Review by New York Times Review
"Love," a trim and electrifying novel, is set over the course of a single winter night in a small town in northern Norway. Orstavik shimmers between 8-year-old Jon and his single mother, Vibeke, on the eve of Jon's ninth birthday (an occasion of which only one of them seems aware). Each sets out for the evening without the other realizing it, Jon to sell raffle tickets for a school fund-raiser and Vibeke to visit the library. Finding it closed, Vibeke resigns herself to dropping by a ramshackle carnival instead. Jon's plans, too, get away from him, and soon both story lines are seeped in tension and dread. The real-time urgency of "Love" is undergirded by the present tense and made incandescent by Orstavik's seemingly effortless omniscient perspective, sometimes switching between Jon's mind and Vibeke's from sentence to sentence. The pronouns work overtime to signal shifts of perspective in Aitken's taut translation from Norwegian, pivoting elegantly from Vibeke to Jon and back as they brave everyday threats. Orstavik's mastery of perspective and clean, crackling sentences prevent sentimentality or sensationalism from trailing this story of a woman and her accidentally untended child. Both of them long for love, but the desire lines of the book are beautifully crooked. Jon wants his mother, and to be let in out of the cold. Meanwhile, Vibeke pursues Tom, a carnival worker, and revises her standards for an erotic encounter steadily downward. Vibeke is a mesmerizing character, Orstavik sketching the contours of her loneliness within a fun fair too rinkydink to have a Ferris wheel. We watch, hypnotized yet removed, as she turns from the innocent love of her child and sifts through Tom's silent scraps: "He looks down into his beer and a curl of blond hair falls against his cheek with an affirmative bounce, a little yes." Vibeke's sensual longing is a hunger that might offer deeper wisdom: "He's a man for me, she thinks.... The insight is physical. The body can be trusted." Bodies are not so trustworthy for young Jon, lured by a witchy figure into a warm car. The primeval darkness of the forest looms, biting as the cold that seems a character throughout this excellent novel of near misses. Claire vaye Watkins is the author of "Battleborn" and "Gold, Fame, Citrus."
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [August 23, 2019]
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
This haunting masterpiece by Orstavik, first published in 1997, follows Vibeke, a young single mother, and her son, Jon, over the course of one cold night in the isolated town in northern Norway to which they have recently moved. It is the day before Jon's ninth birthday, and the boy leaves his home to give his mother time to prepare for his celebration. As Jon wanders, Vibeke forgets about her son and steps out herself to visit the library. From here, the narrative splits to monitor both characters separately as they encounter townsfolk and drift through the hours. Vibeke stops at a traveling carnival, where she strikes up a conversation with one of the employees, while Jon makes friends with a girl from school and later realizes he's locked out of his home. Orstavik shifts from Vibeke to Jon with incredible dexterity, often jumping perspective from one paragraph to the next, and, as their seemingly mundane nights progress, a creeping sense of dread builds. 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. (Feb.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
In a tale of heightened domestic suspense, single mother Vibeke goes about her life, reflecting on the success of a business venture and daydreaming about a handsome engineer even as she heads to the library. Meanwhile, son Jon goes out to sell lottery tickets for his sports club, encountering a chatty neighbor and a girl who lends him mittens. Mother and son have just come to this remote Norwegian village, and as the narrative unfolds, they move in different trajectories, with Jon contemplating his mother while she has little thought of him; she's even forgotten that it's his birthday. It's peculiar that Jon is wandering around on a cold winter's night, inadequately dressed and increasingly worried about getting home, and the creeping sense of unease is racheted up by the cool, lucid prose and how the paragraphs shift between mother and son, clarifying how close they should be and how close they aren't. VERDICT Multi-award winner Orstavik (The Blue Room) offers an unsettling read that most will enjoy. © Copyright 2017. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
Prizewinning Norwegian rstavik (The Blue Room, 2014, etc.) follows the parallel courses of a single mother and her 8-year-old son during a night that moves unrelentingly toward tragedy.Vibeke and her son, Jon, have recently relocated to a small town in northern Norway. Vibeke's mind is on a brown-eyed engineer at her new job. Jon is hoping for a train set for his birthday the next day and looking forward to the cake he imagines his mother making. A thoughtful boy, he has a way of blinking that annoys her and is concerned about torture victims around the world. "Dearest Jon," his mother calls him at dinner, but to herself she thinks, "Can't you just go...find something to do, play or something?" She remembers a dream that began at a glamorous party where a man admired her but ended in the "stench of urine," in "a wasteground of asphalt and ice." While she showers, Jon goes out into the wintry night to sell raffle tickets for the local sports center. He makes a friend and, dozing at her house later, also dreams: he and his mother return to their previous home and find it vandalized, his father at the table eating all their food and telling "sad stories about his life." A nightmarish sense of impending doom hangs over these carefully detailed, tightly controlled pages. Vibeke, thinking her son asleep in his room, also goes out. She has forgotten all about his birthday and goes bar hopping with a traveling carnival worker she meets. Her story and Jon's are told breathlessly close together, without page breaks, almost overlapping. When Jon returns from town, the house is locked, the car gone. It is at this point after 11 p.m.. Not once has it occurred to Vibeke to put her child to bed or even say good night to him. (Though this is clearly essential to the plot, it perhaps strains credulity.) She must have needed something for his birthday cake, he tells himself, and accepts a ride from a stranger in order to stay warm. "Aren't boys your age supposed to be in bed by now?" the driver asks. But it isn't creepy locals who pose the greatest threat or torture victims Jon should be worrying about.A short, bleak, capably written book, ironically titled, icy cold to the core. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
