Published 2.13.2018. Archipelago Books: Brooklyn, NY. Translated from Norwegian by Martin Aitken.
Scandinavia is known for its hardboiled nocturnal crime thrillers, but the 1999 novel Love by Hanne Ørstavik, now translated for Archipelago Books by Martin Aitken, offers something different. In the same way the Gothic is a slow-burning corollary to Horror fiction, this book is a more elemental take on the murder mystery (if for no other reason than that reader is unsure whether or not there will even be a murder.) And like Things We Lost in the Fire, 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.
The story follows the separate wanderings on a cold winter night of Vibeke and her elementary-age son Jon. Vibeke is a single mom whose mind wanders, now thinking of her little boy, now thinking of her work coming up with marketing material for the local town council, now (as single mothers are wont to do) thinking of romance and the possibility of meeting a man. Ørstavik makes both Vibeke and the town plain and unexceptional:
The street lamps are on, lighting up the road between the houses. To the north, the road through the village joins the highway again. It’s a kind of circle, she thinks to herself, you can drive in to the village, past the council offices and the shops, through the housing area, then pick up the highway again further up, follow it south, and turn off toward the village again. Most of the houses have their living-room windows facing the road. We need to address architecture, she thinks, the way it can bring things together. The whole village backs onto forest. She jots down some keywords on a sheet of paper: Identity, pride. Aesthetics. Information.
That Vibeke jots down a series of cliches and vapid banalities further highlights how unexceptional she is. Vibeke is aggressively basic, as kids these days would say, and that partly explains why some reviewers have found her character unlikable. The book shows us a succession of thoughts from a woman with no irony or jaundice, and precious little worldliness. Moreover, these are thoughts that have nothing to do with her son, which prompts us to harshly judge Vibeke’s free-range, thought-out-of-mind parenting (as opposed to the helicoptering we have become so used to that we are prepared to exact harsh judgments against any mother character who fails to conform.) In any case, we are given a full view of Vibeke’s thoughts through both direct and indirect narration of them, and the picture is of a mother who loves her son and also (horrors!) thinks of herself:
She reaches out and smoothes her hand over his head.
“Have you made any friends yet?”
His hair is fine and soft.
“Jon,” she says. “Dearest Jon.”
She repeats the movement while studying her hand. Her nail polish is pale and sandy with just a hint of pink. She likes to be discreet at work. She remembers the new set that must still be in her bag, plum, or was it wine; a dark, sensual lipstick and nail polish the same shade. To go with a dark, brown-eyed man, she thinks with a little smile.
The most off-putting thing about Vibeke (at least to some readers) is how totally familiar her lipstick fixation and “little smile” are. We shudder in recognition because the world is full of Vibekes. Many moms are like Vibeke. Vibeke is a normal person; Vibeke is driven by primal, instinctual needs—and it hurts for the egalitarian, anti-elitist inside of us to admit that “normal” and “driven mostly by primal instincts” are pretty much the same thing. (And furthermore, it’s the logic-driven people who are the weird ones.) Vibeke’s normality, morever, places the emphasis in the story less on her individual qualities than on her situation from moment to moment.
And boy does Ørstavik make the reader feel that situation, the placement of the body in relation to its surroundings. Her narration is stark, declarative, and present tense. It moves swiftly from action to sensation, from “She reaches out and smoothes her hand over his head” to “His hair is fine and soft.” By combining a sense of Vibeke’s innocence, naivete, or normality—whatever you wish to call it—with this very bodily-oriented sensual awareness, Ørstavik creates a sense of tension in the novel without having anything happen explicitly to suggest we should be afraid.
The tension in Vibeke’s storyline is brought to a head when she meets and goes out with a man—an act which, as exhibitionist pervert and recently disgraced comedian Louis C.K. used to point out, “requires more courage than anything I can imagine.” A woman being alone with a man—inherently frightening!—and even more so since the man in this case is a worker with the traveling carnival which is visiting town, a stereotypical font of malevolence and shady dealings. (See: killer clowns, Something Wicked This Way Comes, and the anti-freak and carnie animus directed at carnival workers; threats emanating from the transient circus are a long-standing pop culture trope.)
