Scared stiff: Hanne Ørstavik’s Love (1997)
Where Norwegian minimalism and imagination run awry.
At the sight of spring, they set up the first poles. One by one, white trailers arrive with the poles and the tarps inside. After the students return home, workers walk the parking lot, looking for the worn-out impressions in which to construct the tents. The poles and tarps are tucked under their arms. The workers – mostly men, mostly bearded – wear dark hoodies, their necks creased and rough. On break, they smoke in their pick-ups. Their leave their windows open. Empty coffee cups are left behind, strewn forgetfully across the lot. Some are stuffed, like secret messages, into the crevices of the stone wall that runs along its perimeter. On warm days, the cups fill with ants. It is hard to know there the cup ends and the ants begin. Before the arrival of the trailers and the tarps and the poles, the lot was a playground. Soon, a week later, generators start to hum beneath the tents, connected to strips of lightbulbs that burn all night. The air will grow heavy with the smell of sugar and grease. At night, the neighbors close their blinds and try, in vain, to sleep.
The Saint Denis Family Fun Fair was a key coordinate in the topography of my childhood. A small Catholic school in one of Philadelphia’s more proximate suburbs, Saint Denis was, for the first fourteen years of my life, my sole contact with formal education. Each May, The Fun Fair would attract thousands of people, families, and neighbors to an unremarkable stretch of suburban landscape to eat hotdogs, get their faces painted, striving to win goldfish in plastic bags.
I had forgotten about the Fun Fair until I read Hanne Ørstavik’s novel Love (1997) this past January. Feeling alone and slightly nostalgic, I read Love in a full sitting at a pizza shop, with the hopes of getting ahead the semester’s reading. A grim and brief novel, Love seemed like a conduit for a dreamlike quality that I haven’t identified in other novels; it was faithful, not fantastical, riddled with by the surface tension that delineates life from dream.
Love’s narrative structure is bipolar. The novel’s oscillating points of view between its two main characters, Jon, and his mother, Vibeke, as the duo pass the time before Jon’s nineth birthday (a day that Vibeke has forgotten) made the one-sidedness of their relationship all the more agonizing. Each narrative jump cut, sometimes in the middle of a paragraph, brought with it a sense of misrecognition, dread, and, I felt, even panic. Marching towards catastrophe, Love, whose bitterly ironic title I found heavy-handed on first approach, seemed to punish Vibeke’s vanity and apparent disinterest in Jon with an incalculable price. I read Love quickly, and I did not feel better.
And yet, after reading the scenes depicting Vibeke’s failed romantic entanglement with a funfair worker, Tom, I was reminded however uneasily of my own Fun Fair. I recalled minor details, oddities that gave shape to the mood of that which had now passed: the small alley between the school and its adjacent fence seperating school from cemetery, an alley full of teenagers shoving one another, spiting, kissing; the bluish tint of my brother’s tongue after devouring and vomiting an Icee my mother brought for him on a whim; my father, a volunteer, making funnel cake, his beads of sweat dropping from his nose only to scream as they fell silently into a vat of hot oil. The names of rides, once lost, returned to me: the Super Slide, down whose multicolored lanes I slid countless times, racing my mother, my father, and my brother as we rode atop ragged burlap sacks. At some point in the evening, my parents would ask me to look after my brother as they went off alone, sometimes to chat with friends, but mainly to get some distance. My brother, four years my junior, would grab the edge of my shirt as we rode rides together, questioning me constantly. I found his presence mortifying, even stifling; perhaps it was cruel to feel this way.
My attachment to this novel, then, was associative at heart; I was, for a moment, learning to come back to myself, to a moment of my life full of collective feeling worn flat and dismal. The return of these experiences, however unoriginal such an experience might be, gave form to the sense of negative attachment to the Fun Fair, its carnivalesque grimness, a sense of play gone sour. Reading the novel in a nearly empty pizza shop, a half-grey sky engulfing the empty square of Charlottesville’s Downtown Mall, I couldn’t help but to be reminded of those half-grey March afternoons that signaled the Fun Fair’s inexorable approach. The sudden appearance of the workers, whose alien presence both excited and shocked us; the assembly of carnival rides, some of which our favorites, visible in pieces from our classroom window; pubescent boys bragging about bringing Sharpie markers into the Zipper, a cage-like contraption that spun unpredictably forward and backward, in which they would write vulgar notes to themselves, scorn the teachers they hated, make a mark on something that was, for a moment, their own. This bundle of associations, it seemed, synchronized with the present, undone by their own experience.
In a sense, I was distracted remembering (or imagining) what was surely but another kind of fiction. Distraction via the imagination seems, in many ways, to characterize both Jon and Vibeke’s relationship to their respective worlds. Vibeke’s quasi-Bovarian entrance reeks of a particular kind of literary coziness, a readerly sensibility we are led to find lacking:
She gets through three books a week, often four or five. She wishes she could read all the time, sitting in bed with the duvet pulled up, with coffee, lots of cigarettes, and a warm nightdress on. She could have done without the TV too, I never watch it, she tells herself, but Jon would have minded.
