Knots

Stories

By: Gunnhild Oyehaug, Kari Dickson - Translator

Narrated by: Heather Wilds

In both precise short-shorts and ruminative longer tales, Gunnhild Øyehaug meanders through the tangled, jinxed, and unavoidable conflicts of love and desire. From young Rimbaud's thwarted passions to the scandalous disappearance of an entire family, these stories do the chilling work of tracing the outlines of what could have been in both the quietly morbid and the delightfully comical.

A young man is born with an uncuttable umbilical cord and spends his life physically tethered to his mother; a tipsy uncle makes an uncomfortable toast with unforeseeable repercussions; and a dissatisfied deer yearns to be seen. As one character reflects, "You never know how things might turn out, you never know how anything will turn out, tomorrow the walls might fall down, the room disappear."

Cleverly balancing the sensuous, the surreal, and the comical, Øyehaug achieves a playful familiarity with the absurd that never overreaches the needs of her stories. Full of characters who can't help tying knots in themselves and each other, these tales make the world just a little more strange and introduce a major international voice of searing vision, grace, and humor.

©2012 Kolon Forlag; translation copyright 2017 by Kari Dickson (P)2017 HighBridge, a division of Recorded Books

Something different

This is really something different! But the narrator has a very strange delivery, and after a while it is distracting. I'd love to listen to this with a different narrator.