“A beautiful, memorable novel about love and neglect … an achingly sad, unsentimental story about a mother and son both searching for solace over one long, bitterly cold evening. … Ørstavik brings us remarkably close to both her characters, shifting effortlessly between them in stark, lucid prose.”
Irish Times, UK
“Ørstavik builds a cinematic sense of dread out of the plainest prose, phrase layered on phrase with the hushed implacability of falling snow.”
The Guardian, UK
“Love does not disappoint. In fact, I was immediately lost to it, hooked within two pages, and already anxious about what was in store for the two convincingly drawn leads. … Written in a sparse, economical manner, this is a deceptively simple novel which avoids hyperbolic adjectives and sentimental summaries. But it is also a highly sophisticated piece, becoming emotionally profound as the increasingly interlacing viewpoints highlight the growing space between Jon and Vibeke”
The Big Issue, UK
“[A] haunting masterpiece … Ørstavik shifts from Vibeke to Jon with incredible dexterity, often jumping perspective from one paragraph to the next, and, as their seemingly mundane nights progress, a creeping sense of dread builds. The deceptively simple novel is slow-burning, placing each character into situations associated with horror—entering an unfamiliar house, accepting a ride from a stranger—and the result is a magnificent tale.”
Publishers Weekly, Starred review
“Love can change everything. And it does in this edgy, elegiac and beautifully written novel. Vibeke, a young single mother, and her son, Jon, live in a remote village in Norway. On the night before Jon’s ninth birthday, they set out, each with a goal: Jon, to let his mother bake his cake without him knowing, and Vibeke, to bump into a certain man she finds attractive. But Vibeke forgets Jon’s birthday, and Jon forgets his house keys. Over the course of the evening, the two characters’ narratives work together to expose the vulnerability of their affections; they mistake and misinterpret each other’s intentions, just as they miss each other driving by in separate cars on a lonesome road. What you think will happen doesn’t—and what does breaks your heart.”
Oprah.com
“Trim and electrifying … Orstavik’s mastery of perspective and clean, crackling sentences prevent sentimentality or sensationalism … [an] excellent novel”
New York Times
“Quite simply, exceptional… If this book is an indication of Orstavik’s talent, then translations of the rest of her work can’t come soon enough… [Love] is a short, suspenseful winter’s tale crafted in beautifully spare and precise prose. It can be read in a few hours but its singular effects haunt the reader for a long time afterward”
The Minneapolis Star Tribune, US
“Love is a deep and vibrantly alive novel… beautifully devastating… This is not your typical love story but rather the sharp-edged account of a boy whose need for attention from his heedless mother is heartfelt and full of yearning”
World Literature Today, US
“[I]n Love, the closeness of the perspectives, the cramming of them together, as if the mother and son are one person, and yet clearly not, feels less about narrative, and more about the limitations of love. We think we know another person, we feel settled in another person, and yet, perhaps every other consciousness is entirely a mystery. That’s the power of this particular book. The tiny emotional and atmospheric shifts are often barely perceptible, and yet they add up to much more.”
Los Angeles Review of Books
“It’s all here: Loneliness, longing, self-doubt – and the desperate but never ceasing will to change something”
Neue Züricher Zeitung, Switzerland
“A masterpiece of minimalist prose”
Süddeutsche Zeitung, Germany
“This book, this tiny story by Hanne Ørstavik, captivates you – and after you finish reading, it won’t let you go”
Frankfurter Neue Presse, Germany
“Magnificent”
Peter Urban-Halle, NZZ, Germany
“One hundred and twenty-six pages of suspense. What your fear will happen, doesn’t, but something else does, something much worse, No one can like Hanne Ørstavik show how painful lack of love is.”
La Stampa, Italy
“How so much mysterious power can emanate from little more than a hundred pages, is one of her wonders”
La Repubblica, Italy
“Love is one of those books that make us see the hidden life; while we read, and after we finish reading, our way of seeing the world will be changed. As if we finally really see, what we previously didn’t have the courage to see”
Marco Missiroli, author of The Sense of an Elephant
“Love is a masterpiece. Tight, hard, piercing, but at the same time tender and deep. A novel about the strongest feeling there is, love, and how the lack of it changes us radically and quietly … Love is a unique book. A rare gem. A novel you absolutely have to read”
Mattia Insolia, Mangialibri, Italy
“You can give it as a gift to anyone, and they will be absorbed”
Aftenposten
“Ørstavik describes these tense hours with a fine feeling for language. The tone is quiet, the words believable, the story captivating and engaging without turning into a tear jerker about broken family ties.”
Morgenbladet
”an extremely well-composed, linguistically precise, original, not to mention threatening story about the relationship between mother and child”
Aftenposten
”Excellent writing… Ørstavik writes out these suspenseful hours with a fine-polished linguistic nose. The tone is quiet, the words are credible, the story is gripping and engaging without degenerating into a tear jerker about broken family ties”
Morgenbladet
”The book is small in size, literary masterly and with a content that hits the reader right in the solar plexus”
Bergens Tidende
“Love is about longings, loneliness and the fact that everybody is alone. Because of this, the title has an especially strong effect. It is a thoroughly prepared, quiet, but very, very sad little novel … Love is simply a good book”
Adresseavisen
“With her book The Pastor one discovered Hanne Ørstavik, and the novel Love, recently released in French, confirms her talent”
Livres Hebdo
“Hanne Ørstavik follows to people in parallel, illuminates their wondering and makes tension rise, page by page. The result is a terrifying novel which sends a chill down one’s spine, and leaves no one unaffected!”
Madame Figaro
“In a few pages, that are reminiscent of a sort of fairy tale, with both an enchanting and a disturbing dimension, Hanne Ørstavik creates a touching novel of precise and relevant language. Laboriously, she describes how language builds its own reality, how mother and son live in separate worlds. A wonderful and poetic book about loneliness and the search for love.”
La Gazette Nord-Pas de Calais
“Hanne Ørstavik pulls the reader along until the very end, leading us astray, and tricking us to imagine the continuation of events, before she takes the story in a different, though not more comforting direction.”
La Croix
“As so often before, solemnity is a condition for sensitivity. Hanne Ørstavik has used this principle to perfection, and gives us a novel that is simple and subtle, meditative and gripping.”
L’Humanité
“Love explores the insurmountable distance between people, the elementary impenetrability of them, and tells us about the difficulty of reading the signals of others. In short, dry sentences, Ørstavik relates all the postponed, the possibilities that hang over our lives.”
Avant-critiques
“Hanne Ørstavik succeeds in describing every little thing her characters do, and lets us feel the pressure of a white, freezing, deadly world. The alternation between points of view, and the time perspective (one single night) gives this heartbreaking text a surprising density. (…) Love fortifies the extraordinary talent of this author (born 1969), which behind closed doors, without special effects, describes how loneliness and loss of communication interact and interplay.”
Télérama, ***
