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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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Love Reviews

3.5
“Randomly picked this up from the library display.. it was not for me lol. The presumed ending was expected but still so sad and I’m unfortunately unable to feel any empathy towards the mom”
“This thing is just soaked in foreboding. You know something awful is going to happen, but what? A very short read with a lot of depth. I love it when an author plays with language and perspective like this and those rapid shifts between Vibeke and Jon were disorienting in the best way. Ørstavik gets so much emotion across in such concise prose and imbues the whole story with palpable dread even though ostensibly we’re reading about very mundane activities.”

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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