There was much to enjoy here, but I found I couldn't connect with it. I'd read more from this author in the future though.

Following a group of tenuously connected characters, this is a novel about art, artists and the relationships between them. In fact the novel itself is like a interactive piece of art that I just couldn't find an access point to get into. While much of it is beautifully written, other parts seemed very self-consciously "Art". I appreciated the effort but struggled to finish.

I received a copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.

This book may not be for everyone, but I enjoyed the short vignettes, the cast of characters, and the thread that weaves them together.

A microscopic view of many characters whose inner lives and thoughts are laid bare for us, and whose paths just may or may not cross. A peculiar and often humorous journey that puts in perspective life views that we often have ourselves; those from within our own heads.
The writing is precise, the plot is multidimensional in the extreme. Within the characters, you are sure to find at least one that you can personally relate to, and perhaps one that downright annoys you! This one is unique.

An exercise in good writing, even if the story is not my cup of Don Quixote. Thanks to the publisher for the ARC.

Wait, Blink could've done with longer chapters. Bouncing around so many different characters felt difficult-as soon as I connected all the dots and learned something new about their personality it was off to another mind. It felt like a shame because the writing was truly fantastic and I loved the internal voices.

I read a lot of translated texts, so I am familiar with the common issues enough to get over any humps and continue on. However, something about this text made it difficult for me to get through. It was a bit slow, it was a bit too reflective. I felt like all the inner exploration Sidrid did stalled the story and took away from the overall plot.

'What a typical situation that she should try to understand and understand and that everything should have meaning and more meaning, but that the only understand she could get was from a pair of eyes on the back of a book, or the stars over the mountains at night- it strikes her as she sits there with a book in front of her, and the walls suddenly feel like walls and the ceiling feels like a ceiling, as sometimes happens when the magic of the moment when you feel there is hope disappears and all that remains is this: walls, and ceilings, and walls and ceilings'.

A story of intersections, this first English-language translation of award-winning Norwegian author Gunnhild Øyehaug has gorgeous writing, the challenge may lie for some readers in how the novel flits from one character to the next. There is no denying the insights into each life, emotional states, longings, hopes, and regrets. The narration was difficult to transcend for me, which is a shame because the depths the author goes to in exploring what is happening in the hearts and head space of her characters is flawless. Take Sigrid, there is much amusement in her thoughts about the vulnerability of women in film and literature, and I’ll be damned if the whole oversized male t-shirt tidbit isn’t, in fact, true. The most important musings are really about her feelings for the author’s photo on a book and the fact that later in the novel they meet. Film director Linnea struggles with the frustration of what she wants to express in her films, the impossibility of it all, as with many of her wishes in life, as if met only by an insurmountable wall. As she longs for Göran, he too, asleep beside his wife, wishes he were in Copenhagen . Then we cut to Trine, the performance artist, regretting the aggression of her latest ‘artistic expression’. Why has she allowed herself to love someone? How will motherhood affect her art?

Then we flash back ten years ago to Viggo, crashing on his bicycle. Falling in love, trying to ‘unwind out of himself’, and then a loss all the while pondering on Dante. The novel does a lot of hopping around, which can lose some readers. There is a lot of thoughts about films, and the female’s role in them throughout, certainly something to chew on. A ‘quarrel’ between the characters Käre and Wanda about the relationship between the Bride (Uma Thurman) and Bill, a movie that has a lot of arse-kicking women, and how ‘conventional’ her admiration of Bill seems to be. But why is she, really, so bothered by this scene, why does it birth fears for her own relationship with Käre? Jealousy eats at her, though she is a sort of superwoman, strong-minded, like any other human being she has her weaknesses.

