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It's odd to be reading international fiction when a pandemic is working its way around the globe. The fiction I am reading reflects a social life, with chance meetings and interactions that we're not living right now. We are in lockdown and so is Norway. Meanwhile my home is busy, we are home-working, home-schooling, there is a constant bustle. It is no coincidence that I finished reading Wait, Blink by Gunnhild Oyehaug outside in the sun while my children were looking at screens inside and my partner was cycling. In fiction we can still travel further than a cycle ride.
Wait, Blink was first published in Norwegian in 2008. Ten years later it was published in English by Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, translated by Kari Dickson. A story of multiple characters, it expressed the differences between their inner emotional lives and the outer expression of those lives very aptly and it is filled with references to books that we might have read, art that we might have seen. Other books fall down when they attempt to use this ensemble format to get to grips with introspection but Wait, Blink carries it well and lets us in to the lives of each character while skillfully saving us from sinking in to their eccentricities.
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