Vonde blomar
Umogelege metamorfosar, kjøtmeiser, mygg og menneske med store lengslar, store sorger, små problem og store og små tankar spelar seg ut i novellesamlinga Vonde blomar. Kva skal du til dømes gjere når du plukkar vonde blomar? Kva skal du seie i opningstalen din når det flunkande nye museet ditt har sokke i jorda? Kva skal du gjere når alt du tek i blir til slimål? Og kva skal du gjere når du har lengta etter å besøke dei kvite klippene ved Dover, men no er død?
Vonde blomar handlar om kjærleik, død og opprør, om å skifte form eller å bli verande den same, om flokane i det arbeidet som heiter å forstå.
«‘With Norway’s Gunnhild Øyehaug, ordinary feelings and experiences are turned into fantastical stories. In Evil Flowers, Øyehaug’s characters are on a search for meaning – in nature, or in connection with other people. It’s clever, crazy and thought-provoking – and utterly captivating.‘»
«‘Gunnhild Øyehaug’s Evil Flowers is like an outlandish, wayward laboratory where emotions, ages, experiences and gender are explored. We are lucky to have Øyehaug remind us that inventiveness is always more eye-opening than mere facts.‘»
«‘Mad things happen in Øyehaug’s prose: Reality explodes, narrators suddenly change character, and perspective comes from unorthodox places ... This is what literature is capable of at its very best: it makes the reader see the world with new eyes … It remythologizes the world in the most charming way.‘»
«‘Øyehaug casts a spell on her readers with her catchy, rhythmic prose, her whimsical humour and her fabulous endings.’»
«‘With a gift for humour and a sense of the grotesque, she spins small, affecting stories about people’s difficult relationships with each other and themselves, about death, grief, love and especially about the difficulty of overcoming the distance to other people, but also to oneself. Many of the short stories combine the bizarre and the humorous with a somewhat melancholy attention to the tragedy of modern human life.‘»
«A fresh slice of Øyehaug's work, ideal for seekers of spry experimental short fiction.»
«In this charming and inventive collection, Øyehaug (Knots) plays with narrative conventions to dazzling effect, braiding jokes with earnest accounts of heartbreak. […] This scintillating collection shouldn’t be missed.»
«Øyehaug (Present Tense Machine, 2022) stuns with this delightful, refreshing, read-in-one-sitting short story collection that's sure to be unlike anything else you'll pick up this year. Øyehaug surprises the reader with every word, using various forms and narrative structures and impressing with each. The stories are especially self-referential, and while each work can stand on its own, it is also part of a whole, creating a cohesive and wonderfully odd collection. “The Thread” and its related stories are particularly stirring, as the author uses intentional language to create a “thread” connecting each piece. Other stories showcase Øyehaug’s poetic talents; at just one page, "Seconds" tells a tale that some novels don't accomplish. Simply put, Øyehaug continues to excite, and fans of her previous works—particularly Knots (2017), her earlier collection of short fiction—will find this thread an exciting one to follow.»
«Yet for all its intellect and effort to tinker with narrative, very little of Evil Flowers feels airily schematic or dryly satirical, the way much postmodern writing does. She can be overtly playful, as in “Escape,” which imagines cell phones doubling as pistols. (“I think we should separate the pistol and the telephone functions, like before,” one character suggests. Probably wise.) In “A Visit to Monk’s House,” the narrator spies on TripAdvisor comments about Virginia Woolf’s home, highlighting an obsession about the availability of bathrooms on the premises, a blunt fixation that brings the Modernist genius down to earth. But the prevailing mood is one of a heartfelt desire to press at the edges of story, to acknowledge our self-cancelling urges as readers: We want satisfying conclusions, but we hold pat endings in contempt, and the studied ambiguity of lit-fic endings can feel like its own sort of dead end. Where can a reader go if we’re denied any of these? What should a writer do to complicate them? It’s impossible to give away the ending of an Øyehaug story, because endings don’t exactly exist for her.»
