stay with me

Fear is a second skin for the unnamed narrator of Hanne Ørstavik’s Stay With Me. A successful writer at 53, her father may be a frail twig, but the fear from her past, and of her father's rage, still envelopes her.

In urgent prose, the contours of her life emerge: a 12-year marriage, the death of her lover L, her troubled relationship with M — 15 years her junior and vexed with an all-too-familiar rage. We waver between our narrator’s life and the life of Judith, the protagonist of her nascent novel. Judith is a Norwegian costume designer who falls in love with Myrto, a conductor in an orchestra, who she moves with to Minneapolis. Pulled between the cities of Minneapolis, Oslo, and Milan, and the voice of Judith and her own, our narrator writes with an unparalleled emotional intimacy.

What results is the recursive voice of someone gasping for breath: Who are Pappa, and M, without their rage? Who am I, without my fear? Who am I reaching for, when I reach for Judith? With Martin Aikten’s careful translation, Hanne Ørstavik unravels the binds that fasten us to those we love — why we return despite immeasurable pain, and why we finally, justly, leave.