Love by Hanne Orstavik

He sees the car's gone. Vibeke isn't in. Maybe something's happened. An accident. Vibeke doesn't like diriving 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 in flames and she's going to die from the pain. He tries to imagine how much it hurts when your skin's on fire... Then I'll have to have my birthday at the hospital, he thinks.

Vibeke, a middle aged divorcee, lives with her son, Jon, in a small town somewhere in Norway. They've moved recently, less than a year before the story begins. Their existence is spartan and somewhat sad--Vibeke spends most of her time reading (she may even outpace Chris since she's said to read 3-5 books a week) and thinking about herself. Jon spends his time ice skating at the sports club and dreaming about getting a train for his ninth birthday which, as it happens, is the day after the story in Love happens.

Vibeke is crushing on a man she saw at the library, and so decides to return her books early, only to find the library closed. As she walks to her car, she notices that a carnival has set up across the road, and walks over, not yet ready to return home to Jon. Jon, meanwhile, has left the house to sell raffle tickets for the sports club he's just joined, and in the course of things, meets an old man who invites him in to show him his handmade ice-skates, a girl who invites him to her room to listen to music, and a strange, androgynous person who offers him candy when they see him outside his locked house at midnight, Vibeke still being out at a bar some ways away with a man she met at the carnival.

Love is very widely acclaimed. It's won many awards, is frequently put forth as one of the greatest Nordic novels ever written, and is Hanne's defining work, and indeed, there's plenty to like here. The town, though we see it only in bits, feels realistic. a place where the library closes early on Wednesdays, the carnival doesn't have a Ferris wheel, and the closest late-night gas stations and bars are twenty kilometers away. The situations the characters find themselves in often have undertones of menace, but much like real life, nothing really awful ever happens; awkward and tense is the worst things get.

Love is, at heart, a story about people missing each other, in multitudinous ways. Jon and Vibeke's stories butt up against each other constantly. Though they really only share physical space in the first few pages, Vibeke is always on Jon's mind--sometimes her words must literally come out of his mouth, as when he tells the girl he met that she was divorced because "she couldn't be tied down". Jon, on the other hand, never crosses Vibeke's--she doesn't check to make sure he's in the house before she leaves for the library, nor when she returns at 4am or so. And even early on, when they're talking, she's not really there, as Jon tells her about some (horrific) photos he saw of men being tortured, she responds with platitudes and, we know, is thinking that she wants him to simply go away. The text itself also reflects the same tension, as the POV will change, sometimes mid-paragraph, often offering some ironic juxtaposition of their circumstances. And near the end of the book, the car carrying Jon and the truck carrying Vibeke nearly collide, though neither knows it and probably never will.

So why, ultimately, did Love not work for me? I've given it some consideration and I think the problem is twofold. First, the voice throughout felt, to me, rather monotone. Maybe a necessity given the way the text plays with the alternating narratives, but Jon's story tonally felt too similar to Vibeke's. There's a lot of noticing going on, where Jon or Vibeke think something like "X reminded them of Y. It was like Z. They noticed A and [several tiny details humans tend not to notice]". 

But more than that, I never really bought Jon or Vibeke as real characters. There are plenty of bad mothers out there, but how many of them would go a full 24 hours without even peeking into their 8 year old son's room? Similarly, there are a lot of precocious 8 year olds (I have one) but not many who would say things like "It just happens, that's all. In class, or something after school. I was in a role-playing club, but they only played historical games with Vikings and stuff. I'm more into science fiction" or repeatedly thinking about "titties". Ultimately, the interesting structure and clever parallels couldn't salvage a story about connection that I couldn't connect to.