Here Comes the Sun (Her kjem sola)
‘I, Helga Mork (49), have a feeling something’s going on, only I don’t know what it is’.
Helga Mork is a writer trying to work out what to write next. She wants to write mostly about angry women in small, draughty houses far away from civilisation. She is going through the menopause and has resigned herself to living alone, on a small street high up a hill, and her main companion is her friend Irina who lives six hundred kilometers away and who keeps her in check through regular and sharp text messages. One day, new neighbours move into the empty house next door and to her intense irritation, she discovers that they are writers too. Christina and Even Albert, the famous couple whose photographs she has seen in newspapers. After observing them through the window and watching a long video of Even discussing Wittengstein on You Tube, she makes contact and goes over to introduce herself. It rapidly dawns on her that Even might in fact be her soulmate.
Disturbed by her compulsion to keep an eye on what Even is doing and her overwhelming joy when he comes to see her, she decides to rent an office in her small town in order to get out of the house and focus on her writing. Only this office turns out to be a portal into another world called Reality where everyone is just whispering all the time and she is left wondering how she will ever get back to the world she knew before. Here Comes the Sun is a love story that is looking for hope in human communication, where fiction and reality constantly merge, making it difficult to distinguish one from the other.
"I feel a deep sense of happiness because Øyehaug really doesn’t care what a successful novel is or should be. It is a true delight to trot about in this forest of a novel, to give oneself over to Øyehaug’s horizon-broadening and life-affirming humoristic gaze, which time and time again creates clearings in the wilderness."
- Vårt Land
"Øyehaug successfully expands both the pathetic and the euphoric aspects of Helga’s fumbling search for confirmation from Even. Rather than digging into the latent intrigues of the menage-a-trois, Øyehaug focuses on the act of falling in love itself, on the period in which Helga and Even are still unknown to each other. Here, we get a meltingly beautiful love story where the author really unlocks her potential as an existential humorist."
- Aftenposten
"Gunnhild Øyehaug's new book is an intellectual romantic comedy that takes place in several realities at once. If you've seen the film Being John Malkovich or Everything, everywhere, all at once, you'll have no trouble keeping up here. Øyehaug is so good at writing for the stage, that no matter how crazy the plot is, a film that makes sense plays in my head."
- Booked
"Gunnhild Øyehaug’s wonderfully clever and highly entertaining play on literature radiates warmth."
- Dagsavisen
"Witty about vaginas and the west of Norway […] Here Comes the Sun is an extraordinarily good love story from a learned writer who does not hide her refined literary education. But she shows it with great humour, wit and disarming elegance."
- BT
"Øyehaug’s prose is not only filled to the brim with meta-comments and a mole-like undermining of the borders between reality and fiction, but is also so free and inventive that one never feels safe in assuming that something in the novel is just one thing; for instance, that a hen is just a hen […]"
- Klassekampen
"There are many dreams in this clever, well-written, witty and insightful book."
- Dag og Tid
"Øyehaug succeeds in extracting both the pathetic and the euphoric from Helga's faltering search for confirmation from Even. But rather than digging into the latent intrigues of the love triangle, Øyehaug focuses on the love itself, the period when Helga and Even are still unknown to each other. This is a meltingly beautiful love story in which the author unleashes her potential as an existential humourist."
- Aftenposten
