Book Description

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.

The lengthier works shine brightest, among them “A Sudden Liberating Thought,” in which a Beckett-like series of encounters between two old men becomes a discourse on euthanasia; and “Mardon’s Night,” where three people’s thoughts and actions blur in enigmatic blocks of text.... this definitive volume brims with stellar material.

— Publisher's Weekly

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, Starred Review

There is something so beautifully off-kilter about these stories—a luminous peculiarity that reminds us that strange writing is the only true writing about the world.

— Daniel Handler, author of A Series of Unfortunate Events

Redolent of Chekhov and Isaac Babel . . . There is an old-world pathos to these stories; their public face is stoic, but one often sees them in private hours where they pull the rug out on their personality to give the reader the chance to clasp their essences tighter . . . [Everything Like Before] made me remember fiction-making is about communication, something someone as avant-garde as Donald Barthelme would proselytize for.

— Greg Gerke, Los Angeles Review of Books

Kitchens, decks, doorways, sidewalks, restaurants, and bars are charged with significance as spaces where characters negotiate relationships and appraise their lives. Mundane objects that carry emotional weight—raincoats, hair ribbons, cups of coffee—bring the stories alive . . . In the short stories of Everything Like Before, loneliness, despair, and longing are described with devastating nuance.

— Rebecca Hussey, Foreword Reviews

I am just over the moon about Everything Like Before. An honest-to-goodness fount of suggestion and restraint, cascading omens and omissions throughout. Perennial storytelling.

— Justin Walls, Bookshop.org

Ultimately, Askildsen’s stories are about the horror of the mundane, the emptiness of everyday life, and the paradox of both wanting and fearing change . . . these tales are unconcerned with plot, but rather focus on the subtleties and impossibilities of human interaction. They provide us with windows through which we, like the characters, may watch each other, may be held up for scrunity.

— The Literateur

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

[Kjell Askildsen] is a consummate chronicler of contradictory, quicksilver emotions and impulses. There is in his work a careful calibration of his characters' inner lives, of small dramas in no way empty of incident, whose ultimate crux is the desultory, dangerous weight of time.

— Ben Goldman, Words without Borders

[A] meditation on individual freedom, a book fraught with the day-to-day pressures of human life. The nine brief stories collected within can be described in terms of absences. The absence, for example, of experimental or ornate, ‘flowery,’ prose. The absence of unnecessary characters. The absence of exotic or alien locales, or of complicated plot arcs . . . One senses that Askildsen is delicately, deliberately seeking answers to a particular set of nagging questions, and is never quite satisfied with what he uncovers

— Adam Segal, Numéro Cinq Magazine

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

[F]ull 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

Askildsen’s world is paradoxically both limited and limitless. Only a few things happen to his characters, everything out of ordinary life and nothing externally very dramatic. Yet within themselves, the characters are everything: they are infinitely good and bad, often at the same time; they have great tenderness for each other and are unspeakably cruel to each other too. They’re the world in a grain of sand.

— Julia Gronnevet, Asymptote

Kafkaesque… with wry humor and sardonic wit, Askildsen is a clear master of the genre.

— Travel Through Stories