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3.5 

Love

By Hanne Ørstavik & Martin Aitken
Love by Hanne Ørstavik & Martin Aitken digital book - Fable

Publisher Description

WINNER OF THE 2019 PEN TRANSLATION PRIZE

FINALIST FOR THE NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FOR TRANSLATED LITERATURE

A mother and son move to a village in northern Norway, each ensconced in their own world. Their distance has fatal consequences.


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

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47 Reviews

3.5
“I feel like I’ve just finished something quite brilliant. I can’t stop thinking about it, it’s totally under my skin. Told in the unmarked, alternating perspectives (sometimes changing every few sentences) of a single mother, Vibeke, and her son, Jon, the day and night before his ninth birthday. It’s winter and extremely cold in this small town, and we follow along as Vibeke and Jon meet people; a little girl iceskating and her family, a man who works at the carnival on it’s last night in the town, a fortune teller and more. Jon loves his mother and is anticipating the surprise she might present him with tomorrow. This was such a tense, upsetting story. It’s told in simple but effective sentences and evokes a sense of dread and grief out of the palpable landscape. I found it easy to follow despite the fluid point of views and I was left staring at the last page, somewhat ambiguous, and the implications of the last line. It’s so short I don’t want to say more but it seems to me that this was a special novel and a terrific translation. Add this to your winter tbr if you love a quiet and unsettling novella. Hanne Ørstavik has a talent for turning the ordinary into something beautiful and eerie, at once.”

About Hanne Ørstavik

With the publication of the novel CUT in 1994, Hanne Ørstavik (b. 1969) embarked on a career that would make her one of the most remarkable and admired authors in Norwegian contemporary literature. Her literary breakthrough came three years later with the publication of LOVE (Kjærlighet), which in 2006 was voted the 6th best Norwegian book of the last 25 years in a prestigious contest in Dagbladet. Since then the author has written several acclaimed and much discussed novels and received a host of literary prizes.

About the Translator: Martin Aitken is the acclaimed translator of numerous novels from Danish and Norwegian, including works by Karl Ove Knausgaard, Peter Høeg, Jussi Adler-Olsen, and Pia Juul, and his translations of short stories and poetry have appeared in many literary journals and magazines. In 2012 he was awarded the American-Scandinavian Foundation's Nadia Christensen Translation Prize.

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