Love (2018, tr. Martin Aitken. Original: Kjærlighet, 1997), or the absence of it, unfolds on a single day in the lives of Vibeke and her eight-year old son, Jon. It’s winter, we are on the eve of Jon’s birthday, and he is wating for his mother to come home from work.

They have recently moved to a small town in the north of Norway, and Vibeke works as an arts and culture manager in the local community. She is a single mother and a voracious reader; she is lonely and aloof – and, more importantly, she does not fit in the stereotype of how a mother should be or what a she should feel.

Jon is lonely, too. He is constantly thinking about his mother, but they never really talk to each other. Even when they are together, their thoughts seem to be trapped in two uncommunicable islands: he is thinking of school, she is daydreaming about clothes, nail polish, books, love.

Jon imagines that Vibeke must be busy preparing everything for his birthday, but she seems to have completely forgotten about it. Vibeke comes home, takes a bath, and, believing Jon must be home somewhere, she goes out again to return some books to the library. On the other hand, thinking that his mother must be busy, Jon leaves the house to try to sell some raffle tickets to the neighbours.

We follow their separate but oddly interconnected journeys into the night, and the novel is told alternately from Vibeke’s and Jon’s points of view, switching back and forth between them – and, occasionally, it happens so seamlessly, that we feel as if we were following a long shot, and the camera were passing through loosely interconnected movie sets.

Wandering in their parallel journeys, Vibeke and Jon have various encounters with strangers in the night, and we have a vague sense that danger is lurking somewhere. Jon meets an old man, goes with him down to the guy’s cellar, and there is a chain hanging from the wall; in another scene, Jon starts talking to a girl, goes to her house, she then goes to bed, and her parents start to talk with him in a strange, vaguely erotic way; later, he gets into a car with a woman wearing a wig, and wonders whether she might be a man.

Meanwhile, Vibeke meets a stranger who works at a travelling funfair, and goes with him to his caravan. We have an uncanny feeling that there might be something menacing in what mother and son are doing, but we cannot know exactly what or why. Vibeke and Jon seem oblivious to any kind of danger. Maybe the danger is only in our minds…

As in her novella The Blue Room (2014, tr. Deborah Dawkin. Original: Like sant som jeg er virkelig, 1999), Hanne Ørstavik is brilliant at playing with our expectations and creating a strong sense of dread (while, at the same time, refusing to see the characters as monsters). And the fact the they can always turn out to be monsters but never really do only deepens our sense of dread.

The highlight of the novel for me was the way Ørstavik trapped her characters inside their loneliness; and then made their islands of isolation touch in unsuspected points that remained invisible to them. Vibeke and Jon are inside different cars, but they pass by one another without noticing. As the novel progresses, their different perspectives start to flow into and from one another in the space of a few paragraphs. One scene flows into another as if they were the same; the islands briefly touch, then flow away.

Mother and son are miles apart, and only the way Ørstavik structured the narrative makes them seem closer and connected – which only throws us more deeply into their shared bubbles of loneliness. The book ends in waiting, on a similar point where it had started, but on a bleaker note. And there is no better way of writing a novel about love than to centre it on the absence of love. “He stretches out on his tummy, settling into sleep. Inside his head everything is dark and big and still. He’ll wait for her here.“

While mother and son share close moments of intimacy (Vibeke walks naked around the house, for instance), there is this disquieting disconnect between them – as if their intimacy were only a glass jar: it’s transparent, pure and exact, we can see everything inside, but the jar is forever empty.

I loved this sad, haunting short novel about a boy and his mother, who live together in a small Norway town, but whose lives rarely connect in spite of the boy’s longing for his mother’s attention. It’s a cold, winter’s night, the eve of Jon’s ninth birthday. As he wanders about outside he dreams of his mother at home baking him a cake. His mother, meanwhile, has pretty much forgotten Jon as she sets out to enjoy herself and links up with a stranger who’s come to town with a travelling carnival. The narrative switches back and forth between mother and son in a spare, low-key prose that feels all the more stark as the foreboding tension mounts. A short, suspenseful, tragic tale, which I found compelling and very moving.

A beautiful book though the direction is difficult to describe. The two main characters are Jon, a young boy looking forward to his birthday and his mother Vibeke who is an avid reader and just as avid dreamer. They have moved recently and are new in the village. While Jon dreams of a toy train for his birthday, Vibeke smiles at imagined and past love encounters. They both visit a fun fair where Jon is occupied with a girl a little older than him and Vibeke meets a man. There, their journeys into the night diverge. I was particularly interested in Vibeke’s thoughts; she had an interesting take on men. It is a little bit of an abrupt ending but I think the length is right.

