AshehougAgency

Hyenas

After ending her relationship with Rudolf, Siv borrows a friend’s flat in a small coastal town to get away from it all, and to try to understand the pat­terns in her own life. She wants to dis­cover who and what she is when she isn’t constantly doing something.

Who is Siv when she isn’t writing? Is it possible for her to love another per­son without compromising her own boundaries? And can Siv embrace and enjoy life without being constantly dis­gusted with herself?

In Hyenas, Ørstavik continues her ex­ploration of the relationship between life and text, mothers and their chil­dren, the self and others. Slowly Siv opens up to other people, and to the inner, plentiful life. Evolving from a feeling of emptiness to a string of pic­tures, a string of feelings, until some­thing bigger, subtly connected – the contours of a shape – emerge in the reader, the same way it happens within Siv.

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Praise for HYENAS:

“Noone can depict the movement of the mind, the imperceptible changes and abrupt leaps, as well as Hanne Ørstavik … With her new novel, Hyenas, she is at her very best. At the same time it is a novel that is happier, lighter, more playful than anything else she has written … and the writing is more beautiful than ever … Med this year’s novel her work presents itself as richer and more varied than ever.”
(Hamar Arbeiderblad)

“Hyenas is in every way a typical Ørstavik novel. The clear, transparent prose, the surprising observations, the sudden flashes of humour … Ørstavik is so crafty as a writer that her novels are never insignificant or unimportant.”
(Dagsavisen)

“It’s a good sign when you have difficulties saying exactly what a novel is about. That means it is complex, and you realize thatin order to do the novel justice, it has to be said exactly as it is written … it is the way Ørstavik writes, with long, singing sentences, with frequent turns, elaborations and new angles, that makes this novel so complex … there is a tenderness and human compassion in Ørstavik’s project that make this into a, yes, often moving novel … It touches on something as essential as existence itself.”
(Vårt land)

“The text is vintage Ørstavik, in the sense that it carefully explores the sensations of the body and the whims of the heart, the world as it presents itself to us, closely and intimately”
(Dagbladet)

“[Hyenas] certainly demand concentration from the reader, but if you give it the time and attention it needs, Hyenas becomes a story that causes great impact and hardly resembles anything else in contemporary Norwegian literature.”
(Dagens Næringsliv)

First published: 2011, Forlaget Oktober
Hanne Ørstavik: Biography and bibliography

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