Love

Series: Archipelago Books
ISBN: 9780914671947
Pages: 180
Publication Date: February 13, 2018

Building up to a shattering culmination...that stays with the reader long after closing the book, Love is as haunting as it is moving, stunningly presented in Martin Aitken’s discerning translation. Although originally published in Norway more than 20 years ago, the novel retains a timeless brilliance through its portrayal of missed connections and failures to communicate beyond surface levels.
—D.R. Hansen, 3:AM Magazine

Ørstavik brings us remarkably close to both her characters, shifting effortlessly between them in stark, lucid prose ... Ørstavik’s twinned themes of love and neglect manifest on every page. Her style, brilliantly translated by Martin Aitken, is quiet and mesmeric, aligning us with divorcee Vibeke and, particularly, with her son Jon, on the eve of his ninth birthday ... for all the potential dangers of this one night, the book’s achievement is that we come to the end of it seeing a wider picture.
—Sarah Gilmartin, The Irish Times

Ørstavik’s ingenious device is to toggle between their two consciousnesses from one paragraph to the next, so that their narratives run as though on parallel train tracks, never to meet, even as they lie cheek to cheek. Layers of unremarkable everyday intimacy and acres of emotional distance are compressed between the lines ... Ørstavik has found fertile territory here in which to dig into the raging solipsism of the inner life ... We are all sealed worlds, Ørstavik seems to suggest; it’s dark outside, and it’s dark inside too.
—Justine Jordan, The Guardian