The Heart Keeps On

Daniel Grubbs-Donovan reviews Martin Aitken’s new translation of “Stay with Me,” a recent novel by Norwegian author Hanne Ørstavik.

By Daniel Grubbs-DonovanJune 23, 2025

• Fiction

IN HIS LECTURE “Thought as Internalized Conversation” (published posthumously in 1934), the philosopher George Herbert Mead attempts to build a view of the self from the outside. “How,” he asks, “can an individual get outside himself (experientially) in such a way as to become an object to himself?” And how, we might ask further, would one do so in a way that achieves a basic level of coherence? A professor once told me a joke on this point. A policeman stops you. “Identify yourself!” the officer barks. Uneasily, you begin: “Well, I love my mother …”

The difficulties of representing oneself from the outside are evident. When a novelist undertakes the effort—choosing a place to start, sorting the innumerable details that make up a person into a coherent form—it can be both a relief and a further deception. Fiction is one of the rare places where we even attempt this kind of human summary, but it is reliant on artifice. Within the stasis of the text, the representation of a life, viewed from the outside, is possible; it is the author’s task to sustain this illusion. Both the satisfaction of this fiction and its false fronts are explored by Hanne Ørstavik, the Norwegian novelist, in her novel Stay with Me (2023). 

Newly translated from the Norwegian by Martin Aitken, Stay with Me explores how confronting past experiences in midlife can heal and clarify our relationship with ourselves. The narrator is, like Ørstavik, a Norwegian writer living in Milan whose husband has recently died. She begins a fraught relationship with a younger man, M. They fight. He is explosive and casually cruel to his beloved dog; she drinks and has a desire for closeness that he may not be able to satisfy. There is a difference in backgrounds: he is a plumber who runs his own business, and she is a celebrated novelist (they meet when he comes to fix her toilet). When the narrator goes to M’s apartment for the first time, she sees “no books,” but, she admits, “I knew that already.” Ørstavik intertwines the story of this relationship with a series of tableaux from her narrator’s childhood that she (the narrator) probes to make sense of herself and her relationship. The path between childhood trauma and adult dysfunction is, of course, one that has been trod before. This novel’s accomplishment, and the testament to Ørstavik’s sensitivity and nerve in her recollections, is that it feels fresh here. Ørstavik’s prose takes us within the affective experience of her narrator’s reflection and transformation in a way that a theoretical understanding of trauma could not replicate.

There is a subnarrative as well, a novel that Ørstavik’s narrator herself is writing, which follows a woman, Judith, who moves from Milan to Minneapolis, loses her husband, and takes a younger lover. In this case, the lover is a teenage boy that Judith meets when he comes to her door to make a chance delivery. Judith tracks the boy down to his home in a nearby trailer park while his mother is not around, and the relationship begins. These sections feel out of place in Ørstavik’s novel. There is a story here about the recursive fictionalization of grief and pain through art (Judith’s processing medium of choice is dressmaking), and the narrator professes a desire to say something about the United States and perhaps Native Americans (she even reads Louise Erdrich), but regardless of whether this section is a false start Ørstavik made in the process of writing the present novel, or if she wished to use it to buttress a sense of the “real” in the main narrative, its impact is insubstantial. Its weaknesses prompted this reader to wonder if, in a first attempt to process her experience, Ørstavik may have found that it was simply not enough, that she had to face up to it directly. And she does so powerfully in the first-person narrative. Interviewed by Bulgarian author Nataliya Deleva, Ørstavik said that for past novels, it was important that the text was fiction, “not to protect myself, but to free myself, and most of all, to free the text”—yet the sections here that are most moving are those that hew closest to the details of her own life. 

One of the pleasures of reading Stay with Me is Ørstavik’s perceptive narrator. She is a great looker, and Ørstavik invites us into her mind as she stares into the eyes of those she loves. She does not just look into these eyes; she looks through them. When considering her father, she sees “Pappa, the little boy he was once, he’s eighty-seven now and his eyes fill with tears”; to look at her lover, M, she notes, is “to look straight into life.” It follows, then, that when this super-perception fails, the narrator feels the loss like a blindness: “[W]ith M it’s something unclear, shifting. I don’t know what I’m seeing, and I can’t remember either.” But when things are good, she says, “in his eyes there’s no more resistance, no reservation, only a warmth as powerful as my father’s torch shining at me across the heather.” As their relationship develops, she sees “more in them now than in the beginning, now it’s as if those eyes have seen all the world’s pain, every kind of sorrow, as if they feel everything that hurts, no denigration left unknown to them, and at the same time they can be so warm, so full of goodness, so gentle.” These eyes contain the universe. Ørstavik later makes this explicit, describing the eye as “that moist flickering orb which is simply life.”  

Ørstavik’s insights and connections can, at times, feel overly tidy. In the final stretch of revelations that concludes the novel, Ørstavik’s narrator realizes that her lover gets upset about her drinking because his father drank, and that the narrator likes to work out because her mother was always thin. These causal pathways are neat, and they strain credibility in their dry sociological presentation of the workings of memory. This can make the narrator’s transformations feel clipped and unearned, an elaborate version of saying “suddenly, she realized …” When the narrator finally plunges into the sadness that she felt on the day of her mother’s departure to nursing school, something “alters.” In time, “the urge to drink subsides.”  