This book is steeped in self-reflection, Linnea longing over a past affair, when her mind should be on her film, Trine struggling with her art, now a mother, self-doubt overwhelming her, a sort of love triangle between Käre, Wanda and Sigrid. Käre isn’t sure of his own heart, but when he is, there is nothing for it, sometimes you have to break hearts for happiness. Then there is Viggo, lots of trembling for our Viggo, a character I enjoyed, and just who is this Elida, the fishmongers’ daughter dreaming of being in Viggo’s strong arms, treasuring his lost tooth ten years later? Maybe there are some happy endings here within, ” And one would wish that everything was like that, always. But then things always slide, out and out!” I wonder if there are other novels by Gunnhild Øyehaug that aren’t as populated, that doesn’t move too fast when you just begin to dive into the telling, begin to cozy up with the characters because her writing really is provocative. It’s simply a matter of feeling overwhelmed and dizzy with not being still long enough, and the narrator, thinking much of the time what is up with the narrator? Aw, it all makes sense at the end, but still… I’m not sure every reader will have the patience, I don’t know if something was lost in translation, or if it’s the style that makes it difficult to flow with. I enjoyed it, but keeping up was a chore at times. I would like to read another novel by the author because she clearly has a lot to say about love, the female role in life, and the general struggles we all face, how we are often in our own way.

Available now

Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Wait, Blink is an English translation of a Norwegian novel of interwoven stories of a group of woman pursuing their ambitions.
Not much happens externally in the novel in terms of plot, but instead the reader is led through the minds of these women, experiencing their triumphs and disappointments. I found the prose very readable and was swept up in the often meandering thoughts of the characters. I found all of the characters interesting, sometimes feeling frustrated at the very human flaws, other times highly sympathetic to their failures. I found one of the characters particularly relatable, some of her thoughts and flaws hitting very close to home! This is the kind of novel that reminds us of shared human hopes and fears.
I didn’t find the ending particularly effective as there wasn’t really a strong story to end, but overall I really enjoyed this book.

I really wanted to like this book. I usually love Norwegian writers but most I’ve read have been mysteries. I’m not exactly sure in what category I would place this book. Overall, it was rather confusing with so many characters and dated in references (I realize this is because the translation was done 10 years after the book was written). Perhaps it’s due to the translation, but the narrative didn’t flow smoothly for me. I enjoyed some parts and other parts frustrated me.

This was a weird reading experience. It starts out as a collection of character studies of various people that are often connected. There is discussion of the meaning of art, contemporary life, literature, movies, being an artist and over-analyzing art. That was sort of nice. However, was already irritated by the pacing. The scenes changed too quickly to fully remember who is who, but not quickly enough to call it a character mosaic. And the random deep philosophy and rapid scene changes confused me and interrupted the reading flow.

While this first part introduced a lot of characters, the middle part focused on just two of them. As this was a more traditional narrative, I liked it a little better. But the connection to the first half puzzled me: why make me read about all of them when you are just going to focus on two that don't even have a clear or direct relationship with all the other people from part one?

However, it was the narration and the ending that made me decide on the low 2/5 star rating. Beside the jumpy timeline (sometimes going from present day to 10 years ago, sometimes going as far back as Dante) and the constant philosophy, which made reading hard, the narrative situation just confused me. Apparently, dominantly towards the end, the narrator appears to be a self-aware, very omniscient, 4th wall breaking "we" narrator. And in the last chapter, the reader finds out why: the narrators this whole time have been female characters from the "Divina Comedia" and "Don Quixote". Both books were referenced in this story, but why these women had to be the narrators, I simply did not comprehend.

Overall, it was a very modern and artsy book that made some bold choices in style, but ultimately confused me more than it delighted me.

I realize that writing styles in Europe are different than in America and some things just won’t translate well. Perhaps, like the story’s obsession, something was Lost in Translation. And maybe if I had seen that movie or Kill Bill I would have enjoyed this book more. I doubt it. I have read Dante’s Inferno and it didn’t help. The characters are excessively dramatic and over the top. At one point one is worried about how her marriage will last if he is a day drinker. This is when the two characters just meet. Later there is an entire chapter about a woman who was involved in a car accident earlier in the book. No, it has nothing to do with the story. It was an incident viewed by other characters. But an entire chapter is devoted to her and a dream she had the prior night. Why? It didn’t help that I didn’t like the writing style. Characters and events were presented as though on display for us. Or, in one case, not on display. But that took two paragraphs to tell us where the character wasn’t. Several possible interesting stories were begun during the course of the book but it never felt like any were followed to conclusion.

