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Summary
Summary
"Expansive, intimate, and filled to the brim with delight, Gunnhild Oyehaug's first novel is devoted to the unexpected connections between lonesome individuals, mundane rituals, jellyfish, death, oversized men's shirts, and a thousand other things too astonishing to spoil in this sentence. I truly loved this wide-eyed, all-embracing wonder of a book." --Alexandra Kleeman, author of You Too Can Have a Body Like Mine
Sigrid is a young literature student trying to find her voice as a writer when she falls in love with an older, established author, whose lifestyle soon overwhelms her values and once-clear vision. Trine has reluctantly become a mother and struggles to create as a performance artist. The aspiring movie director Linnea scouts locations in Copenhagen for a film she will never make. As these characters' stories collide and intersect, they find that dealing with the pressures of their lives also means coming to grips with a world both frightening and joyously ridiculous.
Wait, Blink combines wild associations, quotations, coincidences, and other peculiar details into a unique tale that is both humorous and profound. Full of the playfulness that drew acclaim for her story collection Knots , Gunnhild Øyehaug's Wait, Blink --her first novel to be translated into English--is a jolt of desire and fantasy, romance and regret: a fable about what it means to own up to the weirdness inside us all.
Author Notes
Gunnhild Øyehaug is an award-winning Norwegian poet, essayist, and fiction writer. Her story collection Knots was published by FSG in 2017, and Wait, Blink has been made into the acclaimed film Women in Oversized Men's Shirts. She has also worked as a coeditor of the literary journals Vagant and Kraftsentrum . Øyehaug lives in Bergen, where she teaches creative writing.
Kari Dickson was born in Edinburgh, Scotland, and grew up bilingual. She has a BA in Scandinavian studies and an MA in translation. Before becoming a translator, she worked in theater in London and Oslo. She teaches in the Scandinavian department at the University of Edinburgh.
Reviews (5)
Publisher's Weekly Review
The disappointing latest from Oyehaug (following Knots), about the intersection of many lives in Norway, shuttles rapidly from character to character, sometimes for only a page before moving on. Sigrid is a young literature student hoping to distract herself from a recent breakup by throwing herself headlong into studying the trope of women who are depicted wearing oversized men's shirts in literary and visual media. In the opening, she's fixated on an author photo, and the novel transitions, somewhat clumsily, to the subject of the photo: older male novelist Kåre Tryvle, who has just broken up with his girlfriend, Wanda, a bassist whom he admiringly considers "the ultimate woman." By chance, Sigrid eventually meets Kåre, and they become romantically involved, even though Kåre's relationship with Wanda might not be over. Interspersed with Sigrid's narrative are those of Wanda, indignant and hurt over her and Kåre's breakup; Linnea, a young film director who's ostensibly in Copenhagen to shoot a movie, but is more concerned with chasing the memory of an older professor with whom she had an affair; and Trine, a feminist artist who finds her art and her outlook on life changed since the birth of her daughter. As the novel progresses-motivated by pursuit of love, or at least pursuit of meaningful lives without loneliness-these women's paths intersect and connections between them are uncovered. Suffused with cultural references, Oyehaug's novel has intriguing characters and sharp moments, though these are let down by trite themes and uneven prose, and the book as a whole tends to blend together. (June) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Kirkus Review
A delicate net of intermingled lives underpins this witty, spirited novel about creating: art, love, self-sufficiency, and identity.yehaug's (Knots, 2017) first novel translated into English, by Dickson in able and deceptively straightforward prose, follows a clutch of loosely connected women pursuing their artistic visions and contending with distraction, most notably the lack, presence, or loss of love. There's Sigrida literature student, "the kind...who has photographs of literary theorists on her wall"who's beset by all three. Earnest and lonely, Sigrid has just discovered the poetry of Kre, whose author photo she longingly rubs her cheek against just before chancing upon Kre himself while on a walk. Caught in the reflected glare of Kre's fantasies, Sigrid is blinded to her work and their incompatibilities, not least among them Kre's absorption in his ex-girlfriend Wanda, a bassist who hides her insecurity behind a badass exterior. Next there's Linnea, a young film director scouting locations and wistfully hoping to reunite with a past lover, whose primary connection to the others