Literature, here a kind of escapist relief, is set in contrast to Vibeke’s more ambiguous, even negative attachment to Jon, who seems more impediment that source of joy. The way that these paragraphs move, tumbling through free indirect discourse, appears as a chief characteristic of Love’s stylistic claustrophobia. In Love, language is constantly mediated through the consciousness of someone else, a stylistic maneuver that swings from intimacy and distrust, a sense of partial knowledge as to what’s really going on. This paragraph’s final proclamation, itself an ironically considerate gesture, points to the way that Love’s depictions of love are at-times conditional, non-guaranteed. Love’s love is self-sacrifice; not giving but giving up.
But reading literature for Vibeke is also not far from self-care, even self-indulgence. “She feels the lure of sitting with a good book,” the narrator tells us, “a big thick one of the kind that leaves an impression stronger and realer than life itself.” Yet this imaginative wandering seems to be no doubt a symptom, the novel implies, of the socially isolating demands of her post as an arts and culture officer: “I deserve it, she tells herself, after how well I’m doing at work.” Running through these imagined sites of possibility, Vibeke fantasizes of a “brown-eyed engineer”, a coworker. These initial fantasies transform later into into corollary fantasies regarding Tom, an earnest funfair worker with whom she spends most of Love’s 124 pages. After Tom approaches her at the fair, Vibeke enters Tom’s trailer (“A few simple touches would do wonders here, she thinks to herself”) in spite of the classist reflexes about entertaining “a fairground worker”. By a kind of epiphany, Vibeke lapses into reverie: Tom’s face – handsome, though perhaps not beautiful – ascends into something greater:
His face expresses reflection, she thinks to herself. There’s a classic quality about him. He triggers pleasant images in her mind: the two of them together on an endless beach, it’s winter and they’re the only people there; she runs along the shore and he gazes at her, seeing everything she contains, intelligent and warm.
From the cold and snowy expanses of northern Norway, Love’s narrator expands Vibeke’s imagination outward to render a warmth that is both literal and interior “everything [Vibeke] contains”. The fantasy that Vibeke conjures replies, it seems, not only to her will for a private, intimate connection, but also a change of scenery (one in which Jon is absent). The relations in Love seem to say as much about the relations themselves as the places – often hostile – in which they are sustained.
Born in Tana, a remote town in Finnmark, Norway’s northernmost province, Ørstavik herself attends deeply to the effects that landscape wield on the psychic orientations of her characters. Ørstavik’s third novel, Love (Kjærlighet in the original Norwegian) was published in 1997 in Norway, where it was met with critical acclaim. An English language translation of Kjærlighet by Martin Aiken (the translator of several contemporary Scandinavian authors, including Karl Ove Knausgård, Peter Høeg, Ida Jessen, among others) was published by Archipelago Books in 2018. Ørstavik has spoken openly about the effect of landscape and of her childhood in Tana on the mood of her novels. “I somehow feel that I lived at the end of the world”, Ørstavik mentioned in a recent interview. “Here the world ended. Beyond this just the ocean and the north pole. To live on the outer edge […] was an existential feeling that was always with me.”
This sense of a quasi-dimensional precipice expresses itself through the novel’s descriptions of the remote village in which much of the novel transpires. Driving at night with Tom, the narrator describes the seemingly depthless world through which they travel in search of “somewhere with a bit of life”. “It all seems so remote”, the narrator, speaking through Vibeke, describes. “The car and the road and the beam of the headlights are the only things that exist.” Continuing their journey southward en route to late night café, Vibeke and Tom later pass through the “outskirts” of the town. Here, the narrator describes a dismal edgeland, eerily artificial:
Yellow street lamps hang suspended over the asphalt. Staggered rows of dismal, three-story housing blocks recede back on each side. The gable ends visible from the road have been fitted out with billboards lit up by spotlights. Vibeke thinks the illuminated images with people in them make the place seem populated in the night. They drive past a deserted train station, ice-encrusted and floodlit.
The effect of these place descriptions, often coupled with narrative glimpses into Vibeke and Jon’s inner worlds, reinforces the deep uncanniness of the town in which they reside. Billboards simulate population in a town where no one arrives; the train station, frozen over, marks the hermetic seal that freezes places and persons in kind. This kind of spatial and cultural claustrophobia to which Love is attuned defines the foreboding mood that lingers on every page.
