams, café etiquette, and PTSD. The novel nods to Balzac’s La Comédie humaine and Saroyan’s The Human Comedy, while suggesting the style of Dag Solstad. Yet the key may be in Øyehaug’s epigraph by Daniil Kharms, who also experimented with storytelling and saw a world within each self.

  Wait, Blink is a witty and cerebral braid of events both real and fictional—driven by self-talk, undergirded by literary criticism, and sprinkled with factoids.

  Or as the subtitle foreshadows: “a perfect picture of inner life.”

  Lanie Tankard
  Austin, Texas

• ZYZZYVA
  http://www.zyzzyva.org/2018/05/28/an-inner-life-exposed-wait-blink-by-gunnhild-oyehaug/
  Word count: 668

  QUOTE:
  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.

  An Inner Life Exposed: ‘Wait, Blink’ by Gunnhild Øyehaug
  BY INGRID VEGA
  POSTED ON MAY 28, 2018
  Wait, BlinkA 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 (translated by Kari Dickinson; 288 pages; FSG), I frequently found myself electrified. Page after page of passages artfully dissect our most subliminal mental processes. Utilizing the character of Sigrid and her sense of detachment in front of the computer screen, the author makes a fluid allusion to the novel’s subtitle: “She identifies with the cursor! Waiting, blinking, and without any real existence in the world, just on and off between blink and blink. Is this her light in the world?” Øyehaug’s insight echoes what author and psychologist Maria Konnikova said about fiction writers: “Their understanding of the human mind is so far beyond where we’ve been able to get with psychology as a science.”

  The novel is Øyehaug’s first to be published in English. Translator Kari Dickinson’s discerning work remarkably captures the unique beauty of the novel’s syntax, powerfully relating a story so vivid it’s little surprise it made its way to the big screen. (It was adapted into the 2010 Norwegian film Women in Oversized Men’s Shirts, its title a reference to Sigrid’s feminist antipathy toward wearing a male partner’s shirt.) The strength of Øyehaug’s prose is admirably unswerving; the evocative opening paragraph gives readers a taste of what’s to come:

  “Here we see Sigrid. It’s nine o’clock in the morning, it’s January, and the 2008 January light that fills the room is sharp, yet reliably a color temperature of 5600 kelvins, which is the normal color temperature for daylight, and is the color temperature of bulbs in those large spotlights that are sometimes used in films to simulate daylight in a room.”

  The precision of the prose is contrasted by a plot full of variables. The novel threads together the lives of several different individuals who have fleeting connections to one another, incorporating scattered cinematic and literary parallels as it does so, analyzing their interior relationships through the lens of movies such as Kill Bill and Lost in Translation, as well as works of literature such as Dante’s Inferno. Sigrid is a literature student at the University of Bergen and is often “falling into a kind of trance which meant that she’d forgotten she was still part of the world’s everyday dance.” Consequently, she tends to develop attachments with nature rather people.

  That is, until she meets Kåre Tryle, twenty years her senior and with whom she develops a complex romance. Kåre’s ex-girlfriend, Wanda, feels her relationship with Kåre mirrors Uma Thurman’s vengeful quest in Kill Bill: “the fact that it was a possibility, now demonstrating on film, that someone could hurt someone else as much as Bill hurt the Bride.” And to the south of Bergen, in Denmark, is Linnea, a director scouting locations for a film that will never be produced. She is “small and slight, and often walks with her head down, as though she were a small bell-like flower who wanted to keep things to herself.”

  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.

  THIS ENTRY WAS POSTED IN BOOK REVIEWS AND TAGGED BLINK, BOOK REVIEW, FICTION, GUNNHILD ØYEHAUG, INGRID VEGA, KARI DICKINSON, KILL BILL, LITERATURE, NORWAY, NORWEGIAN LITERATURE, NOVEL, WAIT. BOOKMARK THE PERMALINK.

• BOMB
  https://bombmagazine.org/articles/gunnhild-%C3%B8yehaugs-wait-blink/
  Word count: 1075

  QUOTE:
  Wait, Blink is a novel of teeming originality that will rewire your brain and gleefully eclipse whole libraries of lesser fiction.

  Gunnhild Øyehaug’s Wait, Blink by Ryan Chapman
  Part of the Editor's Choice series.

