Review: 'Winter Stories' (Vinternoveller) by Ingvild Rishøi, trans by Diane Oatley
Pub. Date: 02/12/2025
Publisher: Grove Atlantic
A young mother in financial trouble tries to steal a pair of underwear in front of the watchful eyes of her young daughter. A man fresh out of prison struggles to reintegrate into a daunting society and become a better father to his son. Three siblings run away and seek refuge in a remote cabin untouched by time in a desperate bid to keep their family from being torn apart. In these powerful and emotionally charged tales, Rishøi delves into the complexities of family, poverty, and forgiveness, exploring the human desire for a better life, the longing for change, and the difficult choices we must sometimes make to protect those we love.
Winter Stories is a masterful triptych from a major international writer renowned for her ability to say a great deal in few words. It is a poignant reminder of the power of hope, loyalty, and unexpected kindness during dark times.
I read Ingvild Rishøi Stargate, translated as Brightly Shining by Caroline Waight, in Bokmål, one of Norway's major dialects. It is a deeply tragic yet beautiful stories about a young girl, Ronja, and her sister, their alcoholic father, and the pressures of Christmas. Because I read it for class, I focused a lot on the language, as that is what I was trying to learn, but the story nonetheless captured me. Rishøi has a real ability to nail human behaviour at its worst and at its best. The same skill is immediately noticeable in Winter Stories, originally titled Vinternoveller. This is not a feel good Christmas read, but it is oddly heartwarming if you make it through. If you're familiar with Hans Christian Andersen's tale of the matchstick girl, then you have a sense of how the tragic and the beautiful can come together. There are slight deus ex machina/eucatastrophe elements towards the end, focused on the potential kindness of strangers, which don't necessarily uplift the stories into something happy but do provide light in the dark.
Winter Stories contains three stories which all engage with the complexities of family and the desire to do good, set in winter. In the first story, 'We Can't Help Everybody', is about a mother and her five-year old daughter, Alexa, who are on a walk home. She has no money for the bus, or anything really, because Alexa's dad is late with his child support payments. But Alexa is so young, it is so cold, and our unnamed narrator wants so badly to be a good mother. We get glimpses at the young mother's past, her difficulties with her ex, her struggles with living up to whom she wants to be, and her love for her daughter, all packed into a tight number of pages. Rishøi manages to keep the mother very human, while being honest about her struggles and faults, and Alexa is an adorable little child. 'The Right Thomas' is the second story and focuses on a man named Thomas who is about to have his son stay with him for the night for the first time since he was released from prison. As he hems and haws over purchasing a pillow and making it home on time, we find out about how his child came about, how he ended up in prison, and how he is trying to work on himself. It is oddly heartbreaking this one, although all three stories are, but there is a lethargy, or perhaps rather rigidity, to how Thomas can be that reads like a subconscious form of self-destruction. Finally, there is 'Siblings' in which a young teenager, Rebekka, runs away with her two younger siblings, Mia and Mikael. We begin in media res and it is not immediately clear why Rebekka feels they have to run away. Throughout their journey that evening, however, we begin to get insights into their complex family life, marred by depression, as well as Rebekka's own struggles. It is deeply sad and I felt myself getting in the dumps with it, but this one too is oddly beautiful. It reminded me the most of Stargate, in its focus on sibling relationships as well.
Ingvild Rishøi is a great writer, not just because her stories feel so true to live but also because her writing is both incisive and detailed, as well as economical. She does not spell out what is happening and yet it is all there on the page. We don't need to be told that Rebekka's mother is depressed to see it writ large in the unwashed dishes, the unopened mail, or the missed work hours. We don't need to be explicitly told about Thomas' difficult childhood and (class) background to see how it affects his entire story. With the young mother being nothing except "mummy" it becomes clear how deeply lost she feels in motherhood without it being said. While the stories are different in their focus, they align in many ways. Each take place, technically, over a short period of time, usually a few hours, but in those hours, whole lives are revealed. All three are also told in first person. I know, vaguely, that there is a current debate ongoing in some parts of the bookish online sphere about third versus first person narration and usually I fall heavily on the third person side of the debate. However, in their brevity, the first person narration works very well here because you get to see how these characters feel and think, how they're trying to be better and how they're caught in their own patterns. This has a potential downside as well. I felt pretty jittery and nervous after finishing the last story, somehow caught up in Rebekka's own stress and anxiety, and it took me a while to shake that off. That is a sign of good writing, of course, but it's also worth bearing in mind for the reader that, in their similarities, the stories can end up weighing on you. Perhaps don't read them in one sitting, the way I did.
I give this collection...
4 Universes!
Winter Stories' three stories are darkly beautiful, full of hope but also full of the difficulty that gets you there. While different, the stories are also quite similar and operate in the same vein as Stargate/Brightly Shining. I'd love to read something slightly different from Rishøi next.
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