In both precise short-shorts and ruminative longer tales, Gunnhild Øyehaug meanders through the tangled, jinxed, and unavoidable conflicts of love and desire. From young Rimbaud’s thwarted passions to the scandalous disappearance of an entire family, these stories do the chilling work of tracing the outlines of what could have been in both the quietly morbid and the delightfully comical. A young man is born with an uncuttable umbilical cord and spends his life physically tethered to his mother; a tipsy uncle makes an uncomfortable toast with unforeseeable repercussions; and a dissatisfied deer yearns to be seen. As one character reflects, “You never know how things might turn out, you never know how anything will turn out, tomorrow the walls might fall down, the room disappear.”
Cleverly balancing the sensuous, the surreal, and the comical, Øyehaug achieves a playful familiarity with the absurd that never overreaches the needs of her stories. Full of characters who can’t help tying knots in themselves and each other, these tales make the world just a little more strange, and introduce a major international voice of searing vision, grace, and humor.

Full of the playfulness that drew acclaim for her story collection Knots, Gunnhild Øyehaug’s first novel to be translated into English is a jolt of desire and imagination, romance and regret: a fable about what it means to own up to the intractable weirdness of being alive.
Sigrid is a young literature student trying to find her own voice, but when she falls in love with an older, established author, she finds herself overwhelmed by his ideas and lifestyle. Trine, an outrageous performance artist, has recently and reluctantly become a mother, but is finding it increasingly difficult to balance the care of her child with her outsized ambitions. Linnea is an aspiring director scouting filming locations in Copenhagen, but her hopelessly smitten producer already knows that this movie will never be made.
Written from a lively God’s-eye view, darting in and out of these and other characters’ stories at will, and painting a world that is both frightening and joyously ridiculous, Wait, Blink traces the absurd collisions and intersections of people who may never, in reality, meet. Filled with wild associations, quotations, coincidences, fantasies, and jokes, it tramples on traditional storytelling in ways that are both hilarious and profound.