Knots: stories

 

Knots: stories / Gunnhild Oyehaug
trans. from the Norwegian by Kari Dickson
NY: Picador, 2018, c2004.
176 p.

I was a little disappointed in this one. I read Oyehaug's novel Wait, Blink last year, and really enjoyed its cleverness and characters. So I wanted to read these stories this year. But I wasn't as taken by these. Perhaps so many surreal, edgy stories at once was what turned me off a bit. This collection is a mix of very brief stories and longer ones -- the extremely brief ones were interesting just because of their form, and some of the longer ones were able to develop the characters a little more, so that I felt more invested.

But the themes got tired for me. Lots and lots of sex; many of the stories were just about sexual encounters or thoughts, not much else. It felt like some of the stories were adolescent - the later novel is much more developed in style and approach. 

There were a couple of stories that stood out; one, in which a man is born with an uncuttable umbilical cord so is forever tethered to his mother, and all the outcomes of that, is satisfyingly odd and surreal. There's a touch of humour as well which was appreciated. In another short one, a tipsy uncle makes a speech at a wake, speaking about the moment that the deceased had met her husband and the likelihood of their pairing -- for a moment an entire family is on the brink of having never existed at all. The concept was clever and entertaining; who hasn't thought about the great unlikeliness of one's parents' meeting and your own resultant chance existence?

This is a small book, easily read in one sitting, although I'd recommend against that as it's a bit of a surfeit of one author to do so. A story or two at a time, with a break, allows the stories to stand out more as individual pieces. There were some intriguing stories here but for me it isn't as strong a collection as I'd hoped.