  BOMB 144
  Summer 2018
  144 Cover
  Interview
  Tauba Auerbach and Sam Hillmer by
  Chris Martin and Cy Gavin
  Amy Jenkins by David Shapiro
  John Akomfrah by Shezad Dawood
  Florian Meisenberg by Peter Rostovsky
  Simone Forti by Tashi Wada​
  Ottessa Moshfegh by Benjamin Nugent
  Anna Moschovakis by Jennifer Kabat
  Essay
  The Haunting of Reza Abdoh by
  Marc Arthur
  First Proof
  The Trees of Sawtooth Park by
  Ben Marcus
  Yesterday’s Papers, an excerpt from Poso Wells by Gabriela Alemán
  Stories from The Conservation of Mass by Ronaldo V. Wilson
  Three Poems from Heck Land: The Resorted Text by Annelyse Gelman
  My Feeling’s Pyramidal by Julian Talamantez Brolaski
  My Favorite Regular by Devon Marinac
  Portfolio: Tuning by Torkwase Dyson
  Tilden by Geoffrey G. O’Brien
  Editor's Choice
  Otobong Nkanga’s To Dig a Hole That Collapses Again by
  Jason Foumberg
  The Films of Emile de Antonio by Michael Blair
  Gunnhild Øyehaug’s Wait, Blink by Ryan Chapman
  Arturo Ruiz del Pozo’s Composiciones Nativas and Miguel Flores’s Primitivo by Renato Gómez
  Roque Larraquy’s Comemadre by J.W. McCormack
  Sesshu Foster’s City of the Future by Ammiel Alcalay
  Shezad Dawood’s Kalimpong by Sabine Russ
  Journal
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  End Page
  Variation on 1.00056 by Paul Chan

  Jun 27, 2018
  Review
  Literature

  #144
  ISSUE

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  Wait Blink
  What kind of novel would you write if you had never read a novel before? Would it have the mounting tension of a campfire tale? The breathless cadence of fresh gossip shared with a best friend? If you’re Norwegian writer Gunnhild Øyehaug, you unspool 50,000 words with the inventiveness of Scheherazade and the guilelessness of a Red Bull–fueled, hyperarticulate ten-year-old. This is Wait, Blink.

  I’m not suggesting Øyehaug has never read a novel. But her sheer originality appears to have come from nowhere and everywhere, as if she were a scientist adding a new element to the periodic table. If forced to cite contemporaries, there’s an affinity with the narrators of Sheila Heti’s novels and Miranda July’s stories, the type of educated creatives who can correctly pronounce Walter Benjamin’s surname. The orbiting cinematic eye of Wait, Blink—translated by Kari Dickson—recalls the opening section of Don DeLillo’s Underworld taken to comic extreme. Where DeLillo’s prose races between his characters with typical grace, Øyehaug employs an excitable, explicit tone. One chapter opens, “The kung fu master’s spartan room reminds us of Viggo once again, and our wish that he could go to China to be trained in kung fu. Where is he now? We can’t see him anywhere! We look all over his home village, but can’t find him. We randomly pick out Bergen too, but don’t find him there either… We look through all the streets in Oslo, but no Viggo at Oslo S train station, no Viggo on Dronningens Gate, no Viggo on Haxthausens Gate, and in the beautiful light at Slottsparken: no Viggo…”

  Viggo is one of a dozen or so characters passing the narrative baton seemingly at random. There’s also Sigrid, a young freelance writer; Linnea, a filmmaker scouting locations in Copenhagen; Robert, her lovelorn producer; Kåre, a lachrymose fortysomething writer; Wanda, his musician ex-girlfriend; Trine, a performance artist; and Elida, a graduate student fated to intersect with Viggo—one of many such connections. Øyehaug frequently nudges us in the ribs with her facile coincidences; at one point Elida is “reading Dante’s Divine Comedy (it’s the absolute truth! she is the third person in this book to read Dante’s Divine Comedy!)” The novel shakes us from our habit of reading novels qua novels, short-circuiting any distancing analysis. While we’re looking at the chess pieces, attempting to discern the strategy, Øyehaug points out that the board forms a smiley face. And who doesn’t love smiley faces?

  The sunniness should not be mistaken for naïveté. Øyehaug’s achievement is in combining autofiction—its kitchen-sink absorption of politics, media, and the noise of the world—with a comic, let’s-put-on-a-show method of close indirect style. Like most autofiction, Wait, Blink is about cogitation and the auto-reflexiveness of modern thought. These characters cogitate epically, often looking to art as a moral guide—and here, Øyehaug exhibits easy mastery of the technical aspects of fiction. To cite one example, in an early chapter Sigrid studies Lost in Translation for an article about filmic depictions of women in sleepwear, and the antifeminist coding of the adult female dressed solely in a man’s oversized pajama shirt. This is reified midway through the novel in a bedroom scene with Kåre (two decades Sigrid’s senior), who asks her to wear his pajama top. We’re primed to recognize this simple gesture as an infantilizing sartorial request. It emphasizes the May-December nature of their relationship, and in Sigrid’s recognition of the trope, which Kåre’s too dense to notice, the younger woman regretfully gains the intellectual upper hand—a pyrrhic victory that ultimately catalyzes the couple’s breakup.

  The characters’ interconnecting relationships are beside the point, as are the traditional signposts of plot and story. This is a novel with the subtitle, “a perfect picture of inner life,” and Øyehaug’s ambition to render modern thought on the page is for the most part successful. There is a winking, extratextual coda with shades of Don Quixote that undermines more than it strengthens. It’s a small misstep, and one easily forgiven. Wait, Blink is a novel of teeming originality that will rewire your brain and gleefully eclipse whole libraries of lesser fiction.

  Ryan Chapman is the author of the forthcoming novel Riots I Have Known (Simon & Schuster, 2019) and the illustrated book Conversation Sparks (Chronicle, 2015).

  novels fiction norwegian literature

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