Excerpt (see link): Love is more about simmering dread as opposed to tangible fear, but what’s interesting is that it is not the characters who are afraid: the dread in this novel is strictly reader-based. Ørstavik implants it in us by putting her characters in ambiguous but potentially dangerous situations and suspending us there, making us feel the moment, moment by moment, so that it is impossible to escape the sense that something’s not right, something could go terribly wrong.

Love is a distant and melancholic novel of a world that is hard to understand. The 8 year old's anxiety lends an air of menace to everything and his mother's fantasy world induced an air of pure loneliness.

I decided to read this book because I knew it took place in winter and while we still have snow on the ground here in New England I figured I better get to it. Spring might actually arrive by May!

This is such a strange book. It focuses on a mother & son, Vibeke and Jon over the course of one evening. They have just recently moved to a small northern town in Norway. Jon adores his mother and Vibeke seems a bit distant and cold when it comes to her son. She wants to spend her time reading, shopping, working, fantasizing of men, and making sure she always looks beautiful. She doesn't really think Jon and his stories make any sense and she'd rather he just go play by himself and not bother her. Jon's 9th birthday is tomorrow and he dreams of a brand new train set and his mother to bake him a cake. Vibeke doesn't even remember it's his birthday.

Jon has tickets to sell for his Sports Club and leaves the house unbeknownst to Vibeke. Vibeke meanwhile has decided to get herself all prettied up to head to the library. As she leaves the house she calls out to Jon not waiting for a response and not realizing he isn't even in the house.

We then follow both Vibeke and Jon as they make their way through the night and the strangers they encounter. Both of them are overly trusting. An atmosphere of dread prevails through out the entire novel.

I'm not so sure what to make of the ending. Which I think was intentional on Ørstavik's part. It allows the reader to draw their own conclusion. Sadly, what I took away from it was truly heartbreaking. I want nothing more than to give my son the biggest hug right now.

Just to note, the way the story is presented can be confusing at first. One paragraph to the next we're either inside Vibeke or Jon's head without anything to distinguish the change which took me a bit to get used to.

Thank you to NetGalley for providing me with a digital ARC in exchange for my honest review.

This made for a very unsettling read full of suspense. I wasn't sure what to expect when I started but I found the split narrative interesting and the language sparse but engaging. This is the first book I have read by this author and I will probably search more out in future to compare her style. I wouldn't say the characters are particularly likeable but I wanted to know what happened even so. I have been thinking of how to review this for the past few days and will settle on 3 stars simply because I am unsure if I really enjoyed it for its story or just found it interesting.

I look forward to seeing other reviews on this one.

An evocative and moving gem, Love is a novella, but it packs a punch that leaves a bruise that takes a long time to fade. With its spare, pared-down prose and constant sense of brooding unease, this is literary Norwegian noir with all the snow and isolation, but without the crime. Written in 1997 by prize-winning author Hanne Orstavik, it’s now accessible to English readers for the first times in this fine translation by Martin Aitken from Archipelago Books (from mid Feb, 2018)
Vibeke and her eight year old son, Jon have recently moved to a small village in Norway to make a new start. She hopes he’ll make friends and that she’ll find a boyfriend. Everywhere is covered in snow, it’s Jon’s birthday tomorrow but his mother would rather spend her free time reading:
a good book, a big thick one of the kind that leave an impression stronger and realer than life itself.
They spend the evening separately: Jon goes to sell raffle tickets to his neighbour while Vibeke goes to the library, and their stories seamlessly alternate and echo each other. Jon loves his mother and is excited about his birthday. Vibeke fantasises and builds up the perfect love affair from one meeting with a stranger:
I can wait. I’ll sheathe us both in speechless intimacy, until we’re ready for the abruptness of words.
Orstavik tantalises the reader by setting up the kinds of scenarios you’d expect in a horror movie, then skilfully sidesteps at the last minute: Will Jon go down to the cellar with the old man? Will Vibeke go back to a stranger’s caravan? Does Jon get into a stranger’s car? Does Vibeke go with the man to an isolated bar? As each possible decision is taken and played out, the atmosphere becomes darker. But the ending still comes as a complete shock. The reader has been anticipating one or both will come to a sticky end, but ultimately it is a misunderstanding, not an act of violence, that leads to tragedy.
Love explores modern family life, loneliness and what we expect from love, in all its forms. A beautiful, moving story that never let’s the reader off the hook.

