National Book Award for Translated Literature
Love
A novel set over a few hours on the eve of a boy's birthday after a mother and son have moved to a small town in northern Norway. Though they seem bound by affection, Vibeke and Jon go out into separate nights, and the alternating viewpoints reveal loneliness and irreversible distance beside intimacy.
Work Information
As mother and child move separately through a freezing night, the novel quietly illuminates the absence inside love.
Hanne Orstavik's Love, translated from Norwegian by Martin Aitken, follows a mother and son shortly after they have moved to a new town. The mother is absorbed in her own desires, while the boy is caught up in expectations for his birthday. A library, a travelling carnival, cars, and snowy roads become the stages for a quiet suspense built from words and attention that fail to reach the person supposedly loved.
Review Summaries
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The spare, tense prose and the structure of missed perspectives between mother and child are often singled out. Because unease grows inside a restrained narration, the novel leaves a cold and lasting aftereffect.
Book Information
- Publisher
- Archipelago
- Published
- 2018-02-13
- Pages
- 180 pages
- Language
- 英語
- Size
- 14.78 x 0.89 x 17.7 cm
- ISBN-13
- 9780914671947
- ISBN-10
- 0914671944
- Price
- 3385 JPY
- Category
- 洋書/Literature & Fiction/Women's Fiction/Contemporary Women
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.
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.
Reviews
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This beautifully-designed book is small and very readable, again in every way. Excellent translation in that I never felt I was reading a translation. And the novel is absorbing and frightening though you don't know why until the end.
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Is it the way they do in Norway, letting a boy of eight (nine the day after) walking alone on the streets in the middle of the night?
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A child's longing for his mother's love, measures undertaken to fill the void in our hearts with possible encounters, thinking and overthinking to the extent where you're absent from the present, missing of understanding between people, lonliness and unreciprocated emotions, and a sense of unease underlying our decisions are what make this book extraordinary and is bound to leave a mark on your heart. Jon is turning 9 the next day and wants a cake and a train set while Vibeke, his mother wants to get new books from the library and find some permanent company. Love is their story as they wander around town, on their own, a single night making us imagine the worst of situations that they could fall prey to much like the characters themselves.
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This short 2007 novel, more of a novella actually, was first translated into English from the Norwegian in 2017. Having now read it, I cannot understand why on earth Norway's Dagbladet magazine would have said of this novel that its language is "rick in precision with no loss of simplicity." Nor can I see why anyone would suggest that one will find anything "substantial here," much less something that readers "would not wish to be without." Quite the contrary. This book is quite insubstantial and I'd have been much happier not having read it. The paragraphs careen from one character, the mother Vibeke, to her 9-year-old son Jon, often (although not always) without any paragraph break at all. The mother does not care at all for her son, so one wonders why the author would have called this novel "Love." There's no love whatsoever in these pages. This is an insubstantial mess of a book. The only positive thing I can say is that it was, thank goodness, short.
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24 hours in life of single mother and son told from both. Swedish ... good translation. Short but very powerful.