Stay with me by Hanne Ørstavik

Stay with Me by Hanne Ørstavik

Danish fiction

Original title – Bli hos meg

Translator – Martin Aitken

Source – subscription edition

I am a huge fan of Hanne’s earlier books. I have reviewed Love and The Blue Room by her before. I had a strange thing when I picked this up the other day. It was as though other books in my TBR pile had dripped down into this book a violent father I had come across a few weeks ago in My Favourite and then a woman in her fifties like the main character in the last book I had read had read a point in her life where she is going be alone this is a widow that then takes a younger lover.

They never touched each other, caresses, there was no tenderness between them. Mamma thought Pappa was senti-mental, pathetic, pitiful, and at the same time she was afraid of him, afraid to death, there’d been that business with the axe out in the fields in the snow, in the middle of the night, Pappa had been drinking home-made vodka (so Mamma said, he went mad, ran wild and jumped over the stone wall, I can see it in my mind’s eye, over the wall in one leap, in the snow, so young and strong and lithe he must have been then, Pappa, younger than M is now, thirty-three or thirty-four, but now Pappa tells me it wasn’t like that at all, he hadn’t touched a drop, and he hadn’t gone mad either, the axe part had been misunderstood, he hadn’t been going for anyone but had taken the axe with him to use as a gavel, like in court, to emphasise something, a standpoint

The memory of her father and the axe

We live in the age of the unnamed narrator. We meet a Norweigan writer in Italy just as she has lost her husband a year before, and then she sets out on the dating scene again and falls for a man who is seventeen years younger than her. This is one of those c connections that is explosive; the connection is intense. It is like the pull of a powerful magnet, and what happens when you try to pull apart a magnet for the attraction? There has to be a counter effect to that, and this is when her younger lover a plumber by trade has an other side appears a darker side that then in a way awakens a memory of her own past He Papa a violent drunkard of a man. A memory of him with an axe and the outcome of that. Our narrators is also writing a story of a Norweigan designer living in The us and with her husband so when n the street, mistrust and horror that follows the violence she had seen when younger and again with her younger lover it questions what love is like Orstavik has done in her other books.

The days that follow – he’s so quiet. You’re so quiet, I say, and he musters a smile, as if he’s pleased and ever so slightly proud that I’ve asked, about him, the person he is, doesn’t he know I’m always interested in the person he is, only now I’m asking in order to draw him out towards me, towards us. You don’t know me yet, he says, the person I am, my caratteraccio, and he looks at me. His bad temper, okay, but I’m not really listening, and imagine anyway that his softness will come out stronger, its the softness that’s most important, truest, it’s what we are, we’re the nakedness at our core,fragile

When you see a little of his temper maybe a ripple to the past is awakened

What happens when there is a moment when the dream romance turns sour and you see the real face of your younger lover, and it is the same face you saw as a young child in your father. Does history repeat itself? Had the younger man part of what her mother maybe saw in her father? Does fear fall down through generations? Hanne captures the feeling of love crumbling into fear and something much darker, as well as the echoes of one’s past. I was reminded of the rages I saw of my stepfather, a man with many issues who was extremely violent to his own kids. That fear never leaves you and also makes you wary. I question how the same mistakes can fall down through time. But also, what is love? Is it passion because the passion at the star is passion, but is that love? I feel our narrator had love. When you lose it, how hard is it to find it again? At fifty years old, setting sail again on the sea of love can be a really choppy trip when you meet a man who turns out to be a Tempest for her. Have you read any of her books over the years ?