Published 7.11.17. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux: New York. Translated by Kari Dickson. 164 pages.

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Knots is Norwegian author Gunnhild Øyehaug’s first book to appear in English. Without saying anything (yet) about the book’s contents, let me observe that “Knots” is a rather nondescript title for a book. (You might say it’s as nondescript as Ties.) But Abe, it’s about the ties that bind us as human beings, the knots in which we find ourse—yibbidy-dibbidy, yeah that’s all fiction you’re talking about. You could write a short story collection about pirates (or hangmen) and call it Knots. I make this point not to be frivolous or pedantical (although it is fun) but rather to point out that the ambiguity of the title reflects that this an eclectic collection of stories, a series of experiments that push out of the mold of conventional fiction in a number of different directions; what defines these directions are the peculiar consciousnesses of each point-of-view character, and how Øyehaug changes the style of the narration to capture it.

The first story in the collection, “Nice and Mild,” is a good indicator of what we’re in for: a frenetic rush into the consciousness of an agoraphobic man as he tries to heroically navigate himself into IKEA to buy blinds for his son:

The doors to IKEA slide open, you go in. Try to focus. You’re in IKEA and head upstairs. You just have to concentrate on simple tasks, that you’re here to buy blinds, that you’re walking up the stairs.

This YOU stage of the narrator’s thoughts mirrors the beginning of the story: he repeats himself, retraces his own words, all in an effort to maintain thought control. As long as the narrator stays in the YOU mode, his thoughts are under control. But then he breaks into I thoughts, he stops repeating himself, his thoughts spin into an out-of-control run-on sentence:

I always lose any perception of depth when I’m wearing sunglasses, which makes things difficult on stairs, so I take them off and try to put them in the breast pocket of my denim jacket, but miss and they just kind of slide down the front of my jacket, shit [the shit is a streak of indirect thought inserted here to suggest stream-of-consciousness], I have to pay attention to what I’m doing, I look down at the breast pocket as my hand guides the sunglasses toward the pocket, then I trip, I trip on the stairs and fall in a very inelegant way just as two teenage girls pass me and giggle because I, an old man, have tripped and am lying sprawled our on the stairs.

It’s useful to note that this is not actually a stream-of-consciousness paragraph, strictly speaking. Rather, Øyehaug uses the run-on sentence, the shit moment, and the very minute narration of what the narrator sees (something like a close-up in film) to suggest, but not directly represent the narrator’s consciousness. In fact, it is only in the next section of the paragraph, where the narrator starts castigated himself, that we see some direct representation of his consciousness. Øyehaug breaks into and out of different modes of representing consciousness in this and the other stories in the collection, though she does it in large enough strokes that it doesn’t seem haphazard.

Øyehaug uses a similar blend of narration suggestive of consciousness to depict the plight of Geir, the point-of-view character in the diptych of two stories consisting of “Take Off, Landing,” and “Air,” when he is called upon to be a hero. Geir is a trapper getting some R & R at the pier in the big van out of which he sells “Eggs and Prawns.” The first story involving Geir has him laughing heartily at passing neighbors, carefree as he sees “oddball Asle” walk past down the pier carrying a large stone.

What was he going to do with the stone?* Jump? Geir had to laugh.

Note the asterisk here, which directs the reader down to a lengthy footnote where Asle’s entire backstory is related to the reader, a wild flight of fairy tale fancy in which Asle lives on a place called Syrup Hill, in consequence of which he comes home with his shoes covered in syrup, in consequence of which his mother harangues him, in consequence of which he hatches a plan to kill himself:

He went into the living room with the pieces of potato in his ears, looked out at the lights glittering in all the houses, there was a dull humming in his ears like when he dived underwater in summer, and as he stood looking out over the houses that lay shining like treasure on the seabed, he was suddenly struck by such a strong desire to be underwater that it brought tears to his eyes.

The contrast in tone is great between Geir’s world, carefree, having a casual chat with passersby, and the hellish (and rather random, but okay) syrup world of Asle. So when “Take Off, Landing” ends with Asle jumping off the pier—Geir hears a splash—it serves as an abrupt end, but one that serves to illustrate the alternate realities between these two people.

“Air” completes the story, but is largely comical, showing what happens as Geir fumbles towards trying to rescue Asle. Geir’s thought process is chaotic, containing strands of thought both related and tangential to the present situation, in that way approximating (lightly) Geir’s stream-of-consciousness.

Geir looked at the bar of chocolate in his hand, he dropped it as if it were burning, why on earth had he taken a bar of chocolate with him? He wanted to pick it up again, but then thought there was no time to lose, he had to do something, maybe he should even jump in (he really didn’t want to do that!), he bent down halfway toward the bar of chocolate, realized what he was doing, straightened up again. Aargh! Bent down again, straightened up again. No, he had to jump. He took a step out onto the quay, but then suddenly though that it would be best to take off his thermal overalls, so they wouldn’t fill with water and pull Geir to the bottom as well. If only his hands weren’t shaking so much!

