Commentary |

Evil Flowers, stories by Gunnhild Øyehaug, translated from the Norwegian by Kari Dickson

The Norwegian writer Gunnhild Øyehaug is familiar to American readers largely thanks to Lydia Davis, who first translated her into English. That offers a clue to Øyehaug’s appeal, but it’s also somewhat misleading. Like Davis, Øyehaug often writes miniatures, pieces that qualify as poems as much as short fictions — one story translated by Davis, “Same Time, Another Planet,” is a trim, lyrical two-paragraph work about a couple on another planet breaking apart. You can see Davis recognizing Øyehaug’s gift for compression, and the plainspoken voice that has a hint of something broken in it, a hidden wound a close reading will uncover.

But Øyehaug also writes funnier and darker material, and takes more overtly metafictional approaches — you have to look to early postmodern types like Robert Coover and Donald Barthelme to find short stories as fluid, springy, and resistant to convention, while still attentive to emotional effects. Her second collection, Evil Flowers, opens with the kind of stop-you-cold opening line that pomo’s first wave specialized in: “As I sat on the toilet menstruating, a fairly large part of my brain fell down into the toilet bowl.” The narrator is an ornithologist, and the part of her mind that’s been flushed away contains her knowledge about birds. Øyehaug sees the humor in her newfound obliviousness (“These were creatures that could actually fly!”). Thematically, though, it stays focused on loss. The nature of the absence the narrator experiences is open to interpretation: When she refers to the “kind of grief you feel when something you have lost exists,” are we reading an allegory for abortion, misscarriage, stillbirth? A study of the limits of knowledge? A sketch of maternal anxiety? All, or none, might apply.

Many of the stories in Evil Flowers similarly dismantle and reconstitute narrative structures, questioning the need for a story to have a unitary message. A story about a dying woman in a nursing home, “Thread,” prompts follow-up stories questioning the perspective the author took in the original piece. One story, “The Back Door,” invites this retort: “Unhappy endings drive us nuts, and we think that people who are let out a back door, without even knowing they’re being shown to the back door, should be given a prize.” The narrator of these protests tends to write in the royal we, as if passing judgment on Øyehaug’s choice of tropes, metaphors, and plot devices. But it’s not a final judgment, or even criticism; the protest of story is a kind of story in itself. Øyehaug isn’t satirizing fiction — she takes her job seriously. But she wants to question the nature of our emotional responses to it.

It’s perhaps unsurprising, then, that the word “analysis” — and analysts as characters — appear often in this short book. And equally unsurprising that their authority is shaky. (One story, “The Nordics Seen From the Outside,” features a gloomy “analysis department [that] lies in the soporific half-light.”) The royal-we story analysts of the protest stories are a touch irritable, railing about character and structure, or echoing the reader’s sense of disorientation. In the second of two (!) stories about a landscape constituted with and overrun by slime eels, a narrator interjects: “We understand that you might fumble to find some kind of explanation, as we have done — and get no further than the rather cold consolation that sometimes life feels like everything you touch turns into slime eels.”

Slime eels are just one species in the menagerie of creatures Øyehaug recruits; there are also those aforementioned birds, a lion, a dove, leeches, and “a clod of midges who can read thoughts.” All are, in a way, Trojan horses — ways to playfully draw the reader’s attention into strangeness, put the human elements into relief, and draw our attention to the constituent pieces of metaphor, structure, and narration. (Another Scandinavian author, Karin Tidbeck, is similarly skilled at this, working more in a science fiction mode.) And once she’s done that, she enjoys tweaking our assumptions about what a story means by “reality.” In the title story, the narrator is introduced as a bus driver overhearing a conversation about “evil flowers.” But we’re then informed that the narrator is not a driver, that the conversation doesn’t exist. Only the flowers exist, or don’t: “Here, in this text, they are very real. And they are therefore also true.”

This confusion, in Øyehaug ’s hands, creates its own kind of tension. “By the Shack” opens as a somewhat familiar tale of three people stranded after a plane crash, and the need to construct the expected beats around this predicament —desperation, or salvation — leads one character to question their existence as anything but narrative, to propose storytelling as an escape hatch: “We’re all characters in one another’s stories, this is most probably a text that’s been posted online where we’re separate links to other stories, like hypertext, which means if we click on one another, we’ll be on to the next story, let’s try! She said, frantically, and looked at us. Click on me!”

Spoiler alert: Clicking on each other doesn’t work. There are no easy exits from our struggles, and fiction’s suggestion of alternatives can only be a comforting lie. The writers Øyehaug references across Evil Flowers speak to her enchantment with the subjectivity of experience (Virginia Woolf) and its essential grotesqueness and cruelty (Baudelaire, whose pioneering prose poems her writing echos somewhat.); her debut collection, 2017’s Knots (first published in Norwegian in 2004) referenced deconstructionist Roland Barthes. Yet for all its intellect and effort to tinker with narrative, very little of Evil Flowers feels airily schematic or dryly satirical, the way much postmodern writing does. She can be overtly playful, as in “Escape,” which imagines cell phones doubling as pistols. (“I think we should separate the pistol and the telephone functions, like before,” one character suggests. Probably wise.) In “A Visit to Monk’s House,” the narrator spies on TripAdvisor comments about Virginia Woolf’s home, highlighting an obsession about the availability of bathrooms on the premises, a blunt fixation that brings the Modernist genius down to earth.

But the prevailing mood is one of a heartfelt desire to press at the edges of story, to acknowledge our self-cancelling urges as readers: We want satisfying conclusions, but we hold pat endings in contempt, and the studied ambiguity of lit-fic endings can feel like its own sort of dead end. Where can a reader go if we’re denied any of these? What should a writer do to complicate them? It’s impossible to give away the ending of an Øyehaug story, because endings don’t exactly exist for her. (“The end,” ends one story, but she’s satirizing the very concept.) One of the stories about slime eels ends with another protest: “We hope that we’ve now done our bit to draw attention to this, that things must not end like this, that there must be other endings, other than slime eels slithering silently away.” Evil Flowers suggests how we might find them.

[Published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux on February 14, 2023, 128 pages, $25 hardback.]
Contributor
Mark Athitakis

Mark Athitakis is a reviewer in Phoenix who has reviewed for many publications, including the New York Times, Washington Post, and Los Angeles Times. He is the author of The New Midwest, a survey of contemporary fiction from the region. He is a Contributing Editor of On The Seawall.

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