«I fell in love with Øyehaug's writing five years ago, with her novel, Wait, Blink and continue to marvel at her ability to find new ways of expressing her ever trenchant intellect. We're spoiled to get two excellent books in such quick succession, but I still can't wait to see what comes next.»
«Every so often a book appears that is so strikingly different it makes other books all seem the same. The short story collection Evil Flowers is one of those books. It makes most of what is written these days, under the banner of reality literature, feel like nothing more than anemic realism [...] Evil Flowers is a unique collection that will enrich the biodiversity of the literary world.»
«The short stories in Evil Flowers play on the theme of longing for someone to come, longing for connection, with a literary mien is both appealing and confident – precisely because it is never self-righteous.»
«Reading Øyehaug is a singular experience that I enjoy over and over again. Because I believe that I will find wonder in her texts in new and different places over and over again.»
«There’s no one else quite like Gunnhild Øyehaug, but she leans towards modernists such as Baudelaire, seasoned with surrealism and other eras.[…] She allows herself great latitude, compartmentalising short stories which discuss, correct and argue with each other – or otherwise offer a growth, an expansion or change in perspective.»
«Gunnhild Øyehaug confirms her status as one of our most innovative, funny, and irreverent authors[...] This collection is like antibac for the eyes. It rinses away your customary and tainted way of looking at things. Afterwards, you view the world with fresh and astonished eyes. For me, this is among the very best that good literature can achieve – it estranges: it describes familiar things so that they are revitalized. Øyehaug is a master at this – and here she is in her element.»
«Seemingly mundane occurrences grow increasingly surreal in these razor-sharp stories, none longer than a few pages. An ornithologist dispels the part of her brain that recognizes birds; a visitor to a Tripadvisor forum dedicated to Virginia Woolf’s country house strikes up two Internet friendships; an institution is branded the 'Mational Nuseum.' Øyehaug’s dizzyingly inventive fictions are suffused with uncanny observations about the natural world and a pervasive, tongue-in-cheek intertextuality. The title is a Baudelaire reference, and, just before the reader encounters a photograph of the poet’s scowling visage, the narrator imagines him having a prophetic glimpse of her book and thinking, 'Evil flowers, my ass.'»
«Norwegian writer Gunnhild Øyehaug plumbs her psyche in a newly translated work, putting a twenty-first-century spin on nineteenth-century French poet Charles Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du mal. The compelling result teems with candor, wit, anxious obsession, and the merest touch of schadenfreude—or what Baudelaire might have termed joie malicieuse.»
«If you want to see how gloriously messy short stories can get, “Evil Flowers by Gunnhild Oyehaug is a great place to start. A Norwegian poet and author with a distinctly Dadaist sensibility, Oyehaug seems to delight in keeping you off-balance. When “Evil Flowers,” which was translated by Kari Dickson, isn’t pranking Baudelaire (whose famous volume of poetry “Les Fleurs du mal provides its title), it’s pulling the rug out from under the reader in the style of a Monty Python sketch, except gentler and even weirder. […] It’s all delightfully silly and exceedi ngly strange.»
««I acknowledge (reluctantly) that absurdism is not for everyone. But I love it because when it’s written with the enthusiasm and flair for comedy that Øyehaug displays in Evil Flowers: Stories, it allows us, however briefly, to ignore the stress and anxiety of everyday life and recognise that our very existence – that we should be born at this moment, at this time – is utterly ludicrous, but also glorious.»
«Seemingly mundane occurrences grow increasingly surreal in these razor-sharp stories, none longer than a few pages. An ornithologist dispels the part of her brain that recognizes birds; a visitor to a Tripadvisor forum dedicated to Virginia Woolf’s country house strikes up two Internet friendships; an institution is branded the ‘Mational Nuseum.’ «Øyehaug’s dizzyingly inventive fictions are suffused with uncanny observations about the natural world and a pervasive, tongue-in-cheek intertextuality. The title is a Baudelaire reference, and, just before the reader encounters a photograph of the poet’s scowling visage, the narrator imagines him having a prophetic glimpse of her book and thinking, ‘Evil flowers, my ass.’»