In Knots, Øyehaug uses such experiments in representing consciousness to present short fiction of a decidedly different flavor than we are used to from the Land Up North: playful, post-modern, and experimental; or to borrow the adjectives of the front flap, “sensual,” “weird,” and “droll,”—though I think the author was (intentionally) going for raunchy as opposed to sensual, for while the people who write these summaries may find the latter word more elegant and less trite, the stories in Knots feature characters who are tied up—if I may indulge in the obligatory pun that title was begging for—in awkward, somewhat tawdry situations, though (curiously enough) these situations mostly seem to work themselves out in a not altogether disheartening manner.

Take the final, longest, and (I wager) most successful story in the book, “Two by Two.” Øyehaug fairly immediately grabs the reader’s attention by putting us into a tense moment in a marriage; if you’ve lived along enough to see such matrimonial convulsions, you will recognize that interminal crisis moment (not during the blowup, but before or after it), that brooding time, that long night of the soul, when the pain is so great that one or both partners just can’t take it anymore, the status quo is untenable, and a decision is at hand, to stick to the unsatisfactory, intolerable present, or to jump off into the blank, unfathomable unknown. A moment so wrenching Øyehaug times it to the minute:

At ten minutes to one, one night in November, Edel loses it. She has been standing by the window with her arms crossed since ten past twelve, alternately looking down the drive and then at the watch on her wrist.

Throughout this punctuated moment (punctuated being perhaps an understatement here), Øyehaug continues to emphasize the passage of minutes:

Every minute that passed after ten past twelve pulled this look of love from her, like a net being dragged from the water, and by the thirteenth minute past twelve, when she called his mobile and heard it ringing in the breadbox by the kitchen, her face was no longer remotely magnanimous.

This passage of minutes becomes magnified in importance when, as is the case with Edel, the combination of the overall situation along with a specific triggering event prime her to become enraged.

That overall situation, so brilliantly sketched in the opening paragraph, is that Edel has been waiting for her husband to come home, preparing for his return. She goes out to clear the snow in the driveway. He doesn’t come. She sits down to read a book. He doesn’t come. She is able to hold it together up until one hour before the punctuated moment that starts the story, when she “felt no rage” and felt “good, strong, and open,” and “touched by the good, light magnanimity she had felt blossom in her heart just over an hour ago.”

But then the triggering event: impatient of her husband’s return, Edel lays down to read The Birthday Letters, a poetry book by Ted Hughes. Edel knows all about the marriage of the poets Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath, how Hughes was abusive to Plath, how Plath killed herself by putting her head inside a stove and turning it on, and how Hughes went on to write books and receive prizes even as people quietly held him responsible for his wife’s death. Later on he wrote a collection of poetry, The Birthday Letters, in honor of Plath, and Edel feels initially charmed by this exculpatory performance; but then Øyehaug brilliantly shows the curdling of Edel’s thoughts as she reads.

When she got to the last poem, she discovered that the red poppies on the cover referred to this poem about the red poppies that Sylvia loved and seen as a symbol of life; and this evening, as she, Edel, lay on the bed reading this last poem, she felt she was the one who saw all this for her [ed. note: living vicariously through Sylvia], in a stream of warmth and the dark timbre of the voice that saw and said, that twisted and twisted down and down until finally she could barely breathe, suffocated by pressing joy and sadness:

—and here, mid paragraph (mid-sentence?), Øyehaug uses capitalization to signal indirect thought, and (I think it’s fair to say this) mock Edel’s vicarious living through literature with no less viciousness than Flaubert did when he did the same to Emma Bovary—

This Is Life, You Are Loved and You are Betrayed in That, That Is Life, I Must Accept It, I Accept It: Life Is Good, Painful, and Awful! She thought to herself: This is Acceptance!

—the capitalized text being a meta-signal for stupid things imparted to stupid people from their stupid books, the two italicized words being like pangs of raw pathos streaking into this pablum, and then this exaggeratedly beatific note, like something out of Monty Python’s Life of Brian:

The notion of “acceptance” radiating inside her like the sun staring through the clouds, forcing them open and covering the fjord like an iridescent bridal veil. This is God, thought Edel, and she felt like she was about to explode; she clutched the book to her breast and closed her eyes and felt completely open. [Ed. note: and the kicker] She also felt overwhelmed by something else and had to scribble down some words on a piece of paper: “the power of literature.”

The hilarious combination of empathy and malice shown here by the author towards Edel (who flies into a rage when she thinks how her husband is banging one of his girlfriends in town and “hurls The Birthday Letters at the wall as hard as she can”) is sufficient to show that Øyehaug is an author who experiments with a variety of genres and stylistic modes to achieve complex effects in her stories. Sometimes, as in “Two by Two” and the first story in the collection, “Nice and Mild,” these experiments are fully developed into affecting, impactful stories; at other times (especially in some of the shorter stories in the collection) they come off as abortive efforts, not really conveying all that much. (One expects condensed, rather than weakened effects from microfiction; I would think that’s part of its excuse and raison d’être for being micro.)