Fiction
Novel
Hanne Ørstavik
Love
Kjærlighet
Love is the story about Vibeke and Jon, mother and son, who have just moved to a small place in the north of Norway. It’s the day before Jon’s birthday, and a travelling carnival has come to the village. Jon goes out to sell lottery tickets for his sports club, and Vibeke is going to the library.
From here on we follow the two individuals on their separate journeys through a cold winter’s night – while a sense of uneasiness grows. Love illustrates how language builds its own reality, and thus how mother and son can live in completely separate worlds. This distance is found not only between human beings, but also within each individual. This novel shows how such distance may have fatal consequences..
“[A] haunting masterpiece (…) The deceptively simple novel is slow-burning, placing each character into situations associated with horror—entering an unfamiliar house, accepting a ride from a stranger—and the result is a magnificent tale.”
Publishers Weekly, Starred review
’ (…) an eerie, devastating little book, (…) Ørstavik builds a cinematic sense of dread out of the plainest prose, phrase layered on phrase with the hushed implacability of falling snow.’
The Guardian
