Agnes Ravatn- The Guests- tr. Rosie Hedger- #AgnesRavatn @rosie_hedger @orendabooks

Married couple Karin and Kai are looking for a pleasant escape from their busy lives, and reluctantly accept an offer to stay in a luxurious holiday home in the Norwegian fjords. Instead of finding a relaxing retreat, however, their trip becomes a reminder of everything lacking in their own lives, and in a less-than-friendly meeting with their new neighbours, Karin tells a little white lie. Against the backdrop of the glistening water and within the claustrophobic walls of the ultra-modern house, Karin’s insecurities blossom, and her lie grows ever bigger, entangling her and her husband in a nightmare spiral of deceits with absolutely no means of escape…

In both her previous books The Bird Tribunal and The Seven Doors, Agnes Ravatn has demonstrated her innate talent for exploring and dissecting those psycho-dramas that exist between people in claustrophobic settings, with a condensed group of characters. Ravatn is firmly establishing her own style in the realm of the slim, confined and stifling psychological genre. There is a much welcome and unsettling resonance of writers such as Patricia Highsmith and Margaret Millar reflected in her spare prose, and pitch perfect dissemination of the best and worst of people’s compulsions.

Again, Ravatn, with another accomplished translation by Rosie Hedger, brings us much to my delectation and delight, another of her trademark claustrophobic psycho dramas, set in a community of holiday homes for the affluent. With echoes of Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid Of Virginia Woolf, with significantly less shouting and overwrought emotion it has to be said, the story revolves around mainly four characters. The whole mise en scène makes this tailor made for a stage dramatization and this is exactly how I pictured each chapter, and the various interactions of the characters, which made for a different reading experience. Or equally as one of those emotionally tense foreign language films with weighted pauses and beautiful exterior shots. Anyway, I really enjoyed the suffocating tension of the whole affair, and was quickly invested in the plot, deceptively slim in content, but which made for an interesting exploration of deception, avarice and jealousy..

I don’t think I will be alone in thinking that any of these characters are particularly likeable, and it was nice to have that slight empathetic disconnect from them when reading this. Karin comes across as an incredibly dissatisfied and shrewish woman, with a fairly asinine husband Kai, who’s probably great for putting up shelves and taking out the bins , but fairly unremarkable in other aspects. Then there are the writers, Per and Hilma into whose lives Karin and Kai insinuate themselves, whilst they stay in a ‘friend’s’ luxury holiday home. Per and Hilma are long term residents of this holiday community, and seem to eventually welcome interaction with this new couple, quickly spiralling into a compressed drama begun with a single lie. I did like the sense of a snake being poked with a stick, as both couples endeavour to somehow extract something from the other, whilst all retaining this mask of a tentative friendship being formed. I also enjoyed the sideswipes about professional jealousy that writers married to writers, or indeed any couple where both have an artistic bent, experience, and the unavoidable tensions this brings, when the roots of the relationship are not that solid. Overall the book provided a very interesting meditation on avarice and deception and how some people strive to seem better or more worthy, even if it relies on a single white lie to achieve it, rooted in jealousy and being ill-disposed to the seeming success or affluence of others.

Once again Ravatn has produced a bijou tale suffused with emotional tension and psychological angst, that proves an immersive read. Recommended as always, and it’s well worth checking out her previous titles too.

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 Agnes Ravatn (b. 1983) is an author and columnist. She made her literary début with the novel Week 53 (Veke 53) in 2007. Since then she has written three critically acclaimed and award-winning essay collections: Standing still (Stillstand), 2011, Popular Reading (Folkelesnad), 2011, and Operation self-discipline (Operasjon sjøldisiplin), 2014. In these works Ravatn shows her unique, witty voice and sharp eye for human fallibility. Ravatn received the Norwegian radio channel radio NRK P2 Listener’s Novel Prize for this novel, a popular and important prize in Norway, in addition to the Youth Critic’s Award for The Bird Tribunal which also made into a successful play, and premiered in Oslo in 2015.

Rosie Hedger was born in Scotland and completed her MA (Hons) in Scandinavian Studies at the University of Edinburgh. She has lived and worked in Norway, Sweden and Denmark, and now lives in York where she works as a freelance translator. Rosie was a candidate in the British Center for Literary Translation’s mentoring scheme for Norwegian in 2012, mentored by Don Bartlett.
Visit her website: rosiehedger.com and follow her on Twitter @rosie_hedger

(With thanks to Orenda Books for the ARC)

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