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A breathless, propulsive look into the caustic sides of love, from the beloved Norwegian winner of the PEN translation prize and National Book Award Finalist.
Fear is a second skin for the unnamed narrator of Hanne Ørstavik's Stay With Me. A successful writer at 53, her father may be a frail twig, but the fear from her past, and of her father's rage, still envelopes her.
In urgent prose, the contours of her life emerge: a 12-year marriage, the death of her lover L, her troubled relationship with M — 15 years her junior and vexed with an all-too-familiar rage. We waver between our narrator's life and the life of Judith, the protagonist of her nascent novel. Judith is a Norwegian costume designer who falls in love with Myrto, a conductor in an orchestra, who she moves with to Minneapolis. Pulled between the cities of Minneapolis, Oslo, and Milan, and the voice of Judith and her own, our narrator writes with an unparalleled emotional intimacy.
What results is the recursive voice of someone gasping for breath: Who are Pappa, and M, without their rage? Who am I, without my fear? Who am I reaching for, when I reach for Judith? With Martin Aikten's careful translation, Hanne Ørstavik unravels the binds that fasten us to those we love — why we return despite immeasurable pain, and why we finally, justly, leave.
"[A] fascinating metafictional story of fear, love, and the desire to make art from life...[A]n intriguing literary double act." —Publishers Weekly (starred review)
"Norwegian author Ørstavik's latest reflects on how fear binds current relationships with previous ones, creating an emotional complexity that both unsettles the present and unravels the past...In this reflective and poignant novel, Ørstavik precisely depicts tension and unveils the relationships that live and die within the depths of our inner worlds." —Booklist
"What is so impressive is Ørstavik's ability to capture — with precision, candor and, indeed, tenacity — her shifting sense of self, as the foundations on which it rests crumble with every passing moment." —The Wall Street Journal
"The book reached us all. We were all seized by the acute questions the text posed. The existential questions, which no one living here and now can evade." —Gyldendal Prize jury
This information about stay with me was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Hanne Ørstavik published the debut novel Cut in 1994. Her literary breakthrough came three years later with the publication of Love (Kjærlighet), which in 2006 was voted the 6th best Norwegian book of the last 25 years in a prestigious contest in Dagbladet, and won the 2019 PEN Translation Prize. Her books Ti Amo, The Pastor, and now Stay with Me have made her one of the most celebrated contemporary Norwegian writers.
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In youth we run into difficulties. In old age difficulties run into us
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