This short novel concerns a single mother, Vibeke, and her nine year old son, Jon, who move to a new area. It's told in alternating voices consisting of a few paragraphs which works very successfully in giving the reader a constant view of what is happening to both parties at the same time. It also serves to ratchet up the tension and foreboding. The ending came as a shock to me but upon reflection suits the narrative.

Full text of my Goodreads review (https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/2271435784?book_show_action=false&from_review_page=1):

Verbeke, a single mom, and Jon, her eight-year-old, have recently moved to a new town in Norway, and are feeling their way into new lives. In luscious, often hypnotic prose—the translation by Martin Aitken is superb—Hanne Ørstavik narrates the events of the day before Jon‘s ninth birthday: a thrilling, heart-rending tale of trust, neglect and heartbreak.

Verbeke and Jon are like two ships passing in the night. She is in her own little world most of the time, barely aware of her son’s presence except to take care of his basic needs. She is preoccupied by her new job, finding a man, finding clothes that fit sexily. When she thinks her son is home, he’s usually out; when she thinks he’s out, he’s usually not; his sense of her whereabouts is just as off.

They each go off into that night; they each meet new people. The reader is on the edge of her seat, feeling a vague sense of dread: is this or that person a threat, or not? Where is—what is—the danger that permeates this fateful night in the lives of Verbeke and Jon? The echoes reverberating between their points of view skew the unease into a rich, ominous blur.

<i> I received this book from NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.</i>

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I also posted an abridged version of the above review on Litsy.

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My BookTube video review is here: https://youtu.be/xPownS5MuQo

A strangely disturbing and ominous book with a tension that develops palpably as the story progresses,this was difficult to put down. Taking place over the course of one snowy night, we follow young Jon on the eve of his ninth birthday, and his mother Vibeke as they both set out on their own strange and possibly dangerous adventures.
Though short , the book packs a lot of tension, even into the most mundane events, and the somewhat open ending left me fearing the worst. Beautiful writing and deft characterization, even with the minimal details provided, make the book stand out. The loneliness and isolation of the setting is a perfect reflection of the isolation of mother and son who despite sharing a home seem to live in completely different worlds.

Haunting, sinister and utterly lyrical. Having never read anything by Ørstavik before, I fell in love with her eerie writing style. The book is really short, merely 180 pages long, and while it can be devoured in a few hours, the reader must pay close attention to the story since the perspectives of the mother and the son alternate rapidly.

I found the relationship between Vibeke and Jon very interesting, but their distance and naivete, combined with the ominous atmosphere Ørstavik's writing created, prepared me for the worse. Although not excellent, this novella was extremely well-written (and well translated) and very well-worth the read, especially if you attempt to do so on a cold wintry night.

Hanne Orstavik is a well known, prize winning Norwegian author and I thought this book would fit the bill when I was looking for something different to read. What I found was a hauntingly sad story of a single mother, Vibeke, and her eight year old son, Jon and the separate lives they live together. It’s appropriately dark and cold as the story takes place on a cold, dark night in a small village in Norway. The structure or rather lack of - what Jon is thinking and doing interspersed with paragraphs of what his mother Vibeke is thinking and doing and their respective conversations with the people they are with, is one you have to pay attention to. This makes for such an introspective and intimate book. It’s a short book, just 180 pages but it took me longer than I thought to read because I was almost afraid to know what was going happen as both mother and son go out into the night. Each of them meeting with strangers that had me scared for and questioning both of them. I did not connect with Vibke at all except that she is a big reader. Other than that I didn’t like her at all. Jon is only eight and all I could feel for him was heartbreak. Sometimes when I read a translation, I wonder if something gets missed, that nuance, that idiom that doesn’t have a true equivalent. It’s thought provoking in many ways and just so full of loneliness, it gave me pause. Several people have rated this highly but I have to admit that I didn’t love it.


I received an advanced copy of this book from Archipelago through NetGalley.

"She gets through three books a week, often four or five. She wishes she could read all the time, sitting in bed with the duvet pulled up, with coffee, lots of cigarettes, and a warm nightdress on."

This was a short and evocative read; the language is spare but manages to to really conjure up the feeling of the cold night it covers. The difference between Vibeke's assigned meaning to Tom's actions and the reader's was beautifully done.

While it was beautiful in it's sadness it was also short - for my personal taste, running a little too much to the bleak side. Bleak usually only works for me when it's either cut with an undercurrent of longer term hope, or when it's in a longer work with other, brighter threads running through.

