Stay With Me is a brief novel, but the whole is overshadowed by fear. The narrator, a Norwegian novelist living in Milan, recalls her childhood in the book’s opening pages, the constant threat of her father’s violence, its eruptions the more fearsome for being random, unpredictable. “The world was hard. Wrong was wrong. When it could have been right. Afraid was a state of being. I don’t know when it started. All I know is that I was afraid, afraid was a skin beneath my skin that couldn’t be shed.”
Hanne Ørstavik’s novel addresses the question of whether a fear that springs from such a deep well can ever be shed. The nameless narrator is a widow; a year earlier her husband, an Italian musician referred to as L, died far too young. She is not free of her grief, but she meets M, who at 35 is 17 years younger than she is, and embarks on an affair. He is removed from her world of music and literature and gallery openings; his ambition is to own a Land Rover Defender. The contrast frees her from herself to a certain extent, and what’s not to like about hot sex with a younger man? But she questions his desire for her and she comes to fear the rage that can erupt from him, an echo of what she witnessed as a little girl.
In parallel, the narrator is writing a novel, about “Judith” and “Myrto”, characters who reflect her own life and that of her late husband, tracking the rupture that follows his death. So she works on her book and meets her lover, and when she can she visits her now-elderly father, much diminished from the terrifying figure of her childhood. These strands are interwoven in this consciously literary tale: recollections of the narrator’s childhood (the most powerful, most vivid sections of the book), her largely unsatisfying experiences with M, and her struggles with the novel-within-the-novel.
As the story moves forward – at least within its limited confines – the pressure of fear felt in childhood weighs heavily, and not only on the narrator. The reader learns that M’s rage comes from his own brutalised childhood, and that the narrator’s Pappa, too, suffered at the hands of his own parents. The narrator’s mother is an elusive presence; it turns out that she left the family when the narrator was a toddler, hoping to pursue higher education; the scar of this early abandonment lingers. This is territory that Ørstavik, one of Norway’s most lauded novelists, has made a theme of her work. In Love, first published in English in 2018, a mother and her young son orbit each other but never connect; it is set in Norway’s far north, adding an additional chill to the narrative. In The Blue Room, a young woman is locked away by her mother when she threatens to break free from the maternal grasp.
But Stay With Me lacks the haunting claustrophobia of these earlier works and suffers from the generic quality of some of the prose and a tendency towards a self-help tone. Here’s the narrator on her longing for her lover M: “It’s as if those eyes have seen all the world’s pain, every kind of sorrow, as if they feel everything that hurts … and at the same time they can be so warm, so full of goodness, so gentle”. One never knows, reading fiction in translation, what might be lost in the gap between languages, but in English this is bleakly anodyne and unrevealing. The narrator reflects on her mother’s absence: “I’ve never addressed it,” she says of her loss; the paragraphs that follow read therapeutically rather than imaginatively. “If there was something important in all that” – her last recollections before her mother left – “wouldn’t it have made itself known?”
One longs, reading this novel, for the ruthless self-excoriation of Annie Ernaux, or the penetrating bluntness of Rachel Cusk. The brittle clarity of Ørstavik’s earlier work is missing here, blunted by trauma that has yet to be alchemised into fiction.
• Stay With Me by Hanne Ørstavik is translated by Martin Aitken and published by And Other Stories (£14.99). To support the Guardian and the Observer buy a copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
