Republic of Consciousness Class of 2020: Love by Hanne Ørstavik, tr. Martin Aitken (And Other Stories)
Since the announcement of our longlist, we have been running pieces on, or extracts of, all of our longlisted titles. Today, ahead of the shortlist announcement tonight, we publish a review of Love by Hanne Ørstavik, tr. Martin Aitken (And Other Stories). The review is written by Kat Payne Ware, a poet and student at University of East Anglia.
Missed Connections: Love by Hanne Ørstavik, tr. Martin Aitken (And Other Stories)
When I grow old, we’ll go away on the train. As far away as we can. We’ll look out through the windows, at fells and towns and lakes, and talk to people from foreign lands. We’ll be together all the time. And forever be on our way.
So begins Martin Aitken’s new translation of Hanne Ørstavik’s Norwegian masterpiece, the novel’s 28th international publication, printed by And Other Stories. Love follows mother, Vibeke, and son, Jon, on their separate journeys through the winter’s evening before his ninth birthday. When we first encounter these two characters, Vibeke is driving home from work, and Jon peering through his bedroom window, waiting for her to return. Yet what follows is not the familiar homework/dinner/ bathtime/bedtime mother-and-son evening pantomime, but a desolate narrative of lonesome journeys, failures of language, and missed connections.
As Jon waits, he ruminates:
There must be at least a meter of snow. Under the snow live the mice. They have pathways and tunnels. They visit each other, Jon imagines, maybe they bring each other food.
Under its ubiquitous blanket of snow, Love also crawls with characters through its pathways and tunnels, although none deliberately visiting each other — rather, every encounter or non-encounter in this novel appears instantaneous, a work of chance, including those between mother and son.
The novel is ridden with dead ends. In the first chapter, Vibeke notices that the route from the highway to the village is ‘a kind of circle’ — like a model train track where the destination is always the place you began. After dinner, Jon decides to head out into the cold to sell his sports club raffle tickets, which are immediately bought in full by the first neighbour he knocks at, and he returns home. Vibeke decides to return some books to the library, fantasising that a brown-eyed man from work might be there, but when she arrives, the library is closed. Jon then sets off for the fairground, and ends up at a stranger’s house; Vibeke, after setting off for the library, ends up at the fairground. Reading Love is an experience akin to watching two rats in a maze: from the aerial view, Vibeke and Jon cross paths and encounter the same people and places over and over, yet within the maze each rat is set blindly on its path, subordinating itself to chance and outside forces.
These missed connections can be attributed partly to the characters’ obsession with mirrors and surface. One of the only tender images in the novel, that of Vibeke stroking her son’s hair, is punctuated by her assessment of her manicure:
She repeats the movement while studying her hand. Her nail polish is pale and sandy with just a hint of pink.
At many key moments, Vibeke studies her reflection or worries about her hair. Rather than condemning this shallowness, however, Ørstavik/Aitken suggest an obsession with appearance to be symptomatic of her society’s failure to communicate:
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.
For Vibeke, the mirror shows a work-in-progress which if perfected (if only she looked a certain way, if her hair/nails/makeup were right) has the power to cure her loneliness, gleefully reading somewhat like a dystopian TRESemmé advert.
Conversely,
Jon takes aim at himself in the mirror. He holds the pistol steady with both hands, elbows pressed against his trunk as he fires. What does a body look like when it’s full of holes?
Where for Vibeke the mirror promises future human connections, for Jon the mirror shows an adversary, something to be conquered not “positively” via personal improvement but via destruction with the (water) pistol.
If the self in Love is responsible for failures, its narration exemplifies this. Intricately woven from the fraying threads of two close-third persons, the novel’s narration never immediately betrays the owner of its interiority; rather, only the infiltration of external sensory or contextual information signposts a reader as to whether we are behind the eyes of Vibeke of Jon at any given moment. Often this wrong-foots, and a reader is forced to reread, to reassess a passage originally taken as belonging to the narrator of the passage before. The effect of this destabilisation of narratorial voice(s) is one of discomfort or unease, particularly in the places where the voice switches more frequently, which often occur when the lone woman or child is in uncomfortable proximity to a stranger whose intentions are as unreadable as the white blanket of snow.
Identity. Pride. Aesthetics. Information.
These are the keywords that Vibeke notes down at the start of the novel, inspired by that day’s meeting in her new role as an arts and culture officer at the local council. These words both summarise the novel’s themes (read: self, ego, surface, (mis)communication) and exemplify the failures of language and communication that haunt its protagonists. When Vibeke meets a man at the fairground, she is able to communicate only in such buzzwords or other meaninglessnesses, in a misguided attempt to ‘be sensitive to the fact that they’re two individuals’:
I mustn’t spoil the mood with talk, she tells herself.
Yet in her inner monologue, she has a profound understanding of feeling:
She feels like they share something now. It feels like pushing a boat from the shore, the moment the boat comes free of the sand and floats, floats on the water.
These false or blocked communications have been inherited by Jon. He writes his name in the snow, then rubs it out, ‘not wishing to leave a trace’. When in a car with a stranger, he worries about falling asleep,
he talks in his sleep sometimes and he doesn’t want her to hear things he might say.
Earlier, he worries,
Maybe there’s something wrong with his heart.
For his birthday, Jon wants a train set (hoping Vibeke has noticed the list he left on his desk for her to stumble across). Trains, as a method of escape, or trains as flawed, fraught with the possibility of missed connections?
When I grow old, we’ll go away on the train. As far away as we can. We’ll look out through the windows, at fells and towns and lakes, and talk to people from foreign lands. We’ll be together all the time. And forever be on our way.
Vibeke and Jon, over the course of the night, do encounter fells, towns and lakes, and talk to strangers, but are together next to none of the time — and when they are, missed connections result in failures and losses. On a first reading, it seemed from the childish tone that it were Jon speaking here; upon rereading it’s not clear. Perhaps it doesn’t matter. We recall the model train track where start and end points are synonymous.
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KAT PAYNE WARE is a poet from Bristol. She graduated cum laude in Literature and Creative Writing from the University of Birmingham in 2019, and is currently reading for an MA in Creative Writing Poetry at the University of East Anglia. As well as working for the Republic of Consciousness, she is a coordinator of the Green Film Festival @UEA. Her poetry has been published in the Brixton Review of Books, the Verve Poetry Press Anthology of Diversity Poems and received a commendation from Andrew McMillan in the 2020 Verve Poetry Festival competition.
@katpayneware