Yet as this man invites Vibeke for coffee back in his trailer (and the suggestiveness of “coffee” goes without saying), the reader is able to observe as Vibeke makes the conceptual leap of trusting this man and interpreting his behavior in a generous, unthreatening light:
She thinks of him curled up at one end of the sofa with a book, the stillness, the affection she feels for him when he reaches up to get a frying pan from on top of the cupboard.
One thinks of another part of that Louis C.K. bit—I admit I feel conflicted in using this man’s material for the purposes of illustration—where he speculates about the silent decisions women make, and while Vibeke doesn’t decide to sleep with this stranger, her thoughts are in the direction of establishing a relationship with him, of altering her behavior to attract him. Without spoiling the story, I will say that the development of her thoughts at the story’s end is instructive about how someone like Vibeke adjust their thinking in response to changing circumstances.
There is a noticeable difference when the narrative crosscuts from Vibeke’s perspective to Jon’s. Whil Vibeke’s scenes are characterized by facts, context, and moods, Jon’s are by phenomenology, impressions, and daydreams. Here for instance is what Jon perceives when Vibeke arrives home in her car:
The sound of the car. When he’s waiting he can never quite recall it. I’ve forgotten, he tells himself. But then it comes back to him, often in pauses between the waiting, after he’s stopped thinking about it. And then she comes , and he recognizes the sound in an instant; he hears it with his tummy, it’s my tummy that remembers the sound, not me, he thinks to himself. And no sooner has he heard the car than he sees it too, from the corner of the window, her blue car coming around the bend behind the banks of snow, and she turns in at the house and drives up the little slope to the front door.
Jon has something wrong with his eyes that causes him to blink rapidly. When he hears his mother arrive, he hears it in his tummy; even Vibeke is more intellectual and less bodily in her perceptions than Jon is. Being a child, he sees many things—children can be very observant, relying much more on their senses than on their cognition—but he doesn’t understand what he’s seeing the way an adult would. He doesn’t understand why some of the situations Ørstavik writes him into give cause to be afraid.
We watch early on in the novel as Jon goes to sell raffle tickets at the house across the way. An old man opens the door. Jon asks if he’d like to buy tickets and the man says sure, but come inside—his eyes “darting toward the road.” (!) Ørstavik then writes, “It’s been a while since a car came by and it’s too cold for people to be going about on foot.” This is the old man saying this. Ørstavik is narrating it using indirect speech rather than a direct quote; this has the effect of distancing the reader from the man’s words, of deadening their effect. He’s saying this to Jon, the use of indirect speech here implies, but you (the reader) ought to be wary of what the old man is saying. There’s something suspicious about this old man. His rocking chair is still swaying when Jon gets in the room. There are pictures on the wall “that are blurred at the edges as if the people in them are fading away.” The old man pulls out a wad of cash, and buys all of the raffle tickets. Then this happens, which is totally not suspicious at all:
“Let me show you something,” he says.
“What is it?” says Jon. He tries not to blink.
“You’ll see. I’d nearly forgotten all about it, forgotten altogether.”
He opens a door and flicks a switch. A lightbulb goes on, fixed directly to the wall. Jon sees a flight of stairs leading down into the basement.
If you can hear yourself screaming internally, “Don’t go in there!” then you have some idea of the heart attack-inducing suspense this book regularly subjects the reader to. What’s even worse is that at any given time in the book, it’s completely possible that such terrifying situations as this one will ultimately amount to nothing; it is like real life in that way: what we dread of isn’t real, until that one time it is.
I am curious about the author’s intentions in naming this novel Love. In an interview with Bookaholic.ro, Ørstavik explains that she wondered herself as a single mother whether the word “love” was more than a platitude.
Of course, I guess this fear also mirrored the fear of not being loved. I was also thinking about language and how someone can say to you “I love you” and you can believe it, and then somebody else or the same person coming to you in a different moment, saying “I love you” and feel that that’s just a lie; but the words are exactly the same.
Clearly Vibeke and Jon love each other, though when they enter into each other’s thoughts it is usually fleetingly. Of the two, Vibeke certainly goes longer without thinking about her son, while in Jon’s case his thoughts are a mixture of beautiful fantasies where Vibeke will now and then make a cameo as, for example, a train conductor in a dream about trains. But merely the thought of a loved one: is that love? In any case, Love is a book that uses sophisticated literary techniques to harrow readers and keep us in a state of trepidation (and confusion) on these points, right up until its final pages, breathlessly uncertain of the outcome.
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