I felt for Vibeke, seeing her desire to be touched, reached for, grasped at. Yet I could not resist my attachment to Jon, Vibeke’s eight-then-nine-year-old son. I felt an affinity with the unruliness, even the ugliness, of his at-times violent imagination, the way that Love’s narrator felt so attuned to the sensitivities and anxieties of childhood. It is possible that this feeling is attributable to my own biography. At Jon’s age, I started to go to the Fun Fair alone from the first time where, at the same time, I was also enduring a string of recurrent night terrors. Essentially waking nightmares, these night terrors were often brought about through a related childhood feature of what was then called period fever syndrome. This condition (a rare but benign autoinflammatory syndrome) would cause me to fall ill every three and a half weeks with a full gamut of life-draining symptoms: red and patchy feet and hands, agonizing sore throats, and, as its name suggests, sudden and dramatic fevers. During these three-day long episodes, I would shuffle from couch to couch to my bed. I couldn’t think. Nothing and no one made any sense. My parents, with love, fed me yogurts and yellow Gatorade, telling me to sleep. In bed, I was so, so cold. I wanted, more than anything, to be warm, to get comfortable in a body that rejected me. I wanted, like a character in The Magic Mountain, to bake, eyes to the sun, wrapped in a blanket of furs.
When these fevers were particularly acute (after so many episodes, my parents grew rightfully weary of prolonged exposure to acetaminophen and ibuprofen), my dreams became indescribably intense. At times, these dream states would slip into night terrors, one of which recurred, and which I can recount still to this day: a jumble of characters fills an amphitheater. The amphitheater, seen from the front row facing back, seems somewhere between the size of a warehouse or the size of an aircraft hangar. A series of colors, themselves anonymous forms, like paint strokes with legs, fill half-bloodied seats. I am nowhere in particular. An absolute, behemoth sound – nearly orchestral – would rise and rise in pitch and intensity; it rises as if to be the only thing I can feel. A machine slowly consumes the amphitheater. Brownish pipes generate around it and from its interior; I can see from inside and from outside of the pipe-shaped thing – a ship – that cages everything. The ship becomes what feels like a continent; it is, I sense, the end of the world, a nuclear prison, the universe turning back to greet me. Deafening, the sound bellows and rises and does not fall.
When I eventually open my eyes, my room is covered in what seems like TV static. Granular blips of white and black, accompanied by an ever-rising roar like the tuning of a thousand violins, covered every surface. Small objects seem to me to be murderous; a plastic Fred Flintstone, some kind of Happy Meal giveaway, appeared both life-sized and man-like. Somehow, I could feel its will to hurt me. I sob, bewildered. My door is cracked, nearly closed, but I open it and walk across the hallway to my parents’ room. Their door wide open, a bluish light from the hallway streams in against their terracotta-tinged walls. I stand and stare and watch them sleep.
Rereading Love earlier this month, this time facing the beach, these forgotten episodes felt especially familiar. Jon’s eye-twitching (“It’s hard for him not to. It’s the muscles around his eyes that go into a spasm”) and his visions of violence, torture, and, perhaps enigmatically, his affinity for trains all struck me as sites of identification. I saw myself – a smaller, more panicked version, prone to illness, wandering the Fun Fair with both fascination and terror – in Jon’s lack of control over his imagination’s trajectory. This oneiric quality to Love, where a nightmarish logic encroaches on reality, seemed to me most visible when Jon, after walking home in the snow to a dead-locked door, notices that Vibeke’s car is no longer in the driveway and imagines her grizzly demise:
He thinks the space in front of the house has got bigger too. Then he sees the car is gone. Vibeke isn’t in. Maybe something’s happened. An accident. Vibeke doesn’t like driving in the winter. Here it’s winter all the time. She’s crashed and maybe now she’s paralyzed and will have to sit in a wheelchair. Maybe no one’s found her yet and she’s bleeding to death. Or maybe the car’s about to burst into flames and she’s going to die from the pain. He tries to imagine how much it hurts when your skin is on fire. No one’s found her and she’s all on her own.
Through Ørstavik’s virtuosic sense for the imaginative ellipses between sentences (aided by Aiken’s lucid translation), Love tumbles down the labyrinth of Jon’s often-distressing scenarios in the wake of Vibeke’s unusual absence. Gasping for rationalization, Jon slips from the “maybe” to the “is”, affirm the coercive force of panic at its most insidious and familiar. Yet Jon, perhaps not uncommon for a child of his age, transfers the horror of Vibeke’s imagined accident on his own body; she, like him, is lost, “all on her own,” his attachment to her mirroring his attachment to himself. The movement of this paragraph, ricocheting from one violent image to another, acted on me with a frightening seduction that I cannot yet define.
It is this unidentifiable quality that draws me to Love, a pull that demands its due. Fear, I have felt for a long time, commands all our attention. It emerges in the absence of trust; it signifies a transgression at work in the world, a breach in the contract between yourself and it. Fear desacralizes. Jon’s fears throughout the novel (and Vibeke’s seeming absence of fear) respond to his shakiness, the tragic tenuousness of his attachments of which he has but minimal control. It is in these ways that Love reminds us, and reminds me, that our calls for acknowledgement might not bridge the gap; that they guarantee no reply; that our body betrays its impressions; that warmth becomes cold and becomes warmth once again. Through Love, Ørstavik accesses a phobia, a structure of uncertainty whose effects, both emotional and relational, extend beyond childhood: a looming fear of abandonment, being forgotten on our birthday, being awake this whole time.