seems to be through Sigrid's essay in progress about the prevalence in film of women in oversized men's shirts. There's Wanda's friend Trine, a provocative performance artist and new mother who suddenly finds her methods and very drive for creation called into question. And finally, there's Elida, the fishmonger's daughter, also a literature student, who may be enmeshed in a fairy tale coming true. Rich with literary references and knowing authorial winks, is this "a perfect picture of inner life," our fractured, contradictory desires, our cinematic fantasies, our melodrama and unassuageable aloneness? One of yehaug's many gifts is to induce readers to gently laugh along with her at her characters, helping us, as we see our own absurdities in them, to gently laugh at ourselves.If it isn't precisely perfect, it's awfully damn close. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Booklist Review
In her first novel to be translated into English, Norwegian author Øyehaug explores how our perceptions of ourselves shape the way we interact with the world at large. To reveal her characters' core selves, Øyehaug uses their own thoughts as the drivers of the narrative. Twenty-three-year-old Sigrid's mind wanders all over: to oversize men's shirts and the women who wear them; to literary theorist Paul de Man; and, finally, to a photo of author Kåre Tryvle, with whom she feels an inexplicable connection (and who is, at that moment, pacing down the sidewalk and thinking of his ex-girlfriend). When Sigrid later ends up in Kåre's house (wearing an oversize men's shirt), Øyehaug is completing a circle: not just with plotlines but with our new understanding of how these characters' interior lives affect their relationships with others. Far from a meandering stream of consciousness, Øyehaug's writing incisively portrays the richness (and humor) of the inner self as well as the joy of recognition when two selves share the same vision of the world.--Amanda Winterroth Copyright 2018 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
Love is pursued straightforwardly in "Wait, Blink," Oyehaug's first novel to appear in English and the follow-up to her widely lauded story collection, "Knots." Every chapter offers a different consciousness: Sigrid, a dreamy young literature student; Kare Tryvle, the 43-year-old writer Sigrid adores; Wanda, Kare's bassist ex; a filmmaker named Linnea and her producer, Robert; Viggo, "a dreamer, a thinker, a lone wolf." Each character is striving for, and/ or reeling from, a heterosexual relationship. The standout is Trine, a performance artist and new mother who is forced to cancel her "masturbation performance" at the opening of an exhibition of "Women in Norwegian Art" when faced with a breast-pumping emergency. Trine relocates her performance to the museum's public bathroom, where she milks herself into a toilet, ft's an art monster move of the first order, but Trine is too exhausted and angry afterward to bask in her audience's patronizing admiration. "Wait, Blink" feels most organic in these moments of squalor and when its plotlines intersect, an impressive feat given that its narrators revel in serendipity and coincidence. Allusions to Dante and Cervantes clang interestingly against the novel's lively pop-culture riffs, among them a breakup occasioned by a feminist interpretation of "Kill Bill Vol. 2" and a scatological spoof of Sofia Coppola's "Lost in Translation." The form that most influences these pages seems to be the screenplay, and despite her stylish intelligence and sparkplug characters Oyehaug struggles to scratch the narrative's cinematic veneer. "Wait, Blink" has already been made into a film.
Library Journal Review
Obsessive, somewhat prissy literature student Sigrid ponders the significance of women wearing oversized men's shirts and falls for older poet Kåre Tryvle, believing that she can read his whole soul from the beautiful eyes in his author photo. Preening if clueless Kåre tries to strike the right image in front of an audience but profoundly mourns the end of his relationship with wire-taut Wanda, bassist in a rock band. Wanda looks tough but had tenderly feared for her love of Kåre when a conversation about Kill Bill: Vol. 2 clarified their differences. Linnea frantically plans a film, inspired by her affair with literature professor Göran, while producer Robert is too enamored of her to explain that funding has fallen through. Performance artist Trine wanted love and fame but got a child, while hapless Viggo tries to grow beyond childhood bullying and reconcile with his grandmother's death. In this absorbing, smoothly written work, Norwegian award winner Oyehaug (Knots) works by portraiture to delineate contemporary life, as characters cross paths, link and unlink, and don't always find happiness. -VERDICT Solid, discussable work for smart readers. [See Prepub Alert, 12/11/17.] © Copyright 2018. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