Wow! Neither mother nor son is particularly likeable, but both are pitiable. The conclusion was so much bleaker than I could ever have expected. I found myself wondering if Vibeka or Jon had ever seen a psychiatrist. And what prompted them to leave their former home? Ultimately, though, neither question matters. Such a sad, beautiful, poignant little book.

After reading “Love” in one sitting in the middle of the night - (180 pages: Kindle for me), already had slept from about 7pm to 1am- I stayed awake under the covers of my bed thinking about this novel for a good hour before falling back to sleep for another few hours.

This is my first read by author Scandinavian author Hanne Orstavik. Hopefully not my last! What I especially liked was all my own thinking intertwined throughout and then after I finished reading “Love”. I was examining this story from many points of views while being completely captivated by the content presented.

The story itself takes place during the middle of the night - just as my reading it was.
It’s a quiet meditative type of read. A few times my own imagination raced ahead and got the better of me. There was one scene where I was scared - really scared — and it was my imagination... but then I had a hard time shaking my fears of ‘what if’.

Jon is 8 years old. He will be 9 tomorrow. He and his mother, Vibeke, live in a small town in northern Norway. They are new to the town, having just recently moved in.
A traveling carnival has come to town. Vibeke was on her way to the library - but they were closed - and ends at the carnival.
Jon also leaves the house to sell lottery tickets for his sports club.
We follow both of them during the night as they take very different journeys.
We meet the people each of come into contact with.

Jon is sure his mother is at home baking a cake for his birthday....with high hopes in getting a train set the next day.

As a single mother, Vibeke hasn’t much money....yet she has a lot of attention on looking good - would like to buy a new outfit - “she deserves it, with the move and all”. During a dinner scene — before their separate journeys begin — we see the inside thoughts of Vibeke: she doesn’t think her son’s stories have a point and “Can’t you just go, she thinks to herself. Find something to do, play or something”.

What stood out for me ( without giving this small story away) - is how innocent - vulnerable- pure - a child’s love can be for their parent ....under any circumstances. Yet underneath the surface we feel so many emotions....the loneliness.... sadness...longing: desire to be bathed in love.

I’m very glad I chose to read this book ....I thought it was gorgeously written...with concise compact sentences. I also love the book cover - Lovely

Thank You Netgalley, Archipelago Publishing, and Hanne Orstavik

Winters are bitingly cold in northern Norway, with an average temperature of around -17 °C. Yet it is to a bleak little village in this region that Vibeke moves with her eight-year-old son, Jon, in order to make a fresh start. The story begins as the circus arrives, on the eve of his birthday.

Both mother and son are intense, cerebral individuals, who lose themselves in daydreams, and struggle to communicate their thoughts and feelings to others - she chain-smokes, he continually blinks. Even so, they are overly trusting of strangers and have oddly naïve personalities. The greatest void, however, is between the two of them, and they seem to view each other from opposite sides of a wide crevasse. There is love (adoration on his part), but it is ill-defined, unfocused.

“She gets through three books a week, often four or five. She wishes she could read all the time, sitting in bed with the duvet pulled up, with coffee, lots of cigarettes, and a warm nightdress on.”

Voted the sixth best Norwegian book of the last 25 years, Love, by Hanne Ørstavik (originally published as Kjærlighet in 1997), has been translated into English by Martin Aitken, and is due for release in February 2018. It is an existential novel, with narratives drifting back and forth between Vibeke and Jon, which all but merge when either one or both of them become anxious. As the story develops, Ørstavik skilfully effects a feeling of dread - an unpleasant, tense, vaguely sinister sensation of impending catastrophe pervades the icy air.

Has anything significant been lost in translation? I think there probably has, but as an inveterate unilingual English-speaker I simply cannot judge. Nevertheless, I am able to say with certainty that Love is an intelligent, compassionate, if melancholy tale, which demonstrates what can happen if we become too internalised and fail to be mindful of those we love most.

Whilst beautifully and skillfully written, this novella was not for me. I admire the author's skill at instantly creating a foreboding atmosphere and for creating empathy in the reader for the character of Jon, however I found the mother's character so loathsome that I could not continue reading.

Hmmm... This is a novella that throws out the maxim about including characters in fiction that other people can like. It mostly centres on a wishy-washy young mother, trying to find solace, companionship and so on in the eyes of a worker at a passing fairground concession, even though she knows he's moving on in the morning, and her son, a boy obsessed with torture on the brink of his ninth birthday. The novella jumps in very unconstructed and annoying manner between their individual narratives, and gets nowhere, meaning that while the ending is cold in one sense, it leaves you cold in the important, emotional sense. Yes it's moody, but with very little to enjoy here, there's also little point.