on Near Distance by Hannah Stoltenberg, translated from the Norwegian by Wendy H. Gabrielsen
The term “disaffection” usually denotes a dissatisfaction with something institutional – a form of authority, an organization’s ideals, or a political agenda. Thus, “disaffected youth.” But perhaps more common to most of us is a disaffection with others and oneself, period. This latter attitude of disaffection simmers within Hannah Stoltenberg’s debut novel Near Distance, which was awarded the Tarjei Vesaas first book prize in 2019.
The conventional way of eliciting a reader’s empathy for disaffected characters is to cast them comedically or with a knowing wink. But Stoltenberg (b. 1989) shows no such interest, even as one is drawn closer to behaviors that seem uncomfortably familiar. First, there is Karin, a 53-year old jewelry shop manager living in Oslo, divorced and hooking up with men via dating sites. Soon we encounter her daughter Helene:
“She wants to have a good relationship with Helene, she really does, but it’s as if they can’t agree on what a good relationship means. Helene has clear demands, and seems to believe they’re justified, but it doesn’t feel right for Karin to give in to these demands purely and simply to be close to her.”
Of course, Stoltenberg knows that some readers will instantly respond ‘of course a mother should give in.’ But the narrator stays neutral and doesn’t offer more insight than a third-party (ie., any of us) could possibly know about others. We listen as this speaker describes Karin’s habits – her hygiene and grooming, what she eats and drinks, how she entertains herself when alone. Occasionally she gets together with friends or former workmates:
“She has no problem finding things to talk about and is a good listener, but afterwards she often feels distorted by her own words and wishes she had stayed at home. It doesn’t bother her to be alone. As long as your basic needs are covered – food, shelter, the possibility of intimacy – how much difference is there really between a good and bad life?”
Karin’s memories of her childhood and parents, few as they are, may point towards the source of her temperament (“It was a struggle to keep enough distance to be able to breathe”), but they don’t arise in the story as analyses. Stoltenberg wants us to linger in the space between freedom and inevitability – to register both the vivacity and vigilance in Karin. Of her latest bar-and-bedmate, Thorstein, we hear, “She has a feeling he took something from her; she can’t put her finger on what it is, she just knows she wants it back.”
[left — Hannah Stoltenberg]. Then, there’s a phone call from Helene – her husband Endre, she has discovered, is having an affair with a yoga instructor: “Helene’s desire to tell her was surprising, more surprising than Endre’s affair.” Would Karin accompany her to London for a few nights, just to get away? There they go shopping and meet some of Helene’s friends; in the shop, Karin “can’t bear the thought of being surrounded by people right when she desires an item enough to actually pay for it.” Stoltenberg trains the reader to watch and listen for the remark or description or action that adds one more tile to this mosaic. When one of Helene’s friends says it’s necessary to be “brutally honest” with oneself, she replies, “… you can never examine your faults from the right angle … You’re stuck with yourself as your starting point,” at which point “Karin realizes she’s being punished.”
In spots throughout the novel, there are subtle critiques of those who pursue “a greater truth than the one others lived by” – an acidic appraisal of self-deception posing as social enlightenment. But Karin and Helene aren’t portrayed as more astute alternatives. The novel’s original title is Nada, a word Helene flings at her mother when Karin says “I never demand anything” of her daughter. Helene: “You‘re the one who refuses to fit in, acting like you’re above everything and everyone the whole time.”
I came to a sentence that stopped me – to wonder and admire. On arriving at their London hotel, they are directed by a staff member who “shows them up a narrow staircase with oat-yellow wall-to-wall carpeting that absorbs the sound of their steps, but not of the creaking planks.” It was at this moment that Stoltenberg’s dual control of and surrender to the psyche of her novel most impressed me – a line too engrained in the telling to be just a metaphor.
[Published by Biblioasis on January 14, 2025, 160 pages, $16.95US/$22.95CAD, paperback]
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on The Holy Innocents by Miguel Delibes, translated from the Spanish by Peter Bush, with an introduction by Colm Tóibín
On the fourth day of Christmastide, the western Catholic church observes the Feast of the Holy Innocents, honoring the newborns murdered by King Herod who had been told that the “King of the Jews” had been born. In Miguel Delibes’ 1981 novel, the holy innocents are Spanish peasants living in the 1960s under the thumbs of wealthy landowners of Extremadura or Andalucía. The habits, toils, attitudes and speech of the working people comprise the core of the narrative. Organized in six “books,” The Holy Innocents is, as Colm Tóibín says in his introduction, “close to a fable, using brief scenes, much clipped dialogue, and a plain style.” Born in 1920, Delibes was part of a group of writers known as the Generation of 1936 who not only managed to keep publishing during Franco’s regime (1939-75) but frequently employed unconventional techniques. The Holy Innocents, for all of its “plain style,” moves with a quickened pace, abetted by an arrangement of text on the page that affords leaps between dialogue and everything else.
The novel opens with “Azarías,” an aging peasant who wanders around “barefoot mumbling to himself, with patches on his knees and on the seat of his corduroy pants and his fly unbuttoned.” He also pees on his hands “so they won’t get chapped.” Birds are his passion; he cares for a wounded “eagle owl” and calls out to birds in the woods who respond to him. In this chapter, Delibes wants us to live beside and follow the shambling Azarías whose depth of affection for a dying pet is pitched against the harshness of his circumstances, including an encounter with “the señorito” or the indolent, sneering son of the landowner. And so the antagonisms, quickly drawn between rich and poor, become fixed for the rest of the novel. But Delibes here is a humanist even more than a social critic, and a comedic spirit is part of his tonal spectrum, unlike Mario Camus’ resolutely serious 1984 film adaptation of the novel, which some regard as that director’s masterpiece.
