Everything Like Before

From one of the greatest Norwegian authors of the twentieth century, comes a collection of spare, biting stories of people caught between reality and expectation, hope and despair, love and longing.
 
A man and a woman in a quiet, remote house, an old man on a park bench, an estranged brother in a railway café — Kjell Askildsen’s characters are surrounded by absence. Filled with disquiet, and longing, they walk to a fjord, they smoke, they drink on a veranda, they listen to conversations that drift through open windows. Small flashes like the promise of a sunhat, a nail in a cherry tree, or a raised flag, reveal the interminable space between desire and reality in which Askildsen’s characters are forever suspended. Widely recognized as one of the greatest modern short-story writers, with unadorned prose and a dark humor, Askildsen captures life as it really is, the worlds of his characters uncanny mirrors of our own.

“These three dozen stories and vignettes by the venerable Norwegian writer range from bleak to darkly comic... [Everything Like Before] features mainly spare prose exploring the distances and conflicts between people linked by blood, marriage, or circumstance... [Kjell Askildsen] is a fine craftsman who offers lighter moments amid the Nordic gloom and an unrelenting intelligence.” Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

“Kjell Askildsen’s dry, absurd humor is not unlike that of Beckett... His short stories are packed with irony, and the dialogue is sharp and expressive.” Times Literary Supplement

“...full of compelling strangeness. Lives surge through a few brittle pages, suppressed loves and resentments threaten to erupt. Characters are rarely isolated but their loneliness is palpable as they steal time in the shadows. Names recur throughout the book so the reader tries to connect people with events, but it’s the loose ends which draw you back to these taut dramas.” Max Liu, The Independent

“Kjell Askildsen writes what might reasonably be called ghost stories in which there are no ghosts. His prose, uniformly muted and bare, seems haunted by absence... His landscapes are stage sets in which houses and lawns exist alone in an empty world...” Aaron Their, The Nation

Kjell Askildsen (b.1929) is widely recognized as one of the preeminent Norwegian writers of the twentieth century and among the greatest short-story authors of all time. Askildsen’s minimalist stories have garnered him numerous literary awards, among them are: The Norwegian Critics’ Prize (1983 and 1991), the Brage Honorary Prize (1996), the Swedish Academy’s Nordic Prize (2009), and in 1991, he was nominated for the Nordic Council’s Prize for Literature.

Seán Kinsella is from Dublin, and holds an MPhil in literary translation from Trinity College Dublin. He has translated into English works by Kjell Askildsen, Karl Ove Knausgaard, and Frode Grytten, among others. His translation of Stig Saeterbakken’s Through the Night, was long-listed for the Best Translated Book Award in 2014. He lives in Norway.