Heart Undercover
Heart Undercover contains nine essays on art, literature, film, inspiration and writing. Through occasionally personal, poetological research and readings of authors and artists such as Edvard Munch, Nikolai Astrup, Mary Ruefle, Claire-Louise Bennett and Andrei Tarkovsky, the texts revolve around literary transformation points, abstraction and realism, creation and re-creation. If Heart Undercover is an associative, momentary memoir about, for example, standing up to your knees in ice-cold dirt, it is also about work in the first-person singular, about dramaturgy, and about comedy.
In her third collection of essays, Gunnhild Øyehaug delivers a rich, thought-provoking and poetic reflection on literature’s capacity for both fantastic transformation and for holding on tight to something imagined, lived and experienced.
«Gunnhild Øyehaug writes in images, via detours, and with observations that may at first glance appear utterly far-fetched, but which she makes consummate sense of.»
«Few writers deserve the cliché “distinctive” more than Øyehaug. Undercover Heart is a wild and razor-sharp collection of texts about art.»
«Øyehaug writes keenly on art, existence, creation and inspiration. Big topics, but these essays are deliciously down-to-earth, funny, elucidating – and at times moving. What about hunting the hallways of the Louisiana Museum, only to be captivated along the way by something else entirely than why you were there in the first place? Even though you thought you were long since done with Giacometti?»
«Øyehaug writes sparklingly funny and fabulously composed essays, as usual.»
«This year one of our most interesting authors came out with a quirky and nimble-footed collection of nine essays dealing with art, literature and film, as well as other things that inspire the Bergen-based author. Kate Bush’s sensual music videos, Edvard Munch’s paintings and the sculptor Giacometti’s statues are just a few of those she puts under her merry magnifying glass. Perfect reading for the woman of culture.»
«‘‘New introduction, with a magnifying glass’’, the author writes somewhere here, and it’s with a magnifying glass that she goes to work: Undercover Heart is about looking as carefully and acutely as possible – about close reading of either images or texts. Øyehaug’s interpretations bear witness to a writer who is unusually cross-aesthetically oriented: She also thematises a recording by Eyvind Solås and Trond-Viggo Torgersen from 1979, a music video for a Kate Bush song, and the Soviet director Andrei Tarkovsky’s classic Mirror (1975). Øyehaug quotes the filmmaker as saying that when not all has been said about a subject, one has the opportunity to think on for oneself. This is precisely how her own texts work – as rallying cries to attempt to go it alone on the paths she has begun to tread.»
«Gunnhild Øyehaug should be more famous than Knausgård.»
«The ten well-proportioned essays move freely between literature, art, film, music […]. This is written with a pen consistently dipped in the inkwell of enthusiasm. It is writing that confirms the necessary headlessness in the appropriation of art, and where Novalis’s words that the definition of a writer is anyone who is enthusiastic about language. That is: Øyehaug quotes Inger Christensen, who quotes Novalis. You are welcome to quote me quoting Øyehaug quoting Inger Christensen quoting Novalis, as long as you remember the chain, as long as you remember to remember that art is created in circles.»
«Gunnhild Øyehaug manages like few others to home in on how art can poke away at existence. A common thread in the essay collection Undercover Heart is the insights that art can give – often a little inadvertently. The text about Nikolai Astrup’s paintings is undoubtedly one of my finest moments of reading in the past year. [...] Øyehaug has written a funny, heartfelt and extremely lucid book. All at once.»
«Gunnhild Øyehaug’s essay collection is a tantalising portal that leads you straight into some completely unpredictable and highly entertaining cultural analyses. [...] Her style is playful and elegant, but also heartfelt. Not in the sense of sentimentality or bombast, but rather genuine and thoroughly considered. [...] As such, Øyehaug is becoming one of the most interesting essayists we currently have.»
«Gunnhild Øyehaug’s latest collection of essays is imbued with a painful realisation of the senseless tragedy of life, but shows how we can use literary devices to transform our prison into a glorious heaven. [...] Øyehaug’s strength lies in the fact that the small and large transformations of form are not only mentioned, but can also be traced in the texts. We move effortlessly between genre styles, diegetic levels, grammatical excess, narrative positions or interruptions in the form of highly unusual events. It’s as though Øyehaug never wants us to lose Olympia’s gaze, our awareness that every representation is a staging. The move is paradoxical: the exercise is self-destructive and at the same time associatively creative. It is as if the boundaries are not there but rather glide into each other, keeping the thinking going. Any attempt at systematisation slips through the fingers like a bar of soap. The genre designation ‘essay collection’ seems to be the biggest pretext of all for this project. ‘Dear life participants, I thought I would never make it to the microphone’ writes Øyehaug in the text ‘Sexuality and Pantomime’. Undercover Heart reveals the tortuous, twisted, sometimes brilliant journey from budding writer to writing human.»