The Chambermaid
Ellenes, Øyvind: Stuepiken
”The novel opens, as far as I remember, with a song.
It is a song that someone sing together, it comes from outside through a window that is open onto the street.”
Through a series of interiors and exteriors, the prelude to a love affair between two young men is portrayed: A worn down flat from the last turn of the century, a hotel with a ravishing view from all floors, a public park, a discarded tennis court, a bustling open market in a larger city.
In the course of a few days and nights, a funeral, an infatuation, a party and a moving process take place. The story is at the same time detailed and reticent, fragmented and full of reservations. Is it set in autumn, winter or spring? Does the party take place in a flat or a big house?
The Chambermaid is a simple, open and enigmatic novel. Like in the author’s previous novels, the narrator is a nameless outsider – apparently at random, but not without similarities with a classic story.
Praise for THE CHAMBER MAID:
”The Text circles around a funeral and the relationship between a married family man and a young boy, with all the sorrow, obsession and suppression it entails. Elegantly and confidently executed.”
(Steinar Sivertsen, Aftenbladet, Norway)
”Reading THE CHAMBER MAID is like watching a film from afar, a film without sound – the outlines are all you catch, the rest you have to guess at. Ellenes succeeds very well with this device, triggering the reader with precisely this combination of restraint, distance and a slightly oldish language. This produces a double effect when the distanced narrator sort of loosens his tight grip at the end of the novel, and suddenly becomes vividly, closely present in the description of a love weekend between two men in love […] Though the novel doesn’t aim to set off any great emotions in the reader, it does provoke a curiosity and a resistance that I wish more writers would create.”
(Marie G. Aubert, Aftenposten)
”THE CHAMBER MAID is a modern, intellectually challenging novel. What impresses me most is the prose. To me it feels enormously precise and well-crafted – melodic is a word that springs to mind.”
(Bjarne Tveiten, Fædrelandsvennen)
”A resistant novel that doesn’t want to tell, that doesn’t want to be a love story, but that ends up telling anyway, through images with some sort of double exposure, so that one story tells the other.“
(Author Inger Bråtveit recommends five books in Dagbladet, Norway)
First published: 2008, Forlaget Oktober
Øyvind Ellenes: Biography and bibliography
