cold trance
Love by Hanne Ørstavik, translated from Norwegian by Martin Aitken, is 5.88 x 7.01 x 0.35 inches & 125 pages.
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I am a wimp about tragedy, yet I am also famously brave, and so early yesterday morning (a ripe time for dread!), I finally read Hanne Ørstavik’s Love translated from Norwegian by Martin Aitken.
Love is threatening the whole time. It menaces all around. Anything that seems ordinary lurks with threat. In the book, a single mother and her child (a birthday boy, eight-about-to-be-nine) spend the day apart, each tentatively wandering the remote northern Norwegian town they’ve just moved to. Love tells you exactly how it’s going to be ruthless and it is exactly that. And still (SOMEHOW!), when the betrayal finally appears, it astonishes.
Now, I must be bossy, authoritative, and decisive about this book that I read approximately thirteen hours before writing this: it can only be read in a sitting!!
As a gal-on-the-go with a book in every purse, we all know that I’m very casual and cool and spontaneous. But sometimes you much obey a rule. This rapid little book is not fast for fun. This ride is short because Love is going to snatch you up into the air and that can only be accomplished in :
one
fell
swoop
I will say no more, other than telling you that there are significant nail polish application and removal sequences (three I think). Fingernails thrum the whole time. Breath catches, eyes wince.
BONUS PURSE BOOK POLL!!
Here’s a little passage about reading, which usually jars me right out of a book, but I somehow persevered in the Ørstavik trance :
What pace do you read? What rhythm do you possess? Do we think this premise is (A) fun and untrue (B) fun and semi-true?