In Other Words Wait, Blink, by Gunnhild Øyehaug
Sigrid, a literature student at the University of Bergen in Norway, has a print of Van Gogh’s sunflowers on her wall — to her they are loaded symbols of everything from life to loneliness to death.
A love interest, without having seen her room, mocks people who put up mass-reproduced Van Gogh sunflowers on their walls, declaring, “Art should mean something.” She tries to counter that they might mean something to some people, but the man responds with disdain. The novel’s collective narrators observe, “She didn’t like him much right then, it didn’t fit with what she thought he was.”
Gunnhild Øyehaug’s novel Wait, Blink is brief, just a few hundred pages observing the lives of a few men and women, and yet in those pages is an exploration of interpretation, perception, art, literature, and the search for meaning that is both marvelous and mundane. The book is wonderfully funny and strange, guided by self-aware narrators whose talent for deep dives into individual consciousness is matched only by their commentary: “That’s how powerfully a person’s tense inner life can affect their external physiognomy!” they remark during a scene in which a nervous Sigrid struggles profoundly to bring a spoonful of soup to her mouth. Vignettes are rendered with simultaneous beauty and absurdity. A butterf ly of “glorious, glittering colors” flutters around carrying a silk banner. It has emerged from Sigrid’s body, and it says, “I’M PRETENDING TO HANDLE THIS.”
Sigrid’s search — which is largely centered on her critical analysis of women in fiction who wear oversized men’s shirts — is mixed in with that of several other seekers of something beyond them. (That something isn’t always meaning; it’s often romance.) Trine is a shock artist who is losing interest in her own work. “All of a sudden she feels it, that she’s so bored of herself and her drastic and sarcastic ways of flaunting her sexuality.” Trine realizes this not long after an impromptu performance art piece involving spurting breast milk into a toilet. Viggo, whom we meet 10 years earlier than the others, in 1998, is “a lonely sheep, always on the fringes of the f lock, wool a-trembling,” whose anxiety makes him want to vomit at the sight of, for instance, patterned tights. The filmmaker Linnea has written a screenplay in which a man and a woman reunite in a museum after years apart, hoping to translate fiction into fact. Her producer, Robert, is self- conscious about his lack of interpretive skills; “he still feels a slight discomfort whenever he hears the name Ibsen.” The relationship between Kåre and Wanda, a poet and a bassist, falls apart upon a discussion of Kill Bill: Vol. 2 and female archetypes.
We move around Norway and into Copenhagen and Prague, studying them and others, including, briefly, Dante, literary theorist Paul de Man, and George W. Bush. One chapter begins, “Meanwhile: What’s happening on the seabed off Greenland?” then proceeds to depict its active marine life.
If this all sounds ridiculous, it is, a little. It’s also pretty fantastic. Wait, Blink is Øyehaug’s debut novel, following the short story collection Knots and several untranslated works of poetry and essays. Both Knots and Wait, Blink were published in Norwegian long before their English translations arrived; Wait, Blink was initially released in 2008, the year in which it is mostly set. (It was adapted into the Norwegian film Women
in Oversized Men’s Shirts in 2015.) Let us hope that Øyehaug writes more compact yet sprawling works, and that they reach us more quickly. They might just mean something.