National Book Award for Translated Literature
Wait, Blink: A Perfect Picture of Inner Life
A Norwegian novel in which the stories of Sigrid, a literature student, Linnea, an aspiring film director, Trine, a performance artist, and others intersect around art and desire. Coincidence, quotation, and fantasy accumulate as the characters long to belong to someone or something while learning to live with their own unstable oddness.
Work Information
Love, art, and coincidence link together until the strangeness of ordinary life suddenly comes into view.
Gunnhild Oyehaug's Wait, Blink, translated by Kari Dickson and published in English by Farrar, Straus and Giroux, is a Norwegian novel of intersecting lives. A young literature student, people orbiting film production, and an artist uneasy with motherhood are linked through a narration full of quotation and digression. The book looks at the world's strangeness with humor and affirms the awkwardness of people seeking belonging and love.
Review Summaries
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The novel is valued for its playful structure and for expanding unexpected connections among its characters. Because lightness and anxiety, romance and regret operate at once, it is often read as eccentric yet intimate.
Book Information
- Publisher
- Farrar Straus & Giroux
- Published
- 2018-06-05
- Pages
- 277 pages
- Language
- 英語
- Size
- 13.67 x 2.67 x 19.58 cm
- ISBN-13
- 9780374285890
- ISBN-10
- 0374285896
- Price
- 6704 JPY
- Category
- 洋書/Literature & Fiction/Short Stories/Single Author
"Expansive, intimate, and filled to the brim with delight, Gunnhild Oyehaug's first novel is devoted to the unexpected connections between lonesome individuals, mundane rituals, jellyfish, death, oversized men's shirts, and a thousand other things too astonishing to spoil in this sentence. I truly loved this wide-eyed, all-embracing wonder of a book." Alexandra Kleeman, author of You Too Can Have a Body Like Mine Sigrid is a young literature student trying to find her voice as a writer when she falls in love with an older, established author, whose lifestyle soon overwhelms her values and once-clear vision. Trine has reluctantly become a mother and struggles to create as a performance artist. The aspiring movie director Linnea scouts locations in Copenhagen for a film she will never make. As these characters stories collide and intersect, they find that dealing with the pressures of their lives also means coming to grips with a world both frightening and joyously ridiculous. Wait, Blink combines wild associations, quotations, coincidences, and other peculiar details into a unique tale that is both humorous and profound. Full of the playfulness that drew acclaim for her story collection Knots , Gunnhild Øyehaugs Wait, Blink her first novel to be translated into Englishis a jolt of desire and fantasy, romance and regret: a fable about what it means to own up to the weirdness inside us all.
Gunnhild Øyehaug is an award-winning Norwegian poet, essayist, and fiction writer. Her story collection Knots was published by FSG in 2017, and Wait, Blink has been made into the acclaimed film Women in Oversized Mens Shirts. She has also worked as a coeditor of the literary journals Vagant and Kraftsentrum . Øyehaug lives in Bergen, where she teaches creative writing. Kari Dickson was born in Edinburgh, Scotland, and grew up bilingual. She has a BA in Scandinavian studies and an MA in translation. Before becoming a translator, she worked in theater in London and Oslo. She teaches in the Scandinavian department at the University of Edinburgh.
Reviews
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Good Food for Thought!
Great experience with JKBEST! Challenging reads, like this author's books, are a proven way to prevent Alzheimer's. This novel is a true source of inspiration that stimulates the mind!
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Boring
Did not keep my interest.