I didn't love the translation for this book. It seemed clunky and oddly formal at times. I'm not sure if that was intentional or not but it made it hard to connect with the book.

This innovative novel of inter-woven stories from Norwegian writer Gunnhild Øyehaug highlights the lives of three characters – and leaps back in time, at times, when viewing the one. There’s also some authorial intrusion as the narrator describes, “Here we see Paul de Man …” and so on, and also jumps to the future occasionally letting us have sneak peaks at another time to come.
From Sigrid, a young literature student fascinated by the writer Paul de Man, to movie director Linnea to Trine, a performance artist who has recently become a mother, to the enigmatic Viggo, the novel weaves and loops through each of their stories and lives. Coincidences stretch through and there’s a certain enjoyment in following each characters’ journey and the inner life that is revealed in writing that is witty and playful at times too: “He was supposed to hear the sound of him and Wanda forever, he was supposed to hear the sound of Wanda getting out of bed before him and going to the kitchen to read the paper and make coffee, he should have heard that sound every morning and held on to it, and not be sitting in a cafe looking into Sigrid’s brown eyes, which have green rings around their irises, and because he’s now lost in the thought that he’s lost the inner game, he doesn’t hear Sigrid say enthusiastically that what they’re seeing now is the kind of situation that Daniil Kharms, a Russian author she adores, uses to portray the absurdity of existence, like watching someone gesticulate in a telephone booth!” Subtitled A Perfect Picture of Inner Life, that’s exactly what you are getting in this rather unusual, novel work.

WAIT, BLINK (2018)
Gunnhild Øyehaug
Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 288 pages.
★★★★

Late in Gunnhild Øyehaug's Wait, Blink Dante is walking through the icy reaches of hell and encounters the heads of each of the major characters in the novel. Virgil tells him to leave them alone; Dante covers them with snow and moves on. It is an apt metaphor as each individual lives so much in his or her head that they are, in a sense, disembodied. They are certainly isolated and alienated from all things collective.

Øyehaug's novel is partly a literary delight and partly a philosophical journey reminiscent in tone (but not content) of Robert Pirsig's Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. It's also an offbeat exploration of postfeminism, a slippery term that generally accentuates lacunae and contradictions within feminist theory. Øyehaug's work—translated from Norwegian—will reward the patient reader and frustrate those who simply want to chow down on a page-turner. This one is definitely not the latter; in fact, there are (literally) sentences in the introductory sections of the book that took up an entire screen of my Kindle.

We meet four women, each in inappropriate relationships with older men, though age probably wouldn't matter to anyone in this novel. As suggested above, for the most part these are people held prisoner by their own inner thoughts, musings, and fears. They are the sort who end relationships because of disagreements over Sofia Coppola films or the deeper meaning of Kill Bill 2—movies certainly open to interpretation, but probably not the kind that would cause most folks to suffer existential crises. But our characters are not most people.

Sigrid is a 23-year-old literature student who lives in dreams and metaphors. She has a picture of literary theorist Paul De Man on her wall, as well as a poster of Van Gogh's painting of sunflowers, though she's a bit embarrassed by the latter as many her circle would find those sunflowers trite and clichéd. Read what you want to in the fact that one of De Man's most heralded works is titled Blindness and Insight. Sigrid is a fragile thing that can never trust herself—each insight generates its doubting opposite. Øyehaug casts her as akin to Dante's Beatrice, a symbol of sublimation. She is obsessed with film images of women wearing oversized men's shirts* and ponders its feminist implications.

Sigrid will eventually drift toward author Kåre Tyvle, twenty years her senior, who is also plagued by self-doubt and is in mourning for his broken relationship with Wanda, a free-spirited bass player. Wanda also aches with loss, but can either she or Kåre break through the intellectual fissures that drove them apart? Moreover can Wanda ever live up to the post-breakup pedestal upon which Kåre has placed her?

