Translation can be a sluggish triumph. It has taken thirteen years for Gunnhild Øyehaug’s collection of stories, “Knots,” which first appeared in Norwegian, to arrive in an English version (Farrar, Straus & Giroux; translated by Kari Dickson); Øyehaug is forty-two, but the book represents her début in this country. Contemporary Norwegian fiction is astonishingly vital and various. If some of that vitality is gradually becoming apparent to non-Norwegians, it’s partly because of the success of Karl Ove Knausgaard’s “My Struggle,” which may have the effect of shortening the literary struggles of a number of his peers. Anglophone readers can encounter fiction by Per Petterson, Linn Ullmann, Dag Solstad (three of his novels, jewels from a hoard of nearly thirty books, have been translated into English; more are promised), Roy Jacobsen, Tor Ulven, Jon Fosse, and Carl Frode Tiller, among others.
Gunnhild Øyehaug joins that group at a slight angle—as a female (I just enlisted a platoon of men, apart from Ullmann), a short-story writer and poet as well as a novelist, and a writer committed to literary experiment. Her work is playful, often surreal, intellectually rigorous, and brief. She sometimes resembles Lydia Davis, who has read her in both Norwegian and English, and has written admiringly about her work. Like Davis, she moves easily from the theoretical to the humanely engaged. (There is a piece in this collection, entitled “The Object Assumes an Exalted Place in the Discourse,” that is a sparkling riff on a phrase of Roland Barthes’s.) And, like Davis, she can produce stabs of emotion, unexpected ghost notes of feeling, from pieces so short and offbeat that they seem at first like aborted arias. “Vitalie Meets an Officer,” for instance, is about a woman, Anna Bae, who likes reading biographies. Actually, I’ve made the story sound more expansive than it is. It is about a woman who comes across a sentence, in a biography of Arthur Rimbaud, about the poet’s mother, who was named Vitalie: “Although Vitalie’s social life was confined to the church, shopping, and occasional games of whist, she somehow managed to meet a French army officer in 1852.” The rest of the story is about Anna’s delighted response to this single sentence. “SOMEHOW SHE MANAGED IT!” Anna thinks, and the story continues:
Anna imagines how Vitalie might have met her officer. She thinks of a song by Nick Cave “(Are You) The One That I’ve Been Waiting For,” then of Vitalie’s longing, and how it lay “like a well-hidden egg in her chest and purred unseen with glorious, secret dreams.” Anna pictures this egg, and then the officer, and then a woman at a window. The story ends with the arrival of a U.F.O.—which, on closer inspection (Anna goes out into the fields to look at it), might just be the green sofa she has been sitting on. The piece convincingly combines realism and an ethereal surrealism; it flies up but stays tethered to that first ingenuous burst of delight: “SOMEHOW SHE MANAGED IT!”
Øyehaug is intensely interested in consciousness, and in the pictures consciousness makes; this emphasis constantly humanizes her experiments in abstraction and the fantastical. Her riff on the line from Barthes—“the object in discourse assumes an exalted place,” from his “Writing Degree Zero”—could easily have been precious or tedious, or otherwise annoying. But Øyehaug proceeds with a simplicity and a frankness that quickly charm. “We carefully study a sentence we love,” she writes, and then goes on to quote Barthes’s own words. But what is “the object”? Her narrator insists on visualizing it. She imagines a sailing green prism, and thinks of “Blade Runner” and “the small flying cars that Harrison Ford uses”: “It is absolutely no surprise that at this point we have the picture of a luminous green prism sailing in through the dark and taking an exalted place on our retina, a bit like when you’ve been staring too hard at a lamp on the ceiling and then close your eyes! How strange, we think, that a sentence that was written to explain an aspect of modern poetry can have roughly the same effect on our imagination as science fiction.” “The Object Assumes an Exalted Place in the Discourse” is compact, just over two pages, and perfect: it makes gentle fun of French theory’s more sublime pretensions while simultaneously paying Barthes’s lyrical work the lyrical tribute it deserves. It is circular and self-reflexively postmodern—Øyehaug’s text enacts what Barthes theorizes, exalting an “object” that is itself just a sentence—while also registering some brief flash of consciousness, some small explosion of longing, that, like Anna Bae’s discovery in Rimbaud’s biography, seems true to our own experience of passionate reading: jouissance, to be precise.
Øyehaug succeeds, more often than not, by staying focussed on the object of her inquiry. Having established her thought experiment, her area of study—a woman reading a biography, an actor about to walk onto the stage for a one-man avant-garde play (“Compulsion”), a man buying blinds at IKEA (“Nice and Mild”), a girl trying to avoid playing the piano for her oppressively doting grandfather (“Overtures”)—she presses down on the exquisite dilemma, and fearlessly follows the logic of the form she has chosen. The best example of this fearlessness might be “The Deer at the Edge of the Forest,” a page-long paragraph that daringly inhabits an animal’s consciousness. Again, the literary dangers are obvious enough—whimsy, sentimentality, grating eccentricity—and again they are short-circuited by Øyehaug’s appealing, vigorous simplicity:
This might be a sly commentary on Rilke’s poem “Archaic Torso of Apollo,” in which the poet tries to enter an alien, inaccessible consciousness, and concludes, “You must change your life.” What Rilke makes explicit is here kept beautifully implicit: do we treat this as a deer thinking, or as a person merely projecting her troubled thoughts onto the deer?