The next major character is Shorty Paco, who would like his children, especially his 14-year old daughter Nieves, to be educated. He is approached by Crespo the Gamekeeper who takes him and his wife Régula to Don Pedro the Administrator for new work assignments. Régula is to guard the front gate of the estate, then clean out the turkey coops. Nieves is ordered to do housekeeping for the Señora, which hurts Paco. When Nieves says she wants to take First Communion, Don Pedro bursts out laughing. Next scene, Don Pedro accuses his wife of flirting with the señorito, as the story takes on an “Upstairs, Downstairs” aspect.
Paco is notorious for his acute sense of smell and his ability not only to follow the scent of a partridge, but in the process to distinguish male from female bird. As a boy he was trained to load rifles speedily to aid the hunters. Delibes’ hunting scenes become the novel’s harshest examples of class exploitation. The book titled “The Accident” begins:
“When the doves began their passage, Señorito Iván would stay at the Cortijo [farmstead] for several weeks, and every year by that date, Shorty Paco readied the pigeons and tackle and greased the swing for the decoy, so the moment the señorito appeared, they would be off in the Land Rover, down one trail after another, searching foer the birds’ hideouts, which changed according to the ripening of the acorns, but as the years went by, Shorty Paco found it harder to climb the holm oaks and when Señorito Iván saw him hanging awkwardly on a branch, he’d laugh
age forgives nobody, Paco, your backside keeps getting heavier and heavier, but that’s life for you …”
When one reads that “Don Pedro the Administrator showed up at Shorty Paco’s house, acting pompous as usual,” the unnamed narrator ‘s affiliation with the peasants is quite clear. Delibes wanted to emphasize that impoverishment and powerlessness were still rampant in the countryside – while suggesting, at the end of a hunting episode, that change could be pending. Yet by employing a folkloric telling, is he also suggesting that the portrayed conditions are embedded, timeless? For me, Delibes’ work also exerts and celebrates the freedom of the writer; in all The making of each of Delibes’ novels was based on devising a shape and sound suited for the particular task and materials at hand. The shapes and sounds themselves represent the freedom of the writer during an oppressive period of narrowing possibilities.
[Published by Yale University Press on May 13, 2025, 119 pages, $18.00 paperback]
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on Paris, So To Speak by Navid Kermani, translated from the German by Wieland Hoban
A male novelist recalls visiting a town to give a reading at a bookstore. At the book-signing table, a woman appears – it is Jutta, who not only had been the novelist’s lover 30 years previously when they were both teenagers (he was 15) but is also the lover depicted in the novel. After the reading, Jutta accompanies him to a dinner with others where, as she dominates the conversation, he realizes that she is the mayor of the town. Then, she invites him to her house for a glass of wine; she would like to introduce him to her husband and three children.
So begins Navid Kermani’s novel Paris, So To Speak, first published in Germany in 2016 during the peak of autofictional and meta-spiced enthusiasms. What follows is a long, looping conversation between writer and Jutta into the early hours, as recalled and glossed by the novelist. His post-adolescent infatuation with her persists: “All evening I’ve resented the totally untroubled way she looks at me, speaks top me and touches my arm; and the fact that her husband was even looking forward to meeting me is further evidence that they don’t take my passion particularly seriously.” Of course they don’t – they’re adults. Meanwhile, our novelist carries on with the reader about the three texts referenced here – the novel he read at the bookstore, the novel we are reading, and the novel he intends to write about Jutta’s marriage. Her marital life is the subject of their hours-long dialogue.
She and her husband, both doctors, were married in Ecuador where he was treating indigenous people. Now, Jutta reflects on the waning of passion, the recurrence of argument and reconciliation, and the ways in which their interests and tastes have diverged:
“She’s not actually speaking to me. At least slightly intoxicated by wine, marijuana and a fatigue that has given way to an easy, relaxed mood, she’s talking to herself, questioning herself, exposing herself to herself, provoking herself, saying a mixture of disjointed and sentimental things, coming up with explanations …”
Our novelist, who is divorced, cites Proust, Stendahl, Adorno and other writers to establish a basis for evaluating intimate relationships and from which he could depart for his own future novel on Jutta’s marriage. When he says, “I fear the reader will find the constant literary references somewhat laboured,” I respond: yes! He is clearly devoted to his own creatively circuitous noodling, and doesn’t seem to have the tools to deal with contradictions – Jutta insists she and her husband still love each other. It is as if his attempts at provoking Jutta are a kind of sidelong revenge, sharp interrogation designed to make her fall into his arms – which clearly isn’t in the offing.
Kermani is pulling off something here – as he both critiques and effectively employs the enclosure of meta-speak (and his novelist’s literary diversions) while managing to keep the reader engrossed in their conversation. At one point, he claims to have become so exasperated with her vacillations that he insists she must hate her husband, just as he hated his ex-wife; Jutta has no idea what he means and brushes him off. His attitude clarifies in asides like this:
“Our feelings are in conflict, I know it so well from my own experience – a constant, increasingly agonizing and seemingly intractable conflict – when two people are shackled to each other by children, through a shared everyday life and in their shared bed; however many wounds they inevitably inflict on each other when their love turns into coexistence, however many misunderstandings arise when one is in constant dialogue, time – the very fact of long and ever longer time – at once lends constancy to love, steels it against the moods that always come and go.”
But then there’s Jutta – and her family asleep in their beds as the two converse. For the novelist, the time with Jutta has been an opportunity to collect material for a novel. But for the reader, who may find his allusive narrative stimulating, the matter is more complex. And Jutta is the mayor of the troubled city of love.
[Published by Seagull Books on March 8, 2023, 228 pages, $24.95 hardcover]