Twenty-something Linnea poses postfeminist challenges. On the surface she's a self-driven and determined filmmaker. In private she's been involved with 47-year-old Göran, a married literature professor who is obsessed with his own views on literary theory and his own ego—though given the nature of this novel, he's also weak and crippled by all doubts that go bump in the night. Linnea's drive blinds her to many things, including the unlikelihood things will go anywhere with Göran, or that she has a hangdog suitor in 51-year-old Robert, ostensibly her producer, but one lacking the courage to declare himself or to tell Linnea her film will never be made.

Our cast rounds out with 28-year-old Trine, an explicit performance artist, but one whose private life doesn't match her image; she's estranged from the father of her child and how can she possibly perform genital-content art when her breasts are so swollen with milk that she's in pain? And then there's Elida, a fishmonger's daughter, who first saw Viggo when she was 9 and he 19, attending his grandmother's funeral, bloodied, and missing a tooth from a bicycle spill. She's pined for him ever since, but Viggo still carries ghosts and terrors. The wild card in the mix is Magnus, the ex of several women in the novel.

If you get the sense that Wait, Blink is a danse mélancolique, you are correct. The very title words pop up in various and unusual places and, like most things in the novel, are metaphors for the situations in which the characters find themselves. All of them, by the way, seem to have read Cervantes, Dante, Ibsen, and Kafka—among others. You can draw conclusions from that, just as you can mine the entire book for archetypes, symbolism, and metaphors. What does Øyehaug want us to take away from this? What is her overarching view of modern feminism? I'd be lying were I to say I'm sure of any of that, but if it was her goal to make us put aside assumptions and contemplate such things, she has succeeded in spades. Let me reiterate; you need to put on your thinking hat for this one.

Rob Weir

It is a random and unexpected encounter that brings the student Sigrid and the author she has been admiring for years together. They are mutually attracted immediately and in a café try to get closer without revealing too much of them at first. Trine, however, is ready to reveal a lot as a performance artist who works with her body. But she is struggling with being a mother. Another couple is somehow trying to imitate a film scene which is originally set in Paris but transferred to Copenhagen by the director Linnea. It is just a short glance at their lives, but we see the decisive moment that has to potential to transform everything.

I was eager to read “Wait, Blink” since I usually like the Scandinavian way of telling stories. However, I couldn’t really get into the novel. I assume this is due to the fact that there is not one story, but several quite independent stories are told alternatingly and I was always waiting for the moment in which they connect and form a whole which I didn’t really find.

The scenes about Trine were hardest for me since this character is quite unique and I could hardly follow her thoughts and actions. I liked Linnea and her idea of reproducing “Before Sunrise” – “Before Sunset” in her own life. Sigrid is not really a sympathetic character, but I could link with her thoughts and her struggle to appear as a strong and independent woman while she is actually insecure and afraid of human beings.

Even though the content did not really convince me, I adored Gunnhild Øyehaug’s style of writing. She has found an exceptional tone for her narration and the way of the narrator to talk to you as the reader like he was a good friend and his slightly ironic undertone were great to read. Øyehaug shows what she is capable of and I am looking forward for another novel by her.

what an interesting read! All the characters were so tantalizing to read about. This is a quick beautifully written story, and I highly recommend it if you have a few hours to be captured by a really great book! Thank you to Netgalley and Farrar, Straus and Giroux Publishers for the perusal...

I knew that this book was general fiction but you needed a playbook to keep all the people straight, Sigrid, Trine, Wanda, Elida, Virgil, Robert, Kåre, Gōran. Changing characters after two of three pages. It was crazy to follow for the first few chapters. Bringing George W. Bush into it, to tell Kåre's golf story, and then Dante and Viggo are also brought into the story, to tell Elida's story of snow and ice. There's no real action in the story. I believe this story was completely noir in it's telling.

A playful, lighthearted novel that deals with interconnected people and their relationships , plus some Divine Comedy references. Unusual and lovely.