Reviews in English

Mummy is Somewhere Else

Linnestå, Aasne: Mamma er et annet sted

Tale’s mum is not like other mums.

When she dies, Tale must try to understand who her mum really was, and how she herself shall manage to go on with her life.

A powerful book about loss and atonement from one of our foremost authors.

Mamma er et annet sted is Aasne Linnestå’s first novel for young adults.

Stay

Aasne Linnestå: Opphold

The novel Stay is an independent sequel to the critically acclaimed Garden Song, which was published in 2011. While Garden Song centred on the intensely focused author Sylvia, who has been abandoned by her husband and children, it is her husband, Mikkel, who speaks this time around.

No one knows where Sylvia is. No one knows if she is coming back. Mikkel and the children wait – and don’t wait. The days grow darker, autumn arrives, and in the neighbouring house, which is known as The Draft, an asylum-seeking family has settled. The two families are drawn closer and closer together.

Stay is a novel about love and death, about responsibility and relinquishment of responsibility, about adults and children, and about an unendurable absence. Perhaps it is most of all a story about how we live our lives, alone and together, and about how our challenging capacity for compassion is put to the test, time and time again.

«A significant contribution to Norwegian contemporary literature”

Hanne Kristin Wolden, Vinduet

Mother Tongue

Aasne Linnestå: Morsmål

«Rarely has delicate and difficult subjects as asylum policy, assault and abuse been treated more impressive than in Aasne Linnestå’s Mother Tonge. Aasne Linnestå writes ardently beautiful and captures the vulnerability of her subject. I had little knowledge of Aasne Linnestå’s authorship before I read Mother Tonge. After finishing the reading I can safely say that it has been a welcome acquaintance that I’m going to maintain. »

Mari Reinholt Aas, Vårt Land

Garden Song

Linnestå, Aasne: Hagesang

Summer. Sylvia, who is a writer, stays at home, her husband Mikkel has taken the kids on holiday. Or have they left her for good? While the grass is growing in the garden, Sylvia writes like a maniac, to the point where the text is threatening to become more important than anything else.

Garden Song is a wild growing, lyrical novel that also contains a collection of short stories.

“Linguistic sensibility, a high level of reflection, humor, and existential pain. Aasne Linnestå’s new novel is sorely good. (…) Aasne Linnestå has reached new levels in her writing with this new novel. (…) The bird moif, the rhythm, and the theme of madness and writing are reminiscent of the iconic Sylvia Plath and Virginia Woolf.»
(Dagbladet)

“Aasne Linnestå’s fifth book, and third novel, is one of her best. (…) Linnestå is a writer with a unique voice, raw, with sore undertones. The best thing about reading the novel is that you often have no idea what to expect in the next sentence. This creates a productive anticipation of surprise.”
(DN Magasinet)

“An anomalous, good novel about disappearance.”
(Klassekampen)

First published: 2011, Aschehoug
Aasne Linnestå: Biography and bibliography

Krakow

Linnestå, Aasne: Krakow

Krakow is a novel with a powerful theme and broad appeal. It problematizes the condition of grief and how it pulls people out of their ordinary life into a state of extreme loneliness.

A woman loses her unborn child. She is determined not to think about the baby but she is incapable of forgetting about what happened. She leaves everything behind and heads back to Krakow where she used to live as a student. Visiting places and meeting people trigger choices in her that she’s forced to face; whether to continue focusing on her loss, or to move on and embrace the possibilities ahead in Krakow. Reacquainted with the familiar, yet unfamiliar, city and people, she gradually discovers an understanding of suff ering; her own as well as that of others.

Praise for Krakow :

”A powerful little book about losing, about being found … The ideal first meeting with a book: When the language from the very first page takes a grip somewhere on the back of your neck or under the breastbone or under your skull or wherever it takes a grip, and holds on to me, takes me further.”
(Aftenposten)

”The language of reviewers withers in encounter with this book. There is not much to add, except this is a book, it is made up of writing, the writing is a joy to read, and it is a fact: Aasne Linnestå slowly writes better and better, letter by letter, millimetre by millimetre down the pages.”
(Klassekampen)

First published: 2007 by Aschehoug.
Aasne Linnestå: Bibliography and biography

A Foreign Country

Linnestå, Aasne: Utland

A Foreign Country is a story about the relationship between interior and exterior landscapes, told through Hege. In the course of a few months, she is confronted by several important experiences: She is pregnant, her grandfather is dying, the age long relationship with her boyfriend Harald is about to dissolve.

The setting for this novel is the little home town in Telemark, where the plot gradually uncovers some of the structures that form a life. Through reproductions of incidents such as the heavy water campaign during WW2 and, more recently, the hostage drama in Dubrovkateateret, Hege slowly starts to see new features of these events, something that gets consequences for her own life. A journey to the Jewish neighbourhood in Vienna sheds light upon a part of her grandfather’s hidden history. It also marks how great an impact unmade choices can have on a life.

Hege’s unrest and intensity, her power and will to probe into hidden stories, reflect a deep human urge for challenging the existing. A Foreign Country also demonstrates how individuals are necessarily shaped by the landscape in which they grow up.

First published: 2006, Aschehoug Fiction

Aasne Linnestå: Biography and bibliography