But Ørstavik’s unflinching presentation of a narrator so like herself can be breathtaking, and this makes up for some leaps in processing. It is interesting that, in a novel with these themes, very little mention is made of therapy. The writing itself is the excavation: “I write about the things I cannot find in myself, and to have access to them, I need fiction, because I do not know,” Ørstavik explained to Deleva. In this book, Ørstavik is actively looking “in herself.” She guides her narrator, at one point, to reflect on a reference made to her by name in Book Six (2011) of Karl Ove Knausgaard’s My Struggle. Though elsewhere in Stay with Me the narrator is ostensibly anonymous, in this section the reader understands Knausgaard’s quote—“As a person she was sensitive and there was something vulnerable about her,”—to indeed be about her, which here means Ørstavik, the known public figure. Fictional entanglements aside, the reference tellingly reminds the narrator of a male therapist she once saw whose clinical approach involved shoving a pillow into her lap and instructing her to learn how to protect herself. She never went back to the therapist, and this episode feels like Ørstavik drawing an arch contrast between herself and Knausgaard, that other great Nordic ruminator.

There are correspondences, if one looks. Ørstavik’s writing about the heart recalls Knausgaard’s famous opening line—“For the heart, life is simple: it beats for as long as it can.” Ørstavik: “The heart keeps on. The heart wants to live. It doesn’t care about me.” Both hearts are indifferent to the emotional travails of the minds to which they are linked. But Knausgaard’s heart is mechanical, it beats because that is its purpose, while Ørstavik’s wants to live. In other words, it doesn’t want to stop, and it is beating, on some level, to help the narrator stay alive and have a chance to find the complete, all-encompassing love she so desires.

At the heart of this novel is a question, which Ørstavik poses using the words of the Swedish writer Birgitta Trotzig: “A quick dash from birth to death. That the human world ought to be a community of love. Why is it not?” Ørstavik’s search for the answer is all about the desperate and fraught attempts we make to connect with others. The narrator recounts, at one point, the way her ex-husband looked at her when she returned from a trip: “[T]here was such warmth in that look. It made me angry. I shut him out. It was as if his warmth hurt, as if it was a demand, and I couldn’t deal with it.” This reversal offers a clue to resolving Trotzig’s question. Gifts, even gifts of love, bring with them an implied demand for reciprocity that we may not be able to fulfill. 

Ørstavik’s sentences, marked by a succession of clauses that the translator, Aitken, aptly described as “urgent, breathless and distressed,” are effective at pulling us along with the narrator. She blends dialogue and thought, revealing the web of feeling, history, and social constraint that can restrict the utterance of even a single word. One imagines an obstinate child, after argument and cajoling, finally saying “I’m sorry.” “Now, was that so hard?” Well, yes, it actually was. Ørstavik shows us why, and in doing so draws out the subconscious link between brain, memory, and body. Recalling at one point the room she lived in as a teenager, the narrator’s knee begins to hurt. She realizes this is because she tore her meniscus at that time in her life, and merely remembering the room resurfaces the pain. It is the process of writing that brings this out: “I hadn’t realized until now, as I’m writing, how things are connected.” This connection, images from the past stirring to shape and disrupt the present, recurs throughout the book. 

Stay with Me is a portrait of the way resonant memories persist in a life. It reads, as expected given its autofictional stylings, as nonlinear biography, the narrator’s poetic truth. But what does this have to do with Ørstavik, the voice behind the text and the model for so many details of the narrator’s life? George Herbert Mead, who asked how we might view the self from the outside, has an answer to his own question: the “solution is to be found by referring to the process of social conduct or activity in which the given person or individual is implicated.” Put simply, we create ourselves through communicating with others. And when we communicate with others, we are also communicating with ourselves, in the sense that we hear our own voices as sound when we speak. The idea can be applied to writing as well. In Mead’s framework, a novel—and autofiction in particular—would be an extended exchange between the two parts of the self: the “I,” the self as expressed (inside information going out), and the “me,” the self as internalized (outside information coming in). The novelist, in writing, puts the “I” on the page; in reading or editing, it is returned to them and becomes part of the “me.” And the act of communication gives shape to both.

Ørstavik’s nested narratives could be understood as an attempt at this dialogue—to introduce the “I” to the “me,” and thus to produce a reconciliation outside the confines of the text. Only she can say whether she succeeds in this. But the result is at times beautiful, and the areas where her conclusions feel strained just serve to illustrate the difficulty of the task she has set herself. Ultimate connection is impossible; there will always be a gap in the moment of transformation, of transmission. By here depicting the affective process of these truths, Ørstavik might help readers identify how they work in their own lives.

But in the end, we are all stuck in our own narratives. Mead rather optimistically refers to language, at one point, as that “vocal gesture which tends to arouse in the individual the attitude which it arouses in others.” Not always. Trotzig’s sought-after “community of love” is also burdened with the misinterpretations, reversals, and willful blindness of simple conversation. When, late in the novel, Ørstavik’s narrator gently confronts her father about his abusive behavior toward her mother, he fails to understand: “Poor Mamma?” he asks. “Poor me, you mean.” It’s hard to state the problem better than that.