“A great writer … The novel keeps the reader in a tight grip”
5/6 stars, Fædrelandsvennen, Reviewers’ books of the year 2011
“[Ellenes’] best novel so far finds its material in a French gymnasium with as school class of Norwegian boys. But in addition to being a bildungsroman, it is also a novel of how a life is created through text.”
Hamar Arbeiderblad, Books of the year 2011
“a novel which reaches for the intangible, a novel which wants to catch another atmosphere, another time, the loneliness, distance and estrangement that arises in an encounter with another language, other customs, other systems … It is on this level that the novel is exceptionally good … The prose is tender and thoughtful … Ellenes is an elegant stylist who throughout his works has been picking up impulses from the French roman nouveau and domestic modernist traditions … [his great breakthrough] should come; this is a writer who should be talked about also outside of inner the circles of literary Norway.”
Dag og tid
“Øyvind Ellenes’ fine novel Four Hundred French Insults is cinematic, poetically bleak and – not least – enormously confident in its execution … most of all the novel says something about how difficult it is to put a life into writing … Ellenes writes like a film director as he slides in and out of different perspectives. That creates great images … absolutely one of the best novels of the previous year.”
Vårt Land
