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While reading Hanne Ørstavik’s cerebrally lissome novel Love, I was reminded of a question posed by Roland Barthes: “Why do our famous psychologists waste their time on contrived topics like Will, Attention, etc., instead of studying the only important thing in modern psychology: Mood?” A single inquisitive mood – not quite melancholy, not quite buoyant, but often tilting towards one or the other – inhabits the two main characters and unnamed narrator of Love. Mood, instantly inspired by the seen and sensed (and by the imagined for the novelist and narrator), empowers everything here.

Born in 1969 in the far north of Norway, Ørstavik came to the attention of Anglophone readers in 2014 with the publication of The Blue Room, the first of her several novels to be translated into English. In 1997 at the age of 28, she produced her third novel Kjærlighet or Love, now available in a brisk translation by Martin Aitkin. In a 2014 “Bookslut” interview, she said that she writes – and readers read – “not only ‘to understand’ but most of all ‘to be there.’ Thus the novel has to be an open space, the language has to be open, it has to be ‘enterable,’ as bodily as language can get.”

Being there for Ørstavik is not simply a matter of description, though she is prodigiously adept at employing what is acutely seen by her characters to suggest the texture and mobility of their awareness. But if we could understand the world just by looking at it, we would not need fiction. Provisional explanations fill the gap. For Ørstavik, novel-writing is a quest for the actual, not a proof of our mastery over it. What do we do in a situation removed from routine? We look, we feel an impulse to do this or that, to react with tact or indiscretion, to arrange a result. Ørstavik is a master of such micro-gestures and minutely essential insights. But she does not accumulate them into a monument to our communal brilliance. Her resolve cares little for such resolutions. She is preoccupied with the economies of form, with a sufficiency that suggests depth and beauty.

In Love, there is Vibeke, a single mother who has recently moved to a small town. She lives in the village just outside of town with her son Jon. The run-time of the story occurs from dusk to midnight. Vibeke returns home from her office:

 

She carries the bags into the kitchen, dropping the mail down on the table before filling up the fridge and putting some tins away in the cupboard. The engineer in the building department, the dark-haired man with the brown eyes, sat opposite her at the Culture Plan presentation. Her first project as new arts and culture officer. The cover was in full color, she’d insisted on it, an inspirational painting by a local artist.
She lingers at the table, drinking water from a glass.
It went off well, people came up afterwards and said how glad they were to have her aboard. Her presence spurred new visions, they said, opened their eyes to new potentials. The brown-eyed engineer had smiled at her at several points during the presentation. In the Q&A session he made a comment about being interested in extending interdepartmental collaborations.
She sweeps her hair away from her face, gathering it in front of her shoulder and smoothing it with her hand, pleased at how long it’s grown at last.

 

They eat a modest dinner. Vibeke does not hear Jon leaving when he goes out into the frigid night to sell some raffle tickets. The next day will be his ninth birthday. Vibeke bathes, prepares herself attentively, watches some television, departs for the library (she is an avid reader), realizes that it is closed, and wanders into the town’s winter “funfair.” Jon also wanders and encounters several people through the night. Vibeke does, too. A gratifying potential or a darker fate both seem pending. When Ørstavik writes “Her presence spurred new visions,” she is not satirizing the fatuousness of committee people. On the contrary, having visions is almost all we do with ideation. Love is a dream of reality in its ordinary strangeness, and thus the real deal.

Vibeke and Jon each enter the wintry evening with indefinite intentions among people they don’t know. After Jon sells all of his raffle tickets to one man, he drifts — is he vulnerable, in danger? Vibeke also slips into situations that, one imagines, could turn perilous. Is she naive?

The spoken presence of this novel engages the reader with a trance-like rhythm often occasioned by simple subject/predicate sentences, the adroit maintenance of tonal control, and the palpability of everything presented, including Jon’s youthful fantasies and Vibeke’s romantic intuitions. As a paragraph about Jon ends, a paragraph about Vibeke begins – their lives occur in tandem but not through interactions with each other. They are both sanguine, observant, wondering – and alone with their thoughts and dreams. At the funfair, Vibeke begins a sort of quest alongside a handsome enigma. Inevitably, the experiences of mother and son in the night must converge, if only in the lithe prescience of the narrator. They are free to explore the night, yet their ranges are limited by the most human factors.

Having begun with an emphasis on mood and psychological litheness, I have to add that by mood I don’t mean moodiness. Ørstavik’s style is based on a surrender to a certain sound that precludes the narrative conventions of commercial fiction. Love is ultimately a book about style — and the notion that not only does each of us have a style of thought, but that a style may be all we have. Vibeke’s style takes root in a hopeful desire to make herself open to someone; she imagines scenes that represent the pleasure to be found. Jon’s style, equally attentive, seems to absorb his world alongside images he has picked up from pop culture. Their minds leap from observed detail to a wish or a conclusion.

“What is lyric thought for?” asks Jan Zwicky in Lyric Philosophy. “For the discernment of lyric truth – the nature of the timeless, unlanguageable, resonant reality.” Now substitute the words ”lyric fiction” for “lyric thought.” Hanne Ørstavik’s exquisite Love, so elemental in its materials and technique, embodies a profound recognition – namely that every search for clarity and connection must proceed through the full awareness of what constrains us.

 

[Published by Archipelago Books on February 13, 2018. 128 pages, $17.00 paperback]