Knots
Stories
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- £8.99
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- £8.99
Publisher Description
A mesmerizing collection of playfully surreal stories from one of Norway’s most celebrated writers
First published in Norway in 2004, Knots is Gunnhild Øyehaug’s radical collection of short stories that range from the surreal to the oddly mundane, and prod the discomforts of mental, sexual, and familial bonds.
In both precise short-shorts and ruminative longer tales, Øyehaug meanders through the tangled, jinxed, and unavoidable conflicts of love and desire. From young Rimbaud’s thwarted passions to the scandalous disappearance of an entire family, these stories do the chilling work of tracing the outlines of what could have been in both the quietly morbid and the delightfully comical. A young man is born with an uncuttable umbilical cord and spends his life physically tethered to his mother; a tipsy uncle makes an uncomfortable toast with unforeseeable repercussions; and a dissatisfied deer yearns to be seen. As one character reflects, “You never know how things might turn out, you never know how anything will turn out, tomorrow the walls might fall down, the room disappear.”
Cleverly balancing the sensuous, the surreal, and the comical, Øyehaug achieves a playful familiarity with the absurd that never overreaches the needs of her stories. Full of characters who can’t help tying knots in themselves and each other, these tales make the world just a little more strange, and introduce a major international voice of searing vision, grace, and humor.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Norwegian writer yehaug's newly translated collection charts entanglements of all kinds, from difficult families and first loves to more metaphysical experiments that combine a crisp minimalism with endearingly offbeat conceits. "Small Knot," for instance, literalizes a fraught mother-son relationship with an umbilical cord that remains intact well into the son's adult life and even after the mother's death while a lonely woman longing for more encounters a UFO in "Vitalie Meets an Officer." The best of yehaug's miniatures deal with elusive emotional states, like the confession of love for a terminally ill man in "It's Raining In Love," the jealousy experienced by the friends of a highly successful encyclopedia salesman in "Echo," or the contemplative ecstasy of a woman named Edel whom, in "Two by Two," thinks that "nature has been abandoned and we are to blame, we have focused on language and become complicated." yehaug transfigures a trip to IKEA, a late-night bathroom break, the lonely vigil of an egg and prawn vendor. Other stories read like surreal drawing room plays, offering a glimpse at the private lives of Arthur Rimbaud and Maurice Blanchot. "Meanwhile, on Another Planet" concludes "What can we learn from this? That impossible situations can arise on other planets too." This kind of dry, odd, understated humor comes to seem a hallmark of yehaug, whose stories are as original as they are joyously delicate and tranquil.
