OMG. How embarrassing it is to read this here. Or? That a writer begins a relationship with a craftsman 17 years his junior who stops by to fix the cistern in the toilet is perhaps not too much to be upset about? Sex in the car must then also involve two adults. That there should be so much to drink, so much that the Italian girlfriend reacts, can only be said to be the dissemination of Norwegian (un-)culture? Mushrooms at the coffeeshop Then there were all the joints to be smoked along the way. We will even visit the central stimulant MDMA, used therapeutically. But it really only gets embarrassing when the author is thrown out of a coffeeshop in Amsterdam, because she wanted to consume mushrooms where only smoking is allowed. But isn’t the embarrassing love’s most faithful companion? Along with all the other forbidden feelings that love brings with it? Where else is all this asymmetrical, forbidden, scandalous, embarrassing, to be talked about, if not in novels? Has it not been so since the birth of the novel? One of these forbidden emotions is undoubtedly rage. “Stay with me” is a furious novel in many ways. This rage has followed the author since she grew up in Tana in Finnmark in the early seventies. The father was a pressure cooker, although he did not beat the children. The whole family was on pins and needles around the enraged father, and the mother moved out when the daughter was three and a half. The author finds this rage in the men she gets together with in adulthood. THIS IS HOW YOU ARE: Harald Eia and Nils Brenna personality tests Hanne Ørstavik. As true as I really am Anyone reading Ørstavik in 2023 will have to deal with the fact that she writes more explicitly autobiographically than before. In any case, I take it for granted that there is an Italian craftsman also in the real world, in the same way that there was an Italian publisher in the life of the real author. And that the aging father whom the author visits corresponds to the father who exists in reality. But the novel’s credibility does not lie in its relationship to reality. The novel’s credibility lies in the elasticity of the depictions of these men around the author. Ørstavik has his own ability to change the perspective, so that we see the vulnerability in the father and in the young lover. The author depends on their gaze, and in the same way they depend on being greeted with warmth and understanding by her. It is in the gaze of the other that the answer to the essential question lies: Who is it that sees who we really are? Parallel stories Each new element brought in helps to deepen the conversations around what is the overarching question: What does it mean to be loved by someone? What does it mean to be afraid of being subjected to psychological violence? If you are, like the author, used to living with that horror, in what way does it shape your identity? A parallel story about a woman named Judith is one such element. Almost a novel within the novel, a kind of outgrowth. Here, too, we meet a woman who has recently lost her husband and begins a relationship with a younger man. This parallel action is a little more demanding to follow, but it also contains illuminating parts that deepen and add new layers of understanding to the discussions going on in this – unruly! – the novel. “The novel is me, while I write it,” writes Ørstavik now. In the previous book, “Ti Amo”, we said goodbye to her Italian publisher husband, who died of cancer. But life goes on. It’s not so much about “updating” us on what the author has been through since the last time. It is about what has been gained from new insights into why everything turned out the way it did. Why we became the way we became. Everything must be with The ugly and the beautiful almost bubbling under the surface of this well-worn concept of love. Everything must be included. No sooner is your husband in the grave than a new Italian will appear to fix the toilet. Young and hot! Love – in any form, in other words. Whether it is between parents and children, or between two adults who both have the child in them after they became adults. There is a consistent sensitivity here, to what is going on around us and in us. All the time with these apt metaphors. How can it be, for example, that someone manages to photograph us in such a way that it is as if our personality appears in the picture? As if we have been seen through the camera lens? Ørstavik makes us all sensitivity readers – both literally and in the very best sense of the word. news reviewer Photo: Forlaget Oktober Title: “Stay with me” Author: Hanne Ørstavik Publisher: Oktober Genre: Novel Number of pages: 216 Date: 20 April 2023 Hi! I read and review literature in news. Please also read my review of “Kairos” by Jenny Erpenbeck, “Details” by Ia Genberg, or Franz Kafka’s “The Process” translated by Jon Fosse.
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“Stay with me” by Hanne Ørstavik – Reviews and recommendations