Lovely as these brief texts are, Øyehaug is at her most captivating in her longer, slightly more conventional pieces, where she uses a kind of tightly controlled, repetitive dramatic monologue to animate a character’s inner torments. “Nice and Mild” and “Two by Two,” the stories that begin and end this collection, are like sparks thrown off by a furious wheel of suffering. In both pieces, we are in the midst of domestic anguish, as experienced by a troubled protagonist, and must do our best to catch up. In “Nice and Mild,” an unnamed male narrator has come to IKEA to buy blinds for his son’s bedroom. It soon becomes clear that this is an arduous project, one that has been deferred for at least six months. Something is wrong with this obsessive and astoundingly unconfident man. A clue may be found in a particular detail: at home, the DVR is recording a tennis match between Serena Williams and Anna Kournikova, and the man thinks, “The very fact that I’m recording the match and not watching it live is the start of the virtuous circle that buying the blinds was going to start, and what’s more, I’ve come here and no one—that’s to say, my wife—knows that I’m here.” The narrator clings to this detail, returning to it in the way that Thomas Bernhard’s narrators (or, closer to home, Knut Hamsun’s) roll the same tormenting phrases back and forth, like stress balls that have morphed into stress grenades. When, a few pages later, we trip across another mention of that “virtuous circle,” we have a fairly good idea that this man’s circle is vicious rather than virtuous. Some kind of depressive stasis has befallen him; he imagines his wife, standing at home, crying, “because she thinks that I can’t breathe, that she is smothering me, which is why I can’t face doing anything, why I sit on the sofa for most of the day and watch TV and feel that I’m turning into an old man and that life, in short, is over.”
The story is delicate because the drama of the man’s entrapment, despite his repetitive, educated verbosity, seems to allow for only very limited self-knowledge. As he enters IKEA, he trips and falls on the stairs, and is seen by two laughing teen-age girls. In a distinctly Øyehaugean touch, we get a reflection on Baudelaire’s theory of laughter: namely, that it is never the person who falls in the street who laughs but the person who witnesses the accident—unless, she writes, “the person who falls is a philosopher and able to reflect on his fall, able to see himself from the outside. You laugh a little. You reflect on your fall, and laugh a little.” It is characteristic of Øyehaug’s nice sense of irony and human complexity that our protagonist is at once something of a philosopher and not philosopher enough: he can see himself from outside, but only at this moment; he opens one door just to find another, this one apparently locked.
“Two by Two” is written in the third person, but it occupies its protagonist’s mind so intently that it resembles a fierce dramatic monologue. Edel, a bookseller in a rural community, is waiting up for her husband to return. It is almost one in the morning, and snowing. Edel is furious, because she thinks that her husband, Alvin, who should have been home forty minutes ago, is visiting his mistress. (She’s right.) Full of rage and revenge, she gathers up their sleeping son and sets out in her car to confront the errant spouse. All this is familiar enough, the ground rail for a lot of conventional fictional traffic. But Øyehaug, as ever, does fresh things with convention. Edel has been taking courses in English literature at a local college and, in particular, has been enjoying “Symbolism in Literature,” which has convinced her that modern readers are too quick to disdain symbolism as “antiquated, romantic thought.” On the contrary, “she believed that something could stand for something else, a rose for love, an ocean for life, a cross for death.” Now, however, as she drives toward the place where she assumes her husband is, she’s irritated by some vulgarly obvious symbolism: only her side of the road has been cleared of snow, and she immediately thinks, “Is that how it is, is that what this means, is his path closed, will he not come back?”
Øyehaug loves to mix her elements: she is always dabbing light onto shade, blending wit with torment, driving together bookishness and life. (Her work is itself highly bookish, but also intensely life-filled.) So she has some fun with Edel and her ambivalence toward literary symbolism, even as she refuses to turn away from Edel’s acute pain. And she has another joke in store. Alvin, on his guilt-racked way back to his wife, pulls off the road, leaves the car, and lies in the snow. This is where Edel eventually finds him, and as she berates him in the expected ways—“You little shit . . . we’re finished”—Alvin cuts in with an excuse: his car has broken down, and that’s why he is so late; he’s been stuck here for nearly an hour. It’s an obvious lie, but the car really won’t start. Alvin may have saved his bacon; the marriage may live another day; against all ethical odds, the lie worked. Or: an invention, a fiction, mysteriously became “true,” and did so because Øyehaug wittily decided to disable the car and thus spare her characters the divorce furnace. The symbol, now appearing as authorial sleight of hand, determines the rest of the story. Trust the